BAY AREA , August 27 — A multiracial group of twenty-five members and friends of Progressive Labor Party joined hundreds of antiracists to shut down Nazi demonstrations two days in a row.
Day 1: San Francisco
For three months, the racists had planned to have a rally in Crissy Field. As the date loomed closer, politicians and other officials began warning people to stay away and avoid the rally for fear of violence. They began giving police extra enforcement powers and creating restrictions on the protest to keep it peaceful. If politicians really cared about violence, they would not allow the racists to rally in the first place. Racist speech emboldens people to commit racist violence and normalizes a world where people face racist and violent poverty and state terror. Capitalism allows racists to have free speech because it allows the bosses to keep running society and making profits.
Despite the urging of politicians and other misleaders, hundreds planned to show up to Crissy Field to challenge the racists, a testament to working class bravery and understanding of the need to fight racism. Unsure of what to expect, members of PLP scouted the area of the rally in order to prepare ourselves if any dangerous situation arose.
Flaky Racists
On Friday afternoon, the day before the planned rally, the racists announced they would not rally at Crissy Field anymore and instead go to Alamo Square. Presumably, they were afraid of hundreds confronting them.
After hearing this news, our comrades and friends got together to come up with a new plan. Many were nervous about what would happen the next day. Many had never been in a situation like this, and one person had only been to one protest before. After the planning, we had a good plan and we were confident in each other and our ability to navigate unpredictable situations. This bravery was especially impressive most people were teenagers, and two young women stepped up and gave leadership.
The next day, someone announced that the racists cancelled their rally at Alamo Square too. We decided to go to Alamo Square because the racists could still show up.
When we got there, we saw a crowd of hundreds of antiracists and no Nazis to be found. The rally turned into a victory march for intimidating the Nazis out of San Francisco. At the march, we gave out CHALLENGE and led chants. New people got on the bullhorn and we even made up some new chants on the spot.
People in our group commented that we did a good job of keeping the energy up the whole time, even when the spirit of the march died down. Someone also commented that a spirited group of fifteen could change the whole climate of a large part of the march.
At the end, as we were walking away, a squad of San Francisco Police walked by us, and someone in our group started chanting, “How do you spell racist? SFPD!” This was an inspiring action because it showed the bold antiracism of our young base members.
After the march, we went to debrief. During this discussion, someone reported that a group of racists had assembled at Crissy Field and that they outnumbered the antiracists. We decided it was our duty to confront the Nazis. Nervous, we piled back into our cars and drove to Crissy Field. When we got there, we could see racists and antiracists huddled up and a line of police. There were so many road blockages that it took thirty minutes just to get to the field. By the time we got there, the Nazis had fled.We felt a strange combination of relief and frustration that we couldn’t confront them.
Although there were no Nazis, we saw that we had enough confidence in each other to go into a potentially dangerous situation, and we learned the importance of building a group of people who could fight together in the future.
Day 2: Berkeley
The next day, we assembled to rally against a Nazi demonstration in in Berkeley. One comrade stated that it was normal for racists to play whack-a-mole in San Francisco, but that historically that they show up in Berkeley when they say they will. We prepared ourselves for violence and talked about the importance of staying together and following leadership.
We went to the park where antiracists gathered, a few blocks from where the racists were rallying. We started distributing literature while the organizers of the march gave speeches. Later, we heard the racists had started to show up and we were antsy to go confront them.
Misleaders Try to Silence Militancy
Despite the knowledge that Nazis were gathering at Civic Center, which was the whole reason so many people turned out, the misleaders refused to take the march to Civic Center! We believed this was intentional to keep people subdued and to stop confrontations. Misleaders wanted us to hear their speeches instead of using working-class power to stop the racists. It was absolutely maddening! We started chanting, “Let’s march! Let’s march! Let’s march!” and others joined in with us. The leadership told us we would march soon and tried to silence us.
When we finally started marching, we led chants and pumped up the energy of people around us. Someone was beating a drum at the front of the march, so we led chants to the beat and people got really into it. The crowd especially liked the chant, “Turn up, don’t turn down, let’s run these Nazis out of town!”
By the time we got to Civic Center, the police had blocked off the whole park and there were no racists to be seen. The misleaders stalled everybody until they knew it would be too late to confront the Nazis. After we gave out our literature, we left, for there were no racists to confront, and the crowd was getting agitated.
One person in our group commented that people wanted to confront the racists but couldn’t, and they thought that it could get violent because people had no way to channel their anger. Indeed, as we were leaving, some people were throwing smoke bombs, which can only lead to dangerous situations that hurt other workers. The working class is outraged at the rise of racism and fascism, but misleaders prevent us from using our anger for the good of the working class. It was a good reminder of why we need to build a revolutionary communist PLP that can channel our anger into fighting capitalism and ultimately destroying this system.
Reflections
We discussed our actions over the past two days. Some comrades commented that our actions were inspiring because we were able to turn out almost thirty people to fight with us. If we continue meeting together and host study groups, this can be a basis for fighting more militantly and bringing out more people in the future. It was also inspiring because so many people were young, new, and multiracial. Moreover, younger and newer comrades gave leadership and we strengthened our confidence in ourselves.
This weekend was a reminder of the need to work in mass organizations. Going to rallies is important, but you can’t accomplish as much at a rally as you can in long-term work in mass organizations.
In order to build a fighting Party, it’s not enough to just talk to workers on the streets. We must also entrench ourselves at our workplace or school, and build long-term relationships and lead struggles where we are. That is the only way we will build a party that can destroy capitalism. Overall, this weekend was very energizing to comrades and friends of PLP in the Bay Area and we are excited for upcoming battles.

As school returns to session for parents, students, and teachers across the northern hemisphere, readers of CHALLENGE and millions more aim to make the fight against racism a central part of the coming year. Donald Trump’s embrace of Nazi and KKK scum in the wake of Charlottesville is the most open show of support for racism from the White House since Woodrow Wilson screened the pro-Klan film, “Birth of a Nation,” a hundred years ago.
Teachers = Education Workers
Teachers and others determined to bring the struggle against racism into the schools today have much to learn from the efforts of communist teachers in New York City in the 1930s-1950s.
The NYC city school system expanded at breakneck pace in the early twentieth century, as the NYC ruling class absorbed millions of economic refugees migrating from Southern and Eastern Europe, and later, Black migrants from the Southern U.S.
In contrast to the majority of their students who faced mass racist unemployment, underemployment, incarceration, or the military, teachers’ salaries provided a decent standard of living.
Irrespective of salary, however, teachers remained, and are, exploited workers, alongside their students and all other workers. Teachers in the 1930s fought back on this basis, and as they did, two tendencies in teacher unionism emerged. One tendency in teacher unionism involved organizing teachers as professionals and pursuing collaborative relations with administrators and the Board of Education, with the aim of persuading school bosses to make incremental improvements to teacher working conditions. It was argued that the ripple effect of these improvements would also serve the interests of students. This tendency lives on in the leadership of the two major U.S. teacher unions: the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA).
The other tendency in teacher unionism was led by communists to organize teachers as workers. Teachers would fight for school improvements alongside students and parents, and organize entire neighborhoods to feel the strength of collective action by demanding changes at their local school. Rooted in the working class masses, a citywide teacher’s union movement grew: New York City Teachers’ Union (TU).
From its inception, the TU launched mass antiracist campaigns in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg and the South Bronx against abusive school principals, for repairs to dilapidated school buildings, and for the staffing of Black and Latin schools with experienced teachers.
Communist Call to Teachers: Serve the People
In the 1930s and ‘40s, the communist-led Teachers’ Union (TU) was the leading teachers’ organization in the city. The city bosses were careful to never recognize this union as the official bargaining representative of the city’s teachers. Nevertheless the TU launched fights to reduce class size and ban gender discrimination in teacher hiring (which lost and won fights to make statutory racial segregation illegal in New York State), due process for probationary and licensed teachers, and the establishment of nursery schools under existing boards of education statewide.
The TU struggled to win teachers to join antiwar, antifascist, social and unemployment committees. Beyond filing grievances, teachers were struggled with to join labor history, academic freedom, educational policy and finance committees. All communist-led efforts worked to deepen the commitment of teachers to the working class in general and the Black working class in particular.
A featured column by Howard University professor Doxey Wilkerson in the March, 1938 edition of the TU newspaper, New York Teacher, laid out the stakes of the fight against segregated schooling in New York City:  

“Wilkerson argued that the New York City educational system assured that blacks [sic] would remain locked in America’s caste hierarchy. Despite the lack of de jure racial racism in the North, racism nonetheless was still a reality, and the institution where it reared its ugly head the highest was the school system…Wilkerson declared that a deliberate ‘mental crucifixion’ of black children was taking place. In schools in Harlem black students were not allowed to use the swimming pools, were assigned seats in the back of the classroom and were excluded from extracurricular activities and social events. Thus, the Negro child is made to realize that he is not an integral part of the social group with which he is thrown, but rather, that he is a thing apart, isolated, ostracized, somehow not quite like his classmates
—Reds at the Blackboard, Clarence Taylor

As World War II approached, the TU characterized Northern Jim Crow as American Nazism and overt acts of racism as actions of a fifth column—a domestic force committed to the victory of Hitler’s Germany.
Fascists Light the Fires; Liberals Bring the Fuel
From the moment the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 achieved communist victory, the U.S. ruling class kicked into overdrive a long tradition of vicious anti-labor warfare that included repeated state-directed massacres of striking workers. Alien and Sedition Acts revoked legal protections of suspected revolutionaries. The Schenck v. U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing imprisonment of anti-imperialist street speakers and the raids organized by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, resulted in the largest mass deportation of political radicals in U.S. history.
This anticommunist crusade continued in NYC schools, crossing Democratic and Republican city governments and peaked in the 1950s. Loyalty oaths for teachers imposed during World War I were updated with anticommunist language. The early ‘40s saw the assault of the NY state Rapp-Coudert committee, tasked with rooting out communist teachers, which resulted in the removal of over 40 professors from CUNY’s City College in Manhattan. Emboldened, in 1948 the bosses migrated their purge into the NYC public schools, and widened into documented investigation of over 1,100 teachers with over 400 being dismissed/retiring/resigning by the mid-1950s. The Teachers Union would hang on, with declining membership and influence until it disbanded in 1964.
Not a single teacher charged was found to be ineffective in the classroom or of indoctrinating students. On the contrary, these teachers tended to be highly regarded by colleagues and parents as especially dedicated to the mission of quality education for all. Parents, teachers, and community groups protested the first eight suspensions of communist teachers in 1948 with letters and meetings. Forty-eight teachers in Alice Citron’s Harlem school wrote to Jansen that Citron had “worked tirelessly on behalf of the children”; a parade of Harlem mothers testified to the same effect during the subsequent administrative trial of Citron and the seven others.
The national union leadership of the AFT assisted the ruling class in purging the school system of communist teachers in every phase. They even launched their own six-year effort to strip the TU of its charter for the offense of electing communists to union leadership, imposing it in 1941, against the wishes of thousands of NYC teachers who voted for a communist leadership. The AFT’s quiescence in the campaign to turn teachers into informants against each other through the ‘40s and ‘50s in NYC laid the basis for the emergence of the UFT in 1960-61.
Despite this deteriorating situation, the Teachers Union did not immediately disband. Instead, it launched campaigns to eliminate racist and bigoted textbooks from classrooms, hire more Black teachers and promote Black History Month. The TU remade itself into a leading voice in the New York City civil rights movement, by challenging the racially discriminatory polices of the Board of Education.
Weaknesses in the Work of the CPUSA in the Schools
After World War II, a lethal notion arose that the working class did not need a revolutionary communist party any more, that there could be “peaceful coexistence” between the Soviet Union and U.S. imperialism. The reasons for this retreat are discussed in numerous PLP documents, including Road to Revolution, I to IV.
The U.S. bosses were encouraged by the communist retreat, and launched another wave of anticommunist witch hunts in the 1950s. While communist teachers never let these purges derail mass antiracist organizing, these communists followed the international movement’s lead and retreated even further from revolution. Worldwide, the collapse of the international communist movement was underway.
Meanwhile, revolutionary communists formed the PLP and rose to inherit the strengths of the old Communist Party USA (CPUSA); this time, to fight all the way to communism! PL’ers knew then and new generations know now there can never be any “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism. As in the past, today’s communists are working to organize uncompromising struggle against racism and segregation in NYC schools. As the NYC Department of Education pursues a new effort to purge communists from the schools, the closing passage of Marx’s Manifesto of 1848 remains our guide: “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”
Friends of PLP may view the ruling class’ attacks on communism as an absurd throwback to the 1950s. But capitalism’s failures are endemic: the drive toward war, compounding inequality, rising racism and fascism—these crises cry out for solution, and millions seek a way out. Communism remains that way out. The rulers know communism remains a threat, no matter how few in number the communists may be. Help lead society toward the day when workers like the brave members of the Teachers Union are in power—answer the bosses attacks by joining the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party!

New York City, August 22—It could be the open fascist terror of Nazis and Klansmen marching in Charlottesville with the tacit approval of the Racist In Chief.  Or it could be the bosses’  “Klan in Blue” - cops who kill over 1000 working class people a year.  Wherever we are, workers and students must fight back! Recently several Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades in a local congregation mobilized a group of protesters to join two anti-racist demonstrations.
Killers of Mohamed Still Off Scot-Free
We joined a multiracial coalition demanding that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York prosecute the cops who murdered Mohamed Bah five years ago.  Mohamed was a college student and cab driver, and had a psychotic episode.  His mother called for an ambulance to take him to a hospital.  Instead of sending medical help, all they sent were cops.  They refused her help in diffusing the situation, broke down the apartment door, and murdered Mohamed.
There is clear evidence of an execution and cover-up by the cops. Depositions have been taken to force prosecution by both the Manhattan District Attorney and the Federal prosecutor. Evidence has been ‘lost’ or contaminated. As we go to press we have just learned that the federal prosecutor refused to press any charges against the executioners of Mohamed Bah. No surprise!  A civil suite still remains.
Dwayne, Murdered by Cops in his Apartment
The previous Saturday, several of us joined a multiracial demonstration of hundreds that gathered in front of the building where Dwayne Jeune, a 32-year-old, mentally ill worker was murdered by cops in his own apartment on July 31. The circumstances virtually identical to Mohamed Bah’s murder five years before. A lawyer representing the Jeune family, other victims’ families, and some community organizers gave speeches.
We need a lifelong commitment to a better world—communism! We then marched many blocks through Brooklyn’s Flatbush community to the precinct that had sent the killer-cops.
The cops are thugs for the racist billionaire bosses and their capitalists. To terrorize workers and stop any fightback, they have developed a particularly vicious pattern. Families seeking assistance for a relative suffering mental distress call for medical help. Instead of an ambulance, armed cops arrive. Without accepting help from the family, they provoke a confrontation “justifying” killing the victim.
As we help organize these anti-racist struggles, we must redouble our efforts to expose the entire capitalist system.  The increasingly fascist criminal “justice” system will very rarely prosecute —and almost never convict—the cops that are actually carrying out the bosses’ plans of repression and terror. We must increase our organizing actions to shut down schools, work places and transportation.  We will push back against fascist terror!  And we will recruit more and more workers and students who understand that destroying this killer capitalist system with communist revolution is the only ultimate solution.

BROOKLYN, NY, August 19—Over a dozen multiracial, women and men members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party rallied in Brooklyn today with signs and leaflets that read “No Free Speech for Racists” and “Death to the Klan with Multiracial Unity.” In one hour, contacts were made, over 550 leaflets were distributed, and over 200 CHALLENGEs were sold at a busy street corner in the heart of this Black and immigrant neighborhood.
In particular, workers responded to the call for “death to the Klan from Charlottesville to New York City.” Many workers stopped to read the leaflet and discuss how we can organize; on one street corner, a worker helped advertise our leaflet and called other workers over to read a leaflet and buy a newspaper.
Even the Christian groups passing out their own literature listened to our discussions and took our leaflets. At one point a lively and friendly debate was held between a Black, religiously-minded woman worker and a white, communist-minded male worker in PLP. The debate was brought down to earth when the Black worker opened up about her disgust at the open revival of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis. Religious or not, masses of workers share this workers’ exasperation at what we can do about the Klan, apart from “having faith.”
The religious worker and the communist worker did not reach consensus on whether or not there is life after death. However, they both agreed in freeing workers - in this life - from the Klan, racial segregation, racist borders, and imperialist war. Both agreed in multiracial unity, and the need to organize and fight back. While clear disagreements regarding religious faith remain and cannot be casually dismissed, agreement on these points of unity in action can be important to our class in building a political base for the sharpening struggles to come. Hopefully this dialogue will continue developing into genuine friendship, based on antiracism and political struggle!
Above all, communists don’t write off or surrender whole sections of workers to the bosses’ ideas, ever; from white workers to Black workers to religious Christian and Muslim workers! All workers are hurt by racism, sexism, and imperialism, and capitalism uses its most vicious attacks on Black workers, especially women. Today more than ever, masses of them are looking for a way out. Charlottesville has sharpened the mood of the masses. For how long is impossible to predict, but the workers who took hundreds of leaflets and CHALLENGEs, who donated their money to our Party and shared their time to discuss politics and life, taught us we can return to work bolder. And, more confident that communist revolution is an idea whose time has come, if we persist and struggle to spread it.