CHICAGO, June 10—The fascist group “ACT for America” attempted to hold a rally in Chicago to spread racist anti-Muslim hate speech today, and to provoke anti-immigrant hatred under the disguise of protesting so-called “Sharia [Muslim] Law.” Unfortunately for these neo-Nazis, they were outnumbered two to one, and directly confronted by a counter-protest led by Progressive Labor Party members and friends who chanted “Death, death, death, to the fascists! Power, power, power to the workers!”
PLP Sets The Tone: Smash Fascism!
At their racist debut in Chicago, despite their absurd costumes, motley signs, and flag waving, there was nothing funny about these white nationalist proto-Nazis and their racist message. Through their rhetoric, they try to demonize Muslims to set the stage for racist attacks.
Police separated the two groups, allowing the ACT fascists to set up on one street corner unrestricted, while surrounding anti-racist protesters across the street with police and barricades. Our PLP contingent and friends immediately made a plan to cross the street and confront the fascists, while selling CHALLENGE and asking other anti-racists to join us.
Although many protesters agreed that we shouldn’t have been pinned down while the racists were not, most were still reluctant to join us. PLP members with their signs crossed the barricades and directly confronted ACT members, pushing them off the sidewalk. The racists ended up with their backs to the Chicago River and surrounded by anti-racist demonstrators. By this time, many more had joined us in confronting the racists. ACT members had nowhere to go and their message was drowned out by chants of “Asian, Latin, Black, and white – workers of the world unite!” and “The only solution is communist revolution!” The police quickly rushed to protect the small band of white supremacists who fled on foot.
PLP members distributed about 100 CHALLENGEs and collected contact information from workers who are interested in coming to meetings. Some expressed support in attending the upcoming trial on Wednesday, June 21 8:30 am at 26th and California, of a protester who was arrested and held in contempt of court during the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the racist cop who murdered Laquan McDonald.
Brigitte Gabriel: Servant of U.S. Capitalist Class
The growth of fascist movements occurs alongside disarray and weakness within the U.S. capitalist class, manifested by the embattled Trump administration.
No matter what happens with Trump, the belief that “all Muslims are terrorists” does not begin or end with him, and it’s an idea that only serves the ruling U.S. capitalist class. On the one hand, the U.S. bosses are trying to win Black, Latin, Muslim and immigrant workers to fight and die for U.S. imperialism. On the other hand, fighting for U.S. imperialism means committing genocidal-scale mass slaughter for control over global oil in the Middle East and Central Asia. And in terms of preparing workers in the U.S. for imperialist war, Gabriel serves an important role.
ACT for America’s founder Brigitte Gabriel (see box) , far from being some fringe element enjoying a few moments of fame, is firmly entrenched within the U.S. ruling class. Through her contacts with U.S. security personnel and the White House, Gabriel has long advocated for the profiling and surveillance of Muslim workers in the U.S.  According to The Atlantic, “former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, served on ACT’s board. CIA Director Mike Pompeo last year won the group’s National Security Eagle Award. Trump counterterrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka has spoken before ACT chapters.”
In October of 2016, her website announced that her racism had earned her membership in one of the bosses’ bizarre private members-only fraternities, the “Knights of Malta.” Now, Gabriel enjoys expensive vacations with fellow former mass murderers for the U.S. capitalist class like Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, and George H.W. Bush.
Anti-Fascists Turn Up
ACT for America held demonstrations in 25 cities and towns around the U.S. Almost everywhere they were greeted by crowds of anti-fascist workers and youth, often outnumbering the fascists who dared to show their faces with the racist, neo-Nazi filth of ACT for America. In Pennsylvania, the KKK-tied “Oath Keepers” provided security for ACT fascists while in Seattle, youth and police engaged in street battles. In California at the site of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, ACT fascists tried smashing car windows of the multiracial anti-fascists, who formed a wall with linked arms before police dispersed the crowd.
Workers and youth in the U.S. are not taking these neo-Nazis lying down! These are good signs for the working class as we steel ourselves for the battles ahead! While many workers and youth are today marching under liberal and pacifist misleadership of capitalist-controlled religious groups and organizations, many are looking for an alternative. An alternative to not just defeating the fascists and neo-Nazis in the streets, but for a whole new world. PLP believes in fighting for communist revolution and uniting as one international working class. The bosses’ cops, the courts, their laws and their pacifist misleaders set the tone for the capitalist ruling class. Our actions as communists in the Progressive Labor Party must set the tone for the working class. Join us and fight back for the communist world our class deserves!

Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
This series aims to reunite the history of communism with antiracism. Part I explored how the fight to free Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to find out more.
Part II explored how the international communist movement was the imeptus of the civil rights movement. It excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College.

The communist movement both helped inspire and was shaped by the anti-racist struggle for civil rights in the U.S. Martin Luther King Jr. and many of the leading civil rights figures were influenced by the Communist Party (CP). Rosa Parks had attended Communist Party meetings and been trained as an activist at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee which had been supported by members and friends of the CP. Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levinson and Jack O’Dell, who all played important roles in King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that grew out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, were active at various times in the communist movement.
Just as important was the 25-year history of the Communist Party in Alabama led by Black workers leading many struggles against racism and building several organizations including the International Labor Defense, the Sharecroppers Union, the International Workers Order, the League of Young Southerners, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress that in total involved around 20,000 mainly Black workers. These organizations were at their peak in the 1930’s, but the experience of fighting against racism and for the needs of the working-class laid the basis for the fight against Jim Crow laws in the 1950’s and 60’s.

The party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns Communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the…concerns of black people.
Communists believed that organizing the working-class would work only if white workers realized that their liberation, too, was bound up with the fate of black workers….
In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and dispossessed elements of American society.” “It was the Black workers drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political choices as much as … the Communist International (NY Times 6/6).

Like the Scottsboro campaign 20 years earlier the Montgomery Bus Boycott, initiated when Rosa Parks refused to move to the Black section of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, drew world-wide attention to the fight against racism in the segregated South. The fight for civil rights became a major embarrassment to the U.S. ruling-class. At the time, China, the world’s largest country was communist-led, as was the Soviet Union. These two worker super powers provided leadership and support to anti-imperialist movements across Africa, Asia, and South America.
U.S. Rulers Forced to Support Civil Rights Movement
The U.S tried to counter the growing communist-led movements by championing capitalist democracy, but at every turn the racist conditions forced on Black workers in the United States and the increasing demonstrations against those conditions undercut the U.S. bosses’ attempts to gain support.
Under increasing pressure, the U.S. bosses were forced into tacitly supporting the growing civil rights movement. At the same time, they were terrified of the movement that brought together hundreds of thousands of Black and white workers and students in the fight against segregation. The U.S. ruling-class, between a rock and a hard place, tried to gain control of the movement by both working with and threatening Martin Luther King.
While John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson worked with Martin Luther King to end official Jim Crow, the bosses’ legal arm. led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, spied on and tried to disrupt and control the movement by building anti-communism. The bosses’ goal was to limit the movement to blaming the smaller Southern bosses for all of the racism in the country and ignore the racist conditions in the North.
The ruling-class went after every leader and institution connected to the civil rights movement to try to keep it under control. Martin Luther King as the leading figure of the movement came under particular attack and pressure.

In 1963 King bowed to the wishes of the Kennedy Administration and fired SCLC employee Jack O’Dell after the FBI alleged that he was a Communist. King also agreed to cease direct communication with his friend and closest white advisor, Stanley Levison, although he eventually resumed contact with him in March 1965. FBI surveillance and bugs tracked King’s political associations and produced evidence of King’s extramarital sexual activities—information that was later leaked to some reporters.
In 1965 King faced questions from journalists on Meet the Press about his association with Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, which had been branded a ‘‘Communist training school’’ on billboards that appeared throughout Alabama during the Selma to Montgomery March and showed King attending a Highlander workshop. (Stanford University King Encyclopedia)

King was a contradictory figure. He publicly professed anti-communism, yet he was undoubtedly influenced by the communist movement and recognized that communism reflected the desires of an exploited working-class oppressed by racism.

Indeed, it may be that communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all too inert. Communism should challenge us to be more concerned about social justice. However much is wrong with communism, we must admit that it arose as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1847 by Marx and Engels, emphasizes throughout how the middle-class has exploited the lower-class. Communism in society is a classless society. Along with this goes a strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice. Communism seeks to transcend the superficialities of race and color, and you are able to join the Communist Party whatever the color of your skin or the quality of your blood.” (MLK speech “Can a Christian be a Communist”)

At the end of the famed march from Selma to Montgomery, King gave perhaps his clearest speech on the roots of racism as a tool used by the bosses to divide the working-class:

Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then…the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem…to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.
Later King began to expand his public activity to address the war in Vietnam and attempted to extoll the U.S. to end the war on communism.
“[I]n the summer of 1965 the press reported King’s off-the-cuff remarks to a Southern Christian Leadership Conference rally in Virginia: ‘‘We’re not going to defeat Communism with bombs and guns and gases.… We must work this out in the framework of our democracy’’ (‘‘Dr. King Declares’’). In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King decried America’s ‘‘morbid fear of Communism,’’ arguing that it prevented people from embracing a ‘‘revolutionary spirit and … declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.’’ (Stanford University King Encyclopedia)

While there are so many unanswered questions about the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, like the killing of Malcolm X, it coincided with an expansion in King’s political focus from civil rights for Blacks in the United States to fighting for economic rights for the working class and opposing imperialism. King was killed in Memphis where he was actively supporting striking Black sanitation workers.
As the ruling-class pressured King and ultimately murdered him, the working-class became increasingly politicized. Rebellions of Black workers rocked Newark, Watts, Harlem and Detroit and U.S Soldiers were rebelling against the war in Vietnam. In spite of the bosses’ attempts to smother the movement, the working-class was rising up. The bosses may have hoped that killing King would stop the movement but instead the attack hardened the resolve of the working-class, particularly Black workers, to continue to fight.

LOS ANGELES, June 12—In a cowardly move meant to halt resistance, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) suspended three teachers at a high school here, including a PL teacher, one week before summer break. The teachers were associated with citywide student walkouts in protest of Trump’s inauguration over six months ago.
What began as a letter of misconduct turned into a mandatory suspension. These teachers allowed discussions in their classes around important issues, like police terror and anti-immigrant policies. Apparently, that is a suspendable offence! Waiting a week before summer break is an obvious attempt by the district to curb the ability of the staff, parents, and students to organize against these suspensions.
Our fellow teachers have shown support and fightback. Half of the faculty signed a letter protesting the suspensions and the underlying message they are sending to the teachers about discussing political issues in class. Students confronted the principal in person to demand answers.
School Bosses Expose Themselves as Racists
This segregated school is nearly 100 percent Black and Latin and has a history of walkouts organized by students. Suspending teachers associated with the walkout is a silencing and terrorization strategy by the school bosses. The principal even interrogated students. When the school district decides to discipline teachers in response to student fightback, they are sending a clear racist message to students, families, and workers.
They do not care that sexist, anti-immigrant, and racist rhetoric angers our working class brothers and sisters. They do not care that racist segregation of schools continues to leave Black and Latin students behind. They do not care that the police are killing our Black and Latin working-class brothers and sisters with impunity. They do not want students to voice their opinions or take an active stand against racism and sexism. They just want them to stay in class and learn to be obedient to the system.
LAUSD, the largest public school system after New York City, is exposing themselves to be the racist ruling-class agents that they are. Nearly three-fourths of students are Latin. Though Black students make up 9.16 percent of the population, they received 32.3 percent of suspensions in 2014 (Daily News, 1/14/15). When teachers are shut down for fighting racism, it’s a racist attack on students’ education. LAUSD has confirmed that segregation and racism are no accident; they’re part of the bosses’ plan to keep the future working class divided and alienated.
Teachers in other parts of the city are facing similar attacks, some also suspended. A plan is in the works to have a larger, more general protest to the district’s attempt to silence teachers and students during a critical time of increased fascism in the country.  We will keep CHALLENGE informed as we move forward. The class struggle continues!

VIRGINIA, June 8—Forty advocates for changing J.E.B. Stuart High School’s racist name rocked Virginia’s Fairfax County School Board meeting with bold anti-racist speeches amid a cheering throng of supporters.
Students Give Leadership
In this two-year fight, Black students in the high school have given leadership. Two Black Stuart high school students led off tonight’s testimonies, declaring that unless the school board changed the name, it would forever be linked with the racist segregationist school board that named the school in 1958.
“I walk into the weight room [every Tuesday and Thursday] to see a giant mural of J. E. B Stuart painted on a wall in front of me. He’s portrayed like a hero...This sends a message to me that General Stuart and what he fought for is deemed heroic…My ancestors being bought and sold like cattle is OK, because J.E.B. Stuart was a patriot,” said one student.
19th Century Fascist
Stuart was a general and considered the “eyes and ears” of the Confederate Army. He fought to preserve slavery in the 1860s during the Civil War in the United States. Stuart helped capture white anti-racist abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859. (With the help of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, John Brown organized armed insurrections against slave owners. For his fight against slavery, he was executed.)
Racist Stuart made a name for himself by literally fighting to keep the right to oppress, exploit, and murder Black and indigenous peoples. He served during Bleeding Kansas and in the bloody border wars against indigenous people.  
J.E.B. Stuart is the most diverse high school in Fairfax County: only a quarter of the students are white, a little over 60 percent are Latin and Black. This struggle to change the high school’s name is giving the school and county community an opportunity to be on the side of anti-racism. Some adults and students who are in favor of keeping Stuart’s name said they were called white supremacists and felt intimated. But that is no excuse for their racism!
The school board is scheduled to vote on the name change on June 22. More next issue!