NEWARK, NJ, July 26—As a group of multiracial workers rallied outside the Veterans Courthouse on MLK Blvd., Monique Rodwell, the mother of the Rodwell-Spivey Brothers, texted the Rodwell Spivey Defense Team group chat. “Come up guys, they agreed to release him.”

After a year and two months of being detained and punished in one of the most dehumanizing ways on earth, the City of Newark’s prosecutor’s office temporarily set down its whip to release Justin Rodwell from jail. Our defense team of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends have rallied around the Rodwell-Spivey family from the beginning in support of their decision to unite against police terror and in defense of every worker ever put under the boot of this racist, capitalist system. One of the first things our defense team did was invite the family to attend a kickoff to the PLP 2022 Summer Project, and now this year, we’re fighting side by side with a stronger relationship and more lessons learned.

Although the defense team called to ‘FREE JUSTIN,’ as long as capitalism rages on, no worker could ever be free. Not only does this system thrive on exploitation of our class—and the super-exploitation of Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant, and women workers—it also strips workers of our humanity through police terror and mass incarceration. Both are just another form of roping workers into wage slavery.

On June 1, 2021, the Rodwell-Spivey brothers were roped into the system's clutches when two undercover kkkops pulled up on and assaulted Jaykil (Supreme) Rodwell and Jasper (Kick) Spivey as they were talking with a street vendor outside of their house. Their brothers, Justin Rodwell, Branden (Bam) Rodwell, and neighbors came running to their defense. Kkkops called on their klan-in-blue for backup. A truckload of cops, from undercovers to suits, accosted and arrested all four of them. Bam, arrested the most aggressively, was tossed to the ground when he verbally refused to be arrested from behind. 

Smash mass incarceration
After discovering that one of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers’ public defenders was an ex-cop who was fired for planting drugs on someone, we spread the word like wildfire that we needed to fundraise for another lawyer. We shared the body camera footage with students from Essex County to Kingsborough College, started (and still run) social media pages, sent emails, and made calls to as many people as we knew. It helped exponentially that the story went viral on Twitter. For months we petitioned outside of a Home Depot, grocery stores, and on the ‘number blocks’ in Newark about the terror Black and Latin workers in the area face. Black workers shared their experiences about being roughed up by the cops, robbed, and duped to take pleas and sit in jail for years. On the day of the most recent trial, one man heard our speeches and chants outside the courthouse and ended up spending the day with us, telling us about how he was recently released from Northern State Prison and could tell the courts were trying to railroad the family over like they did him and countless others affected by mass incarceration.

Nearly 50 of us packed the court and showed proof that the eyes of the working class are on this case. With the sharp strategy of our collective, we were able to build our lives around the family and use a huge political event for our base to highlight these racist courts and pack them with an intergenerational, multiracial group of fighters. It was a lesson and a reminder that this system will never favor our class, from Newark to Colombia. In cahoots with racist public school administrations, politicians, welfare systems, and police, judges and court-appointed bailiffs exist to penalize and lock workers up as soon as we step out of line (see previous CHALLENGE issue). And to these historically racist courts and prosecutors' offices’ dismay, the Rodwell-Spivey family will not go at this harassment and terror alone. As long as anti-racist workers under this system can fight back, no worker will ever be alone.

Released, but not free
Justin may have been released, but that does not mean he is free. Justin and his brothers face prison time, with Justin facing the harshest penalty: forty-three years with no possibility of parole. All because he and his brothers dared to fight the police. As Justin, the Rodwell-Spivey family, and countless others in Newark still battle for housing, peace without police, and economic stability, the fight is far from over! Being targeted and harassed by these institutions under capitalism is an economic and emotional tax on our class. As the U.S. Marshals service functions, ‘Operation Essex Thunder,’ “the District of New Jersey and the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force once again used their multi-jurisdictional investigative authority” to target and arrest 34 Black workers in June (usmarshals.gov, 6/17).

With two liberal Black mayors, Newark’s Mayor Baraka and NYC Mayor Eric Adams, in office, this is fascism or betrayal and institutional stomping out of the working class by so-called liberals. On the heels of another week-long water crisis with a break in Newark’s water mainline, Baraka led a ‘Peace March’ and, in his speech, blamed parents of incarcerated workers for eruptions of gun violence in the city. But what Baraka and Adams will never say is that they represent the largest gang known to man, the United States government, and are sweeping up the pieces of the failings of bosses before them, all while blaming the workers for their complacency in the exploitation of our labor. But for their reign to live on, they must punish one working-class sector while pretending to serve their more loyal base of workers.

The only way to grant our class a true victory against this system is a full communist revolution. To get there, we need to actualize the potential of what we as workers can do as an armed mass movement, not by swearing into electoral politics and anti-working class rhetoric year after year. Many of us need to participate in antiracist struggles like these because struggle and fightback are the only way that we build and learn how to fight for a communist world where racist courts, judges, and prisons cease to exist. No amount of police accountability or bail reforms will work when it is the system itself that is rotten.

Next steps in the ring of fightback
Our next steps include petitioning and flyering throughout Newark and celebrating Justin’s release on September 9 on the block where it all happened. Although Justin is released, this system fails Black and Latin workers like Justin and the Rodwell-Spivey brothers en masse. And reforms like the decision to end cash bail reform in NJ only adapt the chains around our class’ necks. Justin is open to our politics and agrees that racist mayors and overseers like COs and street officers only look out for themselves and their capitalist bosses. Also, both phony politics of having identity-based representation and reform failed his family and will fail workers worldwide without an international working class revolution. Even when we are released from one form of terror, without communism, we will never be free!

Hyattsville, MD,August 22–Last year Friendship Arms residents were sweltering in the summer heat with no A/C. They petitioned, called the mayor and held an exuberant, noisy rally inside and outside of the building. The goal was achieved — air conditioning in the building’s hot stuffy hallways. Friendship Arms is a subsidized building for seniors and persons with disabilities overseen by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Two residents of the building started reading CHALLENGE as a result of the Progressive Labor  Party’s   (PLP) participation in this struggle.

Fast forward to summer 2022. No A/C in the hallways again! A PLP member  works with Hyattsville Aging in Place (HAP), a volunteer, nonprofit organization helping seniors to stay in their homes and apartments. The PL’er called four residents weekly to make sure that they were safe. Once alerted to the dire air quality in the hallways, the PL’er organized calls to the City’s code compliance hotline and reached out to members of HAP outside of the building to make sure the officers of HAP were aware of the situation.

HAP stepped up and encouraged the new mayor and council members to get involved. A signed petition that was sent to the owners of the building, LIHC, forced action. LIHC is currently being sued by family members who lost loved ones in the Bronx fire in January (see CHALLENGE, 1/22/) A lively tenants’ meeting attended by the mayor and a council member showed how vocal and concerned the residents were. The PL’er regularly inspected the hallways and emailed updates to all. This built trust among the residents and put pressure on the mayor and council. Out of this struggle, another person started reading CHALLENGE and helped write this article.

Only with bold action and spreading communist ideas can we get rid of this capitalist system and put the working class in charge. Workers are the best ones to run society. Join Progressive Labor Party.

This is part 12 of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini's Italy gave Franco massive military aid.

In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses and fighting for “freedom and democracy” to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, which resulted in only fortifying the bosses system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.

In the Progressive Labor Party, we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that's communism. If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism, the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, Thyra Edwards.

Black, woman worker,  organizer, and communist
Born in Texas in 1897, Thyra Edwards trained as a social worker, then as a labor organizer at Brookwood Labor College. In the early 1930s Edwards traveled to the Soviet Union. She declared:

The Soviet [Union] has made women free economically by giving them access to all types of employment. It has extended that freedom by freeing them from bearing children against their wishes.
It is necessary that [Black workers] in America give more attention to the Soviet solution of the race problem. The one thing is certain: that only in a Socialist society can [Black, Latin and Asian workers of the world hope for salvation and equality.

Sometime during the early 1930s Edwards secretly joined the Communist Party.
For Edwards, the Spanish Civil War represented the central battleground in the war against fascism. She went to Spain in early October 1937 to report on the conditions of Spanish children who had been evacuated from bombarded areas after their parents were killed.

Black women leadership builds internationalism
Before going, she declared:

“No force in the world today so threatens the position and security of women as does the rising force of fascism. Fascism degrades women.”: we are not on an inter-racial, save the Negro crusade but rather on an inter-national commission concerned with freedom and democracy for all kinds of people. Just now the Spanish people happen to be symbolic of all the rest of us. And certainly there isn't going to be any freedom and equality for Negroes until and unless there is a free world."

On October 20, 1937 she attended a convention of the National Assembly of Spanish Women against War and Fascism. When she rose to speak, about 3,000 women and children gave her a lengthy standing ovation as they shouted, with clenched fists raised, “Viva la Raza Negra!” Leading the ovation was Dolores Ibarurri Gomez, “La Pasionaria”, a communist whose impassioned speeches helped to rally Loyalist forces. Edwards wrote:

It was an overwhelming and tremendous expression of solidarity with [Black] people and with all peoples struggling for freedom and full emancipation and education and progressive development. ... For in truth Spain is the battlefield on which all our destinies are being fought just now, and fought with such relentless courage and such clarity of direction.

In Spain, Edwards discovered the limits of liberal capitalism when she asked whether the Republic would grant Morocco self-rule. Many Black Africans, called Moors: fought on the fascist side in the civil war. Franco, the fascist leader, was commander of the Spanish colonial army. A representative of the Spanish Republican government told her that they wanted help from France [they never got it], and France feared that if the Republic gave self-rule to the Moors, the same anti-imperialist demands would be made in the French colonies of North Africa. Capitalism, whether liberal or fascist, leads to nationalism and neither benefits the working class. Today the Progressive Labor Party fights for communism. No deals with capitalists!

After returning to the U.S. Edwards and nurse Salaria Kea (see CHALLENGE, 3/30) went on a tour of twenty-one cities to raise money for an ambulance to send to the Spanish Republic. Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright contributed to the fund-raising campaign, Robeson making the first contribution of $250.

The publicity centered on Salaria Kea: A brave young Harlem Hospital nurse who went to Spain last year to do her bit in the world struggle against Fascism, returned on the S.S. Normandie of the French Line Monday, the rumble of guns still roaring in her ears and the stench of blood still in her nostrils.

Edwards wrote the booklet “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain” about Kea.

A pamphlet titled “The Negro Ambulance Fund” connected the war in Spain to women’s rights: “Fascism stands for the subordination of women. Mussolini and Hitler have established that women have one exclusive function: To bear children for soldiers for the State … Under Fascist government not only trade unions are liquidated but fraternities, women’s federations, lodges, cooperatives, and peace organizations.”

The ambulance was inscribed, “From the Negro People of America to the People of Republican Spain.” On the speaking tour her lecture stressed the common interests of Black and white workers in their struggles to satisfy these needs.”

Black boss, white boss, same rotten nationalism
Edwards spoke to many CIO union groups. She was red-baited by Black “company union” boss C.W. Rice. The organizers targeted local nurses and doctors. They received much support from the Association of Colored Graduate Nurses but got almost none from the conservative National Medical Association, the “Black AMA.”Edwards had a strong class analysis:

 In a message that touted housing as a “social right' and health insurance as a “state responsibility,” Edwards praised the role of ladies' auxiliaries in recent sit-down strikes led by the CIO, and she noted that women had been shot down on the picket line a few months earlier in the Memorial Day Massacre outside Republic Steel's plant on the South Side of Chicago.

“… We had the fallacious idea that a black boss would be superior to a white boss when what we want is a democratic order with no boss with his heel on our necks.”

In organizing for a conference of Black groups Edwards stressed a class, rather than a nationalist, emphasis:

… disagree[ing] with the decision to … ignore the issues faced by the black working class. “… [S]tressing police brutality against Negroes in Washington is narrowing the basic issue of police brutality and ignoring their attacks of workers on picket lines, in strike zones, hunger marches and unemployment demonstrations.”

Struggle in later years
During World War II Edwards taught about the Soviet Union. In 1948 she and her husband moved to Italy, where she helped organized the first Jewish childcare program in Rome to assist child Holocaust victims.

Edwards died of breast cancer in 1953. Thyra Edwards' life and contribution to the communist internationalism demonstrates that Black women’s leadership is key to smashing racist capitalism and sexism to liberate the entire working class. Even the FBI, who monitored her work until her death, understood this and feared and attacked her and other Black communists like Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson. Now more than ever we must reject the twin dangers of Black nationalism and feminism, and carry the torch for communism as she once proudly did.

Sources: Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards; A. Donlon. “Thyra Edwards’ Spanish Notebook”; Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom; Salaria Kea: A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain. (pamphlet) - https://alba-valb.org/resource/salaria-kea-a-negro-nurse-in-republican-spain/  Wikipedia article on Thyra J. Edwards

Larry was born on October 12, 1944 in Levittown, NY to parents who had been around the Communist Party. He liked sports and was a pitcher for the Division Ave High School baseball team. He got his BA in education from Harpur College and a teaching credential. After graduation he drove south, stopping in Gulfport, Mississippi. He asked about a teaching job, and the recruiter advised him against it since it was an all-Black school. Not to be deterred by racism, Larry taught math for a year. Moving west, he taught first at Pelton Junior High in San Francisco and then at Presidio. Once he made a lesson plan using the percentages of Kentucky miners who contracted black lung disease and the profits the bosses made from the workers’ suffering. Other teachers followed his lesson plan in their classrooms. He also organized a multiracial group of young people to form a Little League team coached by three other young comrades and included his students in pick-up basketball games.

Fighting the KKK and Nazis
Larry fought racism by taking on the KKK and Nazis several times in the late 1970s and early 80s with Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and hundreds of workers and students. He was arrested in San Jose and a KKKop separated his shoulder. Possibly the biggest battle was organizing to stop a Nazi rally in Oxnard near Los Angeles. According to a veteran comrade: “When the cops attacked us, Larry came to my rescue. I couldn’t run ... Larry grabbed my arm and literally ran me to safety...we took refuge on the steps of an apartment building. A man came out and insisted we come in so the cops couldn’t arrest us. He gave us water and offered us food.”

Larry later taught at Balboa High and then at Lincoln where he regularly took students for bowling and pizza on Saturdays. He developed a CHALLENGE network with other teachers while other comrades sold CHALLENGE and leafletted the students outside. He brought some of them to May Day in Los Angeles.  He was elected to the teacher’s union executive board and helped develop a left caucus. Larry always got CHALLENGE out to people

After a few years the caucus defeated the old leadership. One main issue was the need to fight racism in the school district. The union represented classified paraprofessionals who were mostly Black and Latin women with lower pay and benefits while the majority of the teachers were white. The caucus raised that struggles must build unity among all workers and students. They eventually won that paras would be covered under the same wage and benefit proposals as the teachers in contract fights.

Summer projects in Delano, Watsonville, and Mississippi
During the summer Larry almost always went to projects that PLP teachers organized with students. Some memorable ones were among Latin farmworkers in Delano and striking cannery workers in Watsonville. One summer, fighting the Klan in Mississippi, Comrade G remembers: “Larry and I went to Tupelo with the International Committee against Racism and PLP.  It was a frightening time, and I was scared to death.  Larry became one of the most influential people there.  Thoughtful and calm, his presence helped the group focus and deal with problems as they arose.  This was a powerful contribution.”

Larry struggled with Bay Area comrades to “lead with CHALLENGE” and encouraged us to improve our distribution.  He led by example by developing a CHALLENGE route, dropping papers off at houses of friends and coworkers, libraries, stores and coffee houses. He promoted involvement in mass organizations.

Sing, study and distribute CHALLENGE
Larry sang and played the piano and guitar. He and comrade L sang together at most May Day dinners. She was a member of the Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus and convinced Larry to join. He loved it! At rehearsals he distributed CHALLENGE during breaks. The Chorus was thrilled when Larry would take common songs and write parodies—and sometimes entire songs—to those tunes. These revisions were revolutionary and  whimsical. One of the songs he wrote was “The Working Class” to the tune of “Amazing Grace.”

More recently, Larry and other comrades formed a study group with members of the Chorus and from Larry’s school. A highlight was the discussion of the 10 PLP principles of CHALLENGE.  When people in the chorus were told about Larry’s death, the director and some members talked about Larry’s gift in writing songs—and that he, his wit, and his gift would be missed. One member of both the chorus and study group took over Larry’s job of distributing CHALLENGE at Rainbow Coop Grocery. Larry also worked in HEAT, a group devoted to keeping SF City College as a community asset for the whole working class. When Larry's passing on July 11  was announced, many HEAT members praised his years of dedication to City College and as a fighter against racism.

Larry and his wife enjoyed ballroom dancing and traveling.  He was proud of his son and two daughters and spoiled his seven grandchildren, five great grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.

Despite his illness Larry struggled with and encouraged his comrades forward. He was a proud communist until the end.