The following is an excerpted graduation speech delivered by a communist high school student to their graduating class of 2021.

I am gonna begin this speech just like every other high school senior who is speaking at graduation by congulating us for persevering through the past 16 months of adversity.
I know I can speak for everyone when I say that it has been difficult to stay motivated and confident through online learning, constant worry of sickness, and crowded households. But with the continuous support of our teachers and classmates, we persevered!
We are here today because of all the hard work we have done through one of the most unconventional and difficult high school experiences in history.
But the truth is, our celebration goes far beyond making it through the past 16 months of covid.
As students in a predominantly Black and Latin school in a racist education system, our high school adversity started four years ago. We have undergone four years of oppressive metal detectors, four years of being told “put your metal items in your bag,” four years of being treated like criminals. Despite the DOE [Department of Education] trying to infect our brains with the false idea that we are not meant to succeed, we’ve fought and won. Our diplomas are our trophies. We are all here proving them wrong.  
However, today we are not celebrating enduring racism, we are celebrating fighting racism.
In ninth grade, we entered a community that had spent years building an antiracist and multiracial environment. We saw that and we flourished.
We recognized the DOE’s purposeful separation between all the schools within our building and created and joined campus council to help ease tensions. We spoke with students at the mainly-white high school and realized that we are more alike than we are different. Campus council has held multiple successful school wide game nights, movie nights, and parties. We fought and we won.
We observed the disparity between the sports teams, what the mainly-white school in the building had access to versus what we had access to. Students, teachers, and faculty united and worked to get us more sports teams. We fought and we won.
We continued to fight to merge the sports teams with ours to build comradery and unbeatable teams. This year, PSAL [Public Schools Athletic League] could no longer ignore the continuous calls for change and combined the sports teams. We fought and we won.
And just like we won our fight for an integrated building, we will win our fight against metal detectors. Today, we celebrate the combined sports teams, and in the future, the graduating seniors will give speeches celebrating the removal of the metal detectors.
The platform that we’ve been given to speak up for ourselves and fight against inequity is only possible from the foundation built by the students before us. We have successfully continued the work of our predecessors to help enable the victories of our successors. We have done our work to ensure that the school we are leaving today is a better, stronger, and more resilient school than it was when we entered.
We’ve created unforgettable memories that we, and the faculty here will cherish for the rest of our lives. And while I’m sad that I cannot sit here and reminisce about prom or our senior trip, we had four years worth of fun in the just two and a half years we had in the building.
So here’s to every joke made in spanish class, every picket line outside of the building, every nail biting basketball game that had us on our feet, every laugh, tear, and every schoolwide gathering in the auditorium where we got to cheer for our friends while they did some embarrassing performance for vocal class.
My high school has shaped us into the amazing students, friends, and antiracists that we are today.
It is now our job to take what we learned, both academically and politically, into the next chapter of our lives. Every college that we occupy deserves to hear the echoes of our school slogan the second we step on campus: “An injustice to one is an injustice to all.”
As a senior class, we’ve fought, we’ve won, and we will never stop fighting.

 As this is being written, another wave of Covid-19 is hitting the working class in Haiti with ferocity. Under “normal” conditions of imperialist-imposed misery, there is little or no health care. In the capital city, there is one public hospital—understaffed, under-resourced and underfunded—for about three million people. In most departments (states), the situation is the same. For the majority of workers, there is nowhere to go, so they are ill and dying at home, unnoticed except by their loved ones. Needless to say, private hospitals, while only moderately better, are off-limits to workers.
 The imperialist countries have yet to provide any vaccines against Covid-19 to Haiti, and when and if they do, what little can be expected will be “reserved” for the rulers and their allies who will push their way to the front of the line. Haiti is the only country in the western hemisphere that has yet to issue a shot of any COVID-19 vaccines (Bloomberg, 6/8). The racism is self-evident.
The government, with its history of working with the imperialist bosses to bleed the working class dry, has failed in every way during this crisis. The bosses have zero credibility, so most people don’t know what to believe about the pandemic, or just about anything else. But the rumor mill is active and has disarmed our class. It has made workers wary of vaccines, or doubting that the pandemic is real. The media ignores the pandemic except when it affects the “hauts-gradés” (big shots), though as the illness spreads and the death toll mounts, workers will have no choice but to confront the situation.
While all the conditions of daily life for workers and students—urban and rural—are deteriorating, what is really needed, more than vaccines and all the other necessities of a decent life, is a revolutionary communist party with deep ties among the masses to arm workers with the ideology and organization to change the world. We are fighting for all of it: a decent life today and communism tomorrow. We can change the world. The Progressive Labor Party has a lot of work to do. We will make the difference.
Build PLP! Fight for communism! Power to the working class!

It’s already been a month since the workers’ blockades and marches here in Colombia. The national bosses have offered both the carrot and stick. They have managed to weaken the strike committees with the same strategy they used in 2019, buying time by offering negotiations but never really complying with workers’ demands.
Meanwhile, Colombia’s bosses have unleashed their war tactics: militarizing the country, criminalizing the blockades, infiltrating the marches, creating paramilitary groups that together with the military indiscriminately shoot at the marchers, robbing, destroying, and detaining hundreds of young people who appear in the Cauca River after they were reported as missing.
The defense minister faced charges in the national senate, but predictably he was acquitted. The Colombian bosses long resisted any visit of a human rights commission. The government of Big Fascist U.S. President Joe Biden, supports the Duque government as its most important ally in the region.
The government finally accepted the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), who only served to minimize and justify the state violence. The result is a project for the restructuring of the police, job creation, education, health, and projects for young people. All this to try to calm things down.
The strike committee broke negotiations with the government, as a tactic to coincide with the arrival of the IACHR. We the workers again march in Bogotá, to put pressure on where the bosses are meeting.
But no international organization will ever turn against the capitalist class. It is only a distraction that will give the fascists in power time to justify their actions and prepare to attack our class again. Only the united working class empowered by the method of scientific analysis (dialectical materialism) can draw the best conclusions to act according to reality, being led by a mass Progressive Labor Party that interprets the needs and will of the masses.

Worldwide, the summer is a time of training for Progressive Labor Party. As we gear up for a summer of learning, it’s helpful to reflect on past Summer Projects. We will look at the Tupelo Project of ’79. The following article, published in CHALLENGE in 1979, reflects its time period and level of struggle. While we in 2021 are living in a qualitatively different time, there are many lessons to learn fro the suer of ‘79, including:

• In the face of the Ku Klux Klan and the racist capitalist government, we must be bold and have confidence in the working class to take the lead of communists.
• Multiracial unity is our class’s weapon, and the bosses’ greatest fear.
• To sustain our gains, we must grow the Party and train more Black, Latin, Asian, and white young people in leadership.

Significance of Mississippi
To many who remember the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, Mississippi symbolizes the most extreme racism, the most brutal murders of Black workers, antiracists, and the stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.
For Progressive Labor Party, Mississippi signified a base for revolution among Black and white workers, spreading the ideas of multiracial unity and the fight for communist ideas in the South. Today, we celebrate the 42th anniversary of the Tupelo Summer Project of ’79. About one hundred communists and friends—Black, Latin, Asian, and white—took part in this struggle.
Though relatively small (population of  20,000), Tupelo was an industrial center with over 14,000 workers. The South was of great importance to the ruling class as an industrial area because its carefully-nurtured tradition of racism has made it the citadel of low-wage non-union labor, where the bosses have been able to keep the working class divided and weak in order to extract extra profits.
The main lesson PLP learned in Tupelo, as everywhere, is to be bold. The bolder we were, the more seriously people took us and the more willing they were to respond to us. Workers understand that the system will come down hard when you try to fight it. They are also ready to understand that you only win on the offensive. Below is an edited excerpt from PL Magazine (Fall 1979) analyzing an aspect of the Tupelo Summer Project.
The great July demonstration
Sixty five antiracist marchers, organized by Progressive Labor Party and its [then-mass organization] International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), were marching through the streets in Tupelo, Mississippi chanting, “Death to the Klan.”  
Shots rang through the air.
As the bullets grazed two marchers, , a disciplined group of people, Black and white, rushed out of line, isolated the racist who wielded the gun, and beat him to the ground. In the fight that ensued with this Klansman, or Klan supporter, the antiracists broke his neck. While this was happening, the marchers, maintaining a tight discipline that won them the respect of Tupelo’s working class, continued the march. The marchers, encouraged by the friendly faces that lined the streets and by the workers who joined the march, were able to withstand the menacing threat of the Tupelo police, who aimed their cocked guns at them.
From the start, it was clear that the racist local rulers wanted to stop this march. A new ordinance was created by the city government banning sound devices (in response to successful PLP-led rallies in the past); the police and their flunkies systematically tore down posters in the housing projects; and a permit for the march was not granted until the very last minute. As the march gathered in front of the courthouse, the bosses’ seat of power, a militant rally began, attracting a lot of attention from workers in the area.
A few minutes after the march began, the racist Klan member named Brasil shot into the demo. By the time the antiracist and antifascist fighters got hold of him, they were surrounded by cops who prevented them from finishing the racist off. The cops then grabbed one of the fighters, Floyd Banks, an InCAR member from Galveston, Texas and arrested him for “attempted murder.”
The march, meanwhile, regrouped and continued to lead workers in the area who joined the march in chanting, “The cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan.”
Before I was scared, now I’m mad’
Many militant workers in Tupelo have come to see InCAR as the main mass organization that can lead workers in the fight against racism and the resurgence of  fascist groups like the Klan. One Black woman worker said, “Before I was scared, but now I’m mad.”
This represents the feeling of many people here, that there is no longer the luxury to sit back and watch the ruling class and its flunkies hold power, that they have to get active and build a movement that has as its goal the destruction of ruling class ideas of racism and fascism, and in the final analysis, the ruling class itself.
The political climate is changing rapidly in the South, and only groups like PLP are prepared to respond to the changes, to give leadership and organize the multiracial, antiracist fightback that is necessary to move workers to the left. The United League, a Black reformist group, recently cancelled a march scheduled for Okolona (a town not far from Tupelo) today, because its leader Skip Robinson, essentially chickened out of the struggle.
More and more people are realizing that the leadership of UL cannot stand up to the rigors of the class struggle.
Workers put themselves on the line
Respect for PLP is growing here. Two residents of Tupelo put up their houses as collateral so that Floyd Banks could be bailed out of jail. When the two marchers who had been wounded were treated in the hospital, they were warmly received and treated by white doctors and other hospital workers. After the march stopped to rally, hundreds of Black workers surrounded the marchers to protect them from the cops (who would have been only too glad to be trigger happy.)
This is the first time a racist has been beaten by an antiracist march in Tupelo. The leadership of the UL always guaranteed the safety of the KKK and the cops by holding back the anger and hatred of Black workers in the fight to liberate themselves from the racism they face every day. The bosses think that they can destroy this movement by getting its leaders, but little do they know that leaders always spring up in the midst of struggle, and that there are many, many people right here in Tupelo, and other cities North and South, who can develop working-class leaders in the fight against racism and fascism, and they are being trained by Progressive Labor Party.
This was readily proven by the response not only of the marchers, in their determination to continue the march, not to be intimated by the cops’ harassment, but also by the tremendous support of the local people. Over 200 copies of InCAR Arrow and CHALLENGE were sold, 4 people joined InCAR on the spot. Another demonstration is being organized for August 4.