BROOKLYN, August 28—For the eighth time in nine years the families of Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray joined with neighbors, friends, community organizations and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to offer a different kind of basketball tournament to the Black youth of East Flatbush—Hoops for Justice.   
Shantel and Kimani were killed by killer kkkops working out of the 67th precinct.  In the weeks and months after Shantel’s death in June of 2012, PLP members built a base with her family in the process of organizing street marches to the precinct.  When Kimani was killed in March of 2013, a significant youth rebellion ensued along the same stretch of Church Avenue where our demonstrations had taken place over the prior months.  Hoops for Justice emerged as an annual event to continue the struggle in memory of Shantel and Kimani.
A hallmark of this tournament and the whole fight by this group of families for justice for their loved ones has been to rely on the working class. This reliance on the working class has let all of us see the beginnings of a communist workers led society. A society that we are fighting to put in place by organizing for communist revolution.
A tournament that puts the working class first
A wet start to the day could not dampen the enthusiasm that dozens of young people brought to this now-familiar summer affair. Other tournaments proceeded this summer as if Covid-19 did  not exist, similar to how Mayor Bill de Blasio has opened the city’s schools. These money-making basketball operations showed a disregard for the health of working-class youth in much the same way that the de Blasio school reopening plan was meant to keep the profit-making NYC economy going. Not Hoops for Justice.
Our leadership committee for the tournament engaged in a sharp struggle over the nature of the coronavirus and the urgent need for vaccination. Loved ones of Shantel and Kimani brought a rock-solid determination that this year’s event must go on.
PLP guaranteed that a consistent message that testing and vaccination are a crucial piece of the back to school routine was delivered.
Serving the working class, not the politicians
The slogan of community over competition emerged from our committee meetings and became a refrain at this year’s tournament. As in past years the food provided, the referee stipends, and the music were all provided due to the independent fundraising and leadership of the working class. The families who lost their loved ones have been wooed and courted by local elected officials to join this or that opportunist operation.  
 The families led the largest Manhattan demonstration in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The “NO” from these women to the liberal political establishment has been steadfast.  Their sense of justice—that no other family ought to ever suffer what they have—can never be satisfied by any of these lying, self-serving, petty, conniving, hack Democratic Party politicians. Only communism can meet this standard of justice and our rededication this year to that fight was marked at a touching memorial in the last hour of the tournament.  Onward!

One hundred years ago, August to September 1921, the world witnessed the largest armed rebellion of workers in U.S. history since the Civil War: the Battle of Blair Mountain. It was a great example of multiracial unity between Black and white miners.
Ten thousand armed coal miners marched from Charleston, West Virginia, 70 miles south to Blair Mountain, Logan County, West Virginia, to destroy the unjust system that had taken their health, their homes, and many of their lives. During the battle, striking white workers, partly inspired by the new workers’ state, the Soviet Union, joined with Black and immigrant workers. While the immigrant workers were originally sent to break the strike. The multiracial miners foiled the bosses plans by organizing these workers and turning the strike into a worker’s army.
The U.S. bosses, determined to crush armed insurrection, deployed bombers armed with gas and bombs left over from World War I, some of which were captured by the workers’ army. The workers faced the U.S. army, 3,000 local deputies, police, gunmen and the State Militia.
This march was the miners' immediate reaction to the August 21, 1921, murder of two of their own by the coal bosses' hired gunmen on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse. These killings had followed years of unionizing attempts and guerrilla warfare in the West Virginia coal fields the previous winter.
Within 72 hours, 7,000 armed miners assembled outside Charleston and told the State government that they were going to “open up” Logan County for unionization and “blow it away.” On August 24, the miners' multiracial army, white and Black, citizen and immigrant, began the 70-mile march to Logan.
As the miners made their way from town to town, their ranks swelled.” By the time they reached Blair Mountain, they were 10,000 strong. The miners were a “fully-trained, highly disciplined army ... All the officers were World War I veterans  ...
They taught the miners troop movements [and] flank formations. They formed squadrons.
The original...rednecks’
The white workers, indicating their pro-working class politics over the bosses’ racism, wore red bandanas around their necks, earning the insult “redneck” by the capitalist media (Appalachian Magazine, 5/23/16).
In the bosses’ attempts to rewrite history and erase multiracial unity , it was after Blair Mountain that the “redneck” term became, in dictionaries and media, obscured and synonymous with “cracker” (originally, a child of a convict) and “hillbilly” (originally, extremely poor, often interracial, whites living in the Appalachian mountains and outside the norms of southern society).
This multiracial workers' army were the original “rednecks.” Perhaps in the future we should refer to racists in the South the same way we describe them anywhere in the world, simply as “racists.”
Matewan
The events that led up to the outbreak of this strike and the battle are depicted in the 1987 film “Matewan.” The film shows the miners fighting the bosses’ goons from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency and killing some of them.
But the main strength of the film is its realistic depiction of the militant multi-racial unity of the miners.
The key political struggle Kenehan [union organizer]wages in the first part of the movie is the one against racism. He attacks the racism of some of the miners and calls for organizing the Black and Italian workers into the union. ‘Few Clothes’ John, leader of the Black miners, also has an anti-racist position. There is a great showdown at the mine entrance, under the guns of the company thugs, as the miners stand all together, Blacks, white, and Italian. They march and sign ‘Avanti Popolo’(CHALLENGE, 10/21/87).
The miners lose in the end, as they did in real life. They have no communist party to build for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses. In the film as in reality the bosses, the goons, and the courts defeat the miners in the end.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to be the heir of this legacy of multiracial unity. With the sharpening attacks on the international working class and growing threat of all out inter-imperialist wars looming, our understanding of history is more important than ever as workers from every part of the working class seek out answers that only a new international communist movement can provide.J
The quotes in this article are drawn from a video production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, entitled Even the Heavens Weep—The West Virginia Mine Wars.

Would the miners think we were crazy?
When we flew to Alabama to support striking coal miners at the Warrior Met Coal Company, I was unsure what to expect. In addition to virtually ignoring the strike, national media had spent years depicting "red-state America" as a hopeless bastion of reactionary bigotry. Would the miners welcome support from communist New Yorkers? Would they think we were crazy? Would they be angry?
The response was extraordinary—we were welcomed, and so was our message. (There were exceptions, but they merely proved the rule.) The miners, feeling isolated by the national media's conspiracy of silence, were gratified to have support from outsiders.
They spoke to us about the life-threatening hazards miners face daily, and management's total disregard for their well-being. One 24-year-old worker had lost feeling in two of his fingers due to job-related injuries. Once, when he'd come to his manager with a hurt hand, the manager had checked the inside of his glove for blood to make sure he was being truthful.
Facing death on the job has given these miners a tremendous bond. This is what made them receptive to our message—that the world should be run by, and for, workers. The power of solidarity has kept them alive on a daily basis, and empowered them to demand more from their bosses. (And the miners hadn't bought into the Trump narrative of immigrants stealing good jobs from Americans. They expressed sympathy for exploited immigrant workers.) Everywhere we went, we could see that revolutionary class consciousness was almost there.
*****
Hammer, Hoe, and Hum: Alabama’s workers still fighting capitalism
The recent CHALLENGE article discussing our Party’s work with miners in Alabama reminded me of how much workers in Alabama have had to and continue to endure in recent history. It often seems that in Alabama, workers have had to deal with the consequences of U.S. capitalism in more brutal ways than workers in other states.
Alabama has been in the news recently due to a failed bid to organize Amazon workers. And other news articles recently noted that more people in Alabama died than were born in 2020 due to the bosses’ lack of a response to the Covid-19 crisis. This is more bad news for a state that already deals with some of the highest poverty rates and lowest education rates in the country.
The articles about our comrades’ visit to show support to workers in Alabama coincided with our club’s reading of early chapters from Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley.
All of the recent Alabama news reminds me of a few key lessons:
HThe bosses focus on separating workers by race and class is rooted in their goal to eliminate the idea of workers coming together to do anything empowering. That’s why Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has always and will continue to prioritize worker solidarity!
Beware of the Black bourgeoisie’s attempts to encourage Black workers not to unionize or stand together against the system. A Black capitalist is still a capitalist! In Hammer and Hoe, Kelley describes the way wealthier Black people and the NAACP sought to dampen union struggles in the early 1920’s and 30’s and instead, promoted supporting Black business as the solution to the workers’ problems. Sound familiar?
HThe U.S. has focused so intently on reducing the power of unions in an effort to reduce the power of workers and combat communism.
HThe working class’ experience dealing with capitalist abuse has the potential to create new leadership within the working class. Kelley references workers who became Alabama Communist Party  leaders like Angelo Herndon, Estelle Milner and Al Murphy - all who joined the Party due to their own experiences dealing with the racist system in the South and throughout the U.S.
While bad news about the situation for workers in Alabama abounds, communists have and will continue to be there to support workers as shown through the history discussed in Hammer and Hoe and in the Party’s more recent work supporting miners in Brookfield.
There are many more lessons to learn beyond the four described above, but the final point is the most important: it is up to us, Progressive Labor Party, to help make clear the abuses of capitalism and to show our base that we have been and will always be there to help workers create a better world for the international working class.
*****

 52 years ago this fall, students at Fordham University in The Bronx, New York seized the administration building and demanded throwing the U.S. military’s ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) off campus. This student occupation was led by the Worker-Student Alliance faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was a part of the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle involving many millions against U.S. imperialism.
Knowing that reform orgnizations like SDS will never truly liberate the working class, the key force behind this worker-student alliance, was the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP). We continue to organize and fight back against racism to this day. The lessons learned by the inspiring fightback at Fordham are a manual for students and workers everywhere organizing to take student-worker unity all the way to communist revolution!`
Fordham SDS: baptism through struggle
Fordham is a Catholic school and had traditionally been a conservative place, with an openly fascist student group in the 1930s supporting fascists during the Spanish Civil War. By the mid-60s, it became more liberal, with Fordham students picketing the nearby Woolworths department store for supporting racial segregation in the U.S. south.
Fordham SDS was started in 1965/66 and was militant from the start. By 1968, the Fordham chapter had become influenced by the PLP-led Worker Student Alliance faction of SDS. Increasingly larger and more forceful demonstrations during the next two years opposed Navy recruiters and Dow Chemical, makers of the horrible weapon napalm (jellied gasoline) which was used by the U.S. military against the Vietnamese. The action against Dow Chemical involved hundreds of students shoving campus guards and recruiters with their table, chairs and literature down the hall and down flights of stairs. We also demonstrated against Marine recruiters. For years, we held many forums, workshops and had many late-night conversations in the dorms. 

Students ignite rebellion within U.S. imperialism
ROTC, which trains college students to become junior officers in the military, is an integral part of the U.S. military's war machine. The sight of cadets marching around the college grounds was juxtaposed to the horrors being imposed on the Vietnamese workers we saw on TV every night. Among the thousands of students at Fordham, anger and anti-imperialist solidarity with the Vietnamese workers combined with militant political leadership finally boiled over.
On November 12, 1969, hundreds of students smashed into the administration building and kicked out the president and his flunkies. Barricades were built against the doors with file cabinets as student government representatives tried to negotiate our surrender of the building. Then the administration launched the beefed-up Campus Guards against our barricades. For several hours we fought them off. Late in the evening, we learned that the administration had called in the NYPD. We decided to fight our way out and the best exit seemed to be a window onto the porch. More than 60 of us burst out into a wild melee of at least 20 fist fights going on with the guards outside. Meanwhile, hundreds of students streamed out of the dorms to support and protect us. Several students were grabbed and handed over to the NYPD when they arrived. One was freed by the demonstrators. We then marched up the avenue about a half a mile to the police precinct where the students were being held, demanding their release. We were met by a large contingent of a heavily armed Tactical Patrol Force and were forced to retreat.
Mass base defends students, exposes bosses
26 students were eventually charged, and all but five took a plea deal. Those who didn’t included two members of PLP, and another Worker Student Alliance student. Over the next several months we organized against the bosses’ legal system, turning the case around, and exposing the role of the bosses’ judicial system within the capitalist state. Finally, because of mass support, the students involved were given a slap on the wrist.
The following spring, we continued the fight against ROTC and continued building a strong campus Worker Student Alliance movement. We especially organized support for the cafeteria workers and helped them fight to prevent their being screwed by a new sub-contractor.
Build a base in the working class
Over the past 20 years, we have had several reunions from those days. The largest was two years ago, on the 50th anniversary, when almost 40 participants and friends reunited near Fordham. Some of these attendees became lifelong communists.
The fightback at Fordham shows the power of communist ideas when grasped by masses of students and workers. Against a worldwide backdrop of millions of workers, hundreds at Fordham demonstrated their willingness to fight back against imperialism and support the occupation. Despite the bosses using their state power and police to end it, this mass base followed the students’ militant leadership and defended them in the aftermath, and many remain committed to antiracist, anti-imperialist struggle decades later.
The documentary Fordham SDS was made from film footage taken during the November 12 takeover by a brave comrade who was also a filmmaker, while another brave comrade smuggled the footage out of the building. This documentary is a class in student-worker organizing. As the bosses of the U.S., China and Russia look to today’s youth as cannon fodder for World War III, PLP continues building student-worker unity to smash this entire imperialist system with communist revolution once and for all.