Chicago, August 29 — “I’ll go!” shouted a young woman near the end of tonight’s Fight Back Like Ferguson forum. She was responding to an appeal for volunteers to attend a rally in Ferguson, Missouri called for the next morning. The news of hundreds of workers violently fighting back against the racist police murder of a young black man in Ferguson has inspired millions of workers and youth, from St. Louis to Chicago to Palestine. As one speaker who had visited Ferguson shortly after the rebellion explained, “I’ve never been in a demonstration before where people were willing to die.” This fearless commitment to fighting racism deeply moved those who went to Ferguson. By the end of the forum, a new team of four volunteers was preparing to head out early in the morning.
Featured at the forum were reports from two PLP-led organizing teams that recently returned from Ferguson. One of these PL’ers began the forum by leading the audience in chants brought back from Ferguson. Immediately the political discussion was sharpened with the chant “Who do we want?” “Darren Wilson!” “How do we want him?” “Dead!”
An irate woman in the audience objected to the chant about killing. Others objected to the use of violence. The discussion that followed eventually led to the need for revolutionary violence to destroy this racist system, which uses police killings of young black men to terrorize workers into submitting to capitalist rule. We were told about PLP study groups being formed among young workers who are willing to die rather than go back to the way of life that was Ferguson before the protests began.
We saw many photos and videos that showed Ferguson workers standing up to the kkkops and their rifles and bearcats (armored personnel carriers). We heard many stories of how community members welcomed the support of the PLP volunteers, despite the hype in the media about how “outsiders” weren’t wanted in Ferguson. They accepted and read over 400 copies of CHALLENGE. These workers adapted a PLP chant to say “What has to go?”  “ The whole system.”
More than 60 people attended the forum proof of the tremendous support for the antiracist fighters of Ferguson. More than half of the audience came from our friends in the community where the forum was held:  CHALLENGE readers and others from Chicago State University, Southsiders For Peace, and Unity in Diversity.
One speaker summed up the current situation by saying that the local cops, the state police and the National Guard couldn’t defeat the power of the workers. It is only the ideas of racism and nationalism which hold our class back. By winning workers to antiracism, internationalism and communist equality, we will smash the hold the bosses have on the working class.