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.
The following piece 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 Civil Rights Movement was a decades-long mass uprising of Black and white workers and students against the most open forms of racism in the U.S. Its impetus was the growing international communist movement fresh off the defeat of fascism in Europe and quickly growing in China, Africa and around the world, combined with the growing resistance to racism by the Black workers in the U.S.
The U.S. ruling class tried to shut down the mass antiracist fightback by using anti-communism to divide and terrorize the movement. In the period right after World War II, the Soviet Union was admired by workers around the world, including in the U.S., for defeating the Nazi war machine. The workers-led society in the Soviet Union stood in stark contrast to the legal segregation workers faced in the U.S.
Trained by CP, Became Civil Rights Leaders
While the racist Jim Crow laws in the South were are well known, segregation cut across the country. Black workers who moved to northern cities to look for jobs faced racism in looking for homes and on the job as well.

Between 1940 and 1960 the Great Migration brought over six million African Americans to industrial centers in the urban North and West, where migrants were met with new forms of racial containment. They were often restricted to domestic and retail service work. Those who found industrial employment were kept out of labor unions
(Baldwin).

The communist movement had been heavily involved in the fight against racism in the South since around 1930 and had built up a mass movement that included Black and white workers and students. The struggle to defend the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black men wrongly accused of raping two white women, galvanized the anti-racist movement (see CHALLENGE, 5/31). This communist-led struggle brought thousand of Black and white workers into organizations that fought racism and trained many of the leaders of the civil rights movement.

If you look at all the…auxiliary organizations[of the Communist Party in Alabama], the International Labor Defense, which focused on civil rights issues, they had up to 2,000. The Sharecroppers Union had up to 12,000. You had the International Workers Order. You had the League of Young Southerners. You had the Southern Negro Youth Congress. [In total], it touched the lives easily of 20,000 people.
There were many people who were trained in the Communist Party who went on to become Civil Rights activists [including] Rosa Parks…some of her first political activities were around the Scottsboro case…She never joined the party, but as a young woman, she and her husband, in fact, attended some of the meetings…the infrastructure that was laid forward that becomes the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, was laid in many ways, not entirely, by the Communist Party (Robin Kelly on WNYC Radio 2/16/2010).

WW II and After: Communist Fighters Under Attack
The movement against racism that grew in the 1930s didn’t stop during World War II.

The United States entered the wartime world as the self-professed face of democracy, but African Americans began to make links between Nazi racism, European imperialism, and American [racism].
Veteran activist and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) A. Philip Randolph threatened to lead a 100,000-person March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in November 1941 if wartime production was not desegregated…
Between 1942 and 1945 industrial centers, military camps, and port cities, including Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, exploded with race riots. Ongoing…attempts to constrain black life erupted in violent riots in more than forty cities (Baldwin).

After the war, the U.S. bosses came under increasing pressure as the Soviet Union and the international communist movement exposed the hypocrisy of U.S. capitalism, describing itself as a pillar of “democracy” while denying even the most basic freedom to Black citizens.
Black communists played a leading role in exposing U.S. racism to the world and came under attack as well. Paul Robeson was a communist actor, singer, athlete and political activist. He was a man of international renown and used it to build the movement for workers’ power and the fight against racism. Robeson and other communists came under extreme attack by the U.S. bosses who were terrified of the multi-racial fight against racism

In 1947 W. E. B. Du Bois placed the grievances of African Americans before the newly formed United Nations in his famous “Appeal to the World” address…singer and activist Paul Robeson signed a U.S.S.R. petition to the United Nations, “We Charge Genocide,” documenting a series of human rights abuses against African Americans. Communist activist Claudia Jones organized in Harlem for jobs, housing, and humane immigration policies. Both Robeson’s and Du Bois’s passports were revoked until 1958 while the Trinidadian [Claudia] Jones was deported to Britain. In the Cold War context, black struggles for freedom were largely denounced as un-American (Baldwin).

The bosses’ anti-communist McCarthyism campaign was an attempt to strangle the communist movement in the U.S. and stop the fight against racism. It terrified many people. Leading fighters were driven underground, out of the country and some were put in jail. For a while, there were few public demonstrations against racism in the South or North as anyone, Black or white, who stood up against Jim Crow, housing or school segregation was labeled a communist and subject to being harassed or attacked by the FBI.
But the working class continued to fight and the struggle against racism eventually focused on the Jim Crow laws that segregated all forms of life in the South. The U.S. bosses were particularly vulnerable to the fight against Jim Crow laws. The German Nazis had used the laws as a model for setting up their fascist system “[Hitler in Main Kampf] describes the United States as ‘the one state’ that had made headway toward what he regarded as a healthy and utterly necessary racist regime” (NY Times 5/22). Black soldiers returning from the war were increasingly unwilling to tolerate fascism at home after fighting it in Europe.
Many Black workers began to resist legal segregation and Alabama civil rights leaders decided it was time to take mass action against the laws.
In 1955, Rosa Parks was asked to make a stand that would spark the campaign. When she refused to get out of her seat setting off the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Black working class of Montgomery, experienced by the communist-led fight to defend the Scottsboro Boys and the many other battles against racism, was prepared to fight and that they did.

NEW YORK CITY, May 21—Twenty-one thousand AT&T Mobile workers went on a three-day national strike this weekend, as a dress rehearsal for a bigger confrontation. These workers are fighting for survival in a continuing offensive of capitalist profiteering against worker’s conditions of work and living standards. Rivalries between global imperialists are sharpening, and moving toward even greater war. While the telecommunications bosses tighten the screws, the Progressive Labor Party salutes and supports the AT&T workers for saying enough is enough!
Much like Verizon Wireless’s strike last summer this battle is over the outsourcing of call center jobs, the closing of stores, hiring of part-timers instead of full-time workers, and higher co-pays for health insurance. The workers are represented by Communication Workers of America (CWA). The three-day strike is the first for most of these workers and was intended as a shot across the bosses’ bow to move contract negotiations forward.
PLP members in Brooklyn visited a local store and walked and talked with the workers who were predominantly young Black women. Their enthusiasm was high and they warmly greeted us. We intend to go back to the store, develop ties with these workers and help as they prepare for the bigger storms ahead.
U.S. workers, like telecommunications workers at AT&T, are on the front lines of these attacks as the U.S. bosses gear up for war with their imperialist rivals, the bosses of China and Russia. The communist Progressive Labor Party stands side by side with the AT&T workers. The AT&T workers are a key part of a vital organ of capitalism, telecommunications. Examining the role of telecommunications within capitalism, these workers, together with their international sisters and brothers in transit, mining and heavy industries, hold the power to shape a communist world without borders, imperialism, money or profits!
Telecom Workers: Vital Organs of Capitalism
“Telecommunications” refers to the simple sending and receiving of electronic messages. For the working class in the U.S. and many countries, telecommunications—in the form of Internet—capable devices like smartphones and their wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon and other, have entered and now dominate many aspects of life. For many workers growing up today, Internet access and sending text messages can be a taken-for-granted part of every day life.
The global ubiquity of telecommunications is matched only by the depth of its penetration into the labor process. Many lines have blurred and mutually-reinforcing relationships forged between capitalist industries. As of 2013, the London-based Financial Times’ top 500 companies based on profits included seventeen global wireless telephone companies (including AT&T), fifteen fixed-line phone utilities, fifteen multinational mass media companies (like TimeWarner), fifteen software and computer technology companies (including Apple, IBM, and now Google), and eleven healthcare companies who count on massive digital and fiber optic networks for their explosive growth (“FT 500,” 2013).
Not listed as companies, but even more dependent on telecommunications as any company, are the imperialist bosses’ militaries in the U.S., Russia, and China. The U.S. bosses in particular maintain a global array of over 750 military bases, killer drone fleets, aircraft carrier fleets, and nuclear submarines, all dependent on telecommunication.
At the center of this entire industry is the international working class, and telecommunications involves nearly every sector of it. Companies like Apple’s and Google’s brands depend on the advertising industry. Products like phones and computers rely on the extraction of metals and minerals by millions of miners in sub-Saharan Africa, who live in U.S. and Chinese imperialist-backed fascist states. These raw materials are shipped to factory workers in India, China and elsewhere and assembled according to designs made by workers in computer, electrical and mechanical engineering. Warehousing and transport workers ship these products, and millions of storefront and call center workers sell and provide technical support for them.
From that to the workers who build and operate the electrical grids themselves, the power stations, the cables; who manage the invisible electromagnetic waves that devices use; to the thousands of satellites built and launched into orbit around the earth—for capitalism and imperialism, telecommunications have emerged in importance as electricity and water themselves. When workers disrupt even one step in this entire process, we catch a glimpse of the immense power of our class.
AT&T Workers Represent Working-Class Potential
To meet their current demands, the AT&T workers’ strike will take more than contract negotiations to beat back the AT&T bosses. It will take militant rank-and-file workers’ power. Building workers’ power in AT&T must go hand in hand with raising consciousness of their potential power at the center of global capitalism. Capitalism will continue to extract more from workers to bolster profits and prepare for the coming war. All workers face a future of not only more, but also more militant battles against the bosses.
We in PLP fight to unite all workers around the globe to turn this imperialist war against the world’s workers into a class war for communist revolution so that the working class can share among us the wealth we produce and control our destiny. Then, imperialism, racism, and sexism can be destroyed. Then, this modern miracle of telecommunications infrastructure, built by the hands and brains of workers, will no longer be used for profit and war, but for solidarity and communism!

BOSTON, May 28—Today, 70 protestors picketed at the Elks Club in West Roxbury, the site of a panel discussion called by Bostonians Against Sanctuary Cities.  This racist organization formed after Trump’s election with the goal of popularizing his viciously anti-immigrant agenda.
When Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends arrived, an ad hoc group of protesters from all over the Boston area were standing in a line with signs.  We seized the opportunity to provide some leadership and organized a picket line. We began chants “Hitler Rose, Hitler Fell, racist hate groups go to hell” and “Stop racist deportations, working people have no nation.” We distributed a leaflet and carried signs that boldly exclaimed “No Free Speech for Racists”, and “We won’t be divided, we won’t be fooled. Racism is the boss’s tool”.  Almost everyone accepted our leaflet “The main thing to do: Fight Racism.”
 The panel consisted of a mother whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, a Bristol County sheriff who wants to use Massachusetts inmates to build the wall on the Mexican border, and a woman from the openly anti-immigrant Washington DC organization, Center for Immigrant Studies.  It is an ultra-conservative group trying to get a foothold in liberal Massachusetts.
The Trump takeover is fostering more racism as well as more protest. Many protesters are new to fightback and open to rejecting the liberalism of the Democratic Party.  Anti-immigrant racism has always been and is part of capitalist profiteering and exploitation of the working class. Electing a Democrat will not change that. Obama deported 3.2 million immigrants, more than any U. S. president in history. PL’ers need to go to these protests with the outlook of meeting new friends who want to help build a militant, multiracial movement against racism, and we need to bring our friends to help develop them as working class leaders. Join us!

The Manchester atrocity shows how cowardly acts of individual violence are spawned by the biggest terrorists of them all: UK and U.S. imperialists. It also creates an opening for state violence and fascism against the working class.
On May 22 at an Ariana Grande concert, Salman Ramadan Abedi detonated a device packed with metal nuts and bolts and killed 22 people, injured over 60, many of them children, and terrorized the working class. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility, but there is no evidence providing IS was directly involved (Stratfor, 5/27).
The 22-year-old Libyan Briton bomber’s action was a despicable attack on masses of unarmed youth and families. But, the biggest terrorists are the capitalist bosses. When the UK and U.S. bosses aren’t bombing hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re shattering the lives of millions with racist incarceration, deportation, segregated housing and schooling, and unemployment. To divert attention from their own monstrous crimes, the bosses will exploit fears of ISIS to stir anti-Muslim racism as well as to pledge allegiance to this savage system to protect us.
A Century in the Making
The imperialists have created their own terrorists. Much of the religious sectarian violence and rise of Islamic militant groups can be traced to the British, French, and U.S. imperialists.
Not only did the British imperialists, along with the French, carve up what is today the Middle East after World War I as a divide-and-conquer strategy, the bosses have used and bred reactionary and armed Muslim groups to back their imperialist oil interests. (See Brzezinski obituary, page 5). UK Secretary of the War Cabinet Maurice Hankey in 1918 viewed control of oil supplies in the region to be “a first class British war aim.”
For example, the UK funded the Mujaheddin as proxy fighters. “It resulted in the spawning of al-Qa’ida, the spread of international terrorism, and the empowering of ISI, the Pakistani secret police, who became their sponsors. …[T]he lesser known by-products [are] the dispatch of Afghan Islamist veterans, with the connivance of Britain and the US, to the wars in the Balkans and the former Soviet republics in central Asia, and ethnic Muslim areas of China.” (The Independent, 7/29/2010).
In Libya, a joint effort on the British, French, and U.S. imperialists via NATO, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engineered a U.S. invasion in 2011. The massive bombing and missile raids were designed to consolidate oil deals the imperialist powers had made with the unreliable Muammar Qaddafi and each other. The British admit their role “aided the rise of the Islamic State in North Africa” (9/14/16). They also aided in displacing, starving, and terrorizing hundreds of thousands of families.
An Opening for Fascism
The Manchester attack will spur even greater efforts from bosses on all sides to impose fascism on the working class as they prepare for wider imperialist wars.  Increasing racism and capitalist state terror, and foster cross-class collaboration with police forces, are symptoms of rising fascism.
The Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson tweeted, “We need a State of Emergency as France has. We need internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children” (NY Times, 5/23).  Some called for those suspected to be electronically tagged. The Economist called for an “iron-willed application of the law” (5/27).
Working-Class Response
In Manchester, residents opened up their homes to those stranded, taxi drivers gave free rides, and restaurants sent donations to those still searching for loved ones. While the bosses will respond with cynical ploy to build allegiance to its exploitative system, the working class responds with collectivity and antiracism.
The international working class still holds all the cards, including the potential to overthrow the entire murderous capitalist system. No amount of divisions can keep the working class from ultimately taking power. No lesser-evil politician or government can liberate our class. Progressive Labor Party aims to build communism. We will construct a world free of terrorism, racism and sexism.