NEW JERSEY, February 7—“I know we should try to stop police brutality, but it seems like all these revolutions we are learning about show us we need a more revolutionary approach.” This was the conclusion a college student in New Jersey shared while summarizing an event featuring multiracial women and men student leaders from Kingsborough Community College (KCC) in Brooklyn, New York. KCC students gave a presentation and a skit reenacting the racist attacks on students by college public safety officers (see article in 11/17/22 CHALLENGE) and participated in discussions with over 50 New Jersey college students. One thing became clear: students are eager to challenge the racist and sexist system. Antiracist fightback is spreading, and the more it spreads, the more this racist, sexist, imperialist capitalist system is doomed.

Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were also present to distribute CHALLENGE. Between the presentation and revolutionary communist politics, debates and discussions show that these working class students are more than capable of both analyzing the world and organizing to change it. Workers and students like them can and should run the world—that’s communism, and our fight for that world is expanding!
The struggle spreads and sharpens
To the New Jersey college students in attendance, the first reaction to hearing about the struggle at KCC was disbelief and stunned silence. Upon viewing an improvised skit to illustrate KCC Public Safety’s appalling assault on the student, questions and comments began to pour in with some students sharing how this resonated with their own experiences.  
New Jersey students took over from the KCC students in leading the discussion and sharp debates followed. Some students suggested that the police can be reformed through “better training” and “building bridges with the community” through diverse inclusion and representation on the police force. Other students responded that the history of policing itself dates back to racist slave patrols, and an inherently racist system cannot be reformed. The murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black cops is a good example that shows how reforming the police is a dead end.
From Tyre Nichols to the KCC students’ own experiences, Black cops, under a Black police chief and (at KCC) a Black college president have only changed the appearance of capitalist oppression. The underlying essence of increasing brute force, obedience and terror disproportionately targeting Black, Latin and immigrant workers —fascism—  is concealed by identity politics pushed by the very same liberal politicians today sending billions of dollars in weapons to the capitalists running Ukraine and Taiwan. Soon enough, they will be sending working class youth here to kill other working class youth in Russia and China, and die for U.S. imperialism.
At places like KCC, however, the capitalists’ bootlicking servants are letting their mask of identity politics slip enough to reveal who they really serve. As our struggle spreads, communists in PLP are organizing to channel working class resistance exemplified by these students into class war against fascism and imperialist war for communism.
‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’
The success of this college event is a political victory and reveals the potential for a mass militant antiracist student movement beyond New Jersey and CUNY. For Kingsborough students and faculty, the opportunity to return to New Jersey and share organizing experiences brought us full-circle: we first came to New Jersey last year to help pack the courts during the antiracist fightback at the Rodwell-Spivey trial.
Student eyewitness reports of the bosses’ legal system threatening Justin Rodwell with over 40 years in prison for trumped-up charges inspired mass growth in KCC’s antiracist club Common Ground in defense of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers. With one of our new student comrades bringing a wealth of fighting experience from the student movement in Haiti, the antiracist movement built last year continued growing and is now leading mass antiracist fightback at KCC.
Racist school administrations in NY/NJ can catch a fire
As the event was closed and to nurture the growing bonds of working class solidarity, students and faculty heard reports from other racist attacks and antiracist struggles and discussed how to link them together. From supporting an antiracist high school teacher recently terminated to supporting student strike organizing at Rutgers, this period of relative student growth means students and faculty have a responsibility to continue building a militant antiracist movement.
Another concluding organizing lesson was the importance of consistently waging antiracist fightback while building a multiracial base with an emphasis on Black student leadership. A New Jersey student commented on the worldwide character of the response to the mass Black worker-led rebellions after George Floyd’s murder. He reasoned that workers around the world are inspired by and look in solidarity to the Black working class for political leadership, to the extent that both Black workers’ culture and resistance are appreciated and emulated worldwide. Black student and worker leadership is key to our multiracial working class movement, and as communist leaders will be the key force in smashing capitalism once and for all.
Smashing borders locally prepares us globally
Back on the KCC students’ side, organizing and traveling to New Jersey also enabled us to bridge the psychological distance between our areas. Even though New York/ New Jersey are part of the same metropolitan area and connected at points by mass transit, many KCC students had neither been to New Jersey nor felt totally comfortable making the trip. The bosses’ media obsession with subway crime sees these divisions.
While not having the same hurdles as crossing the bosses’ borders from Haiti to the Dominican Republic or Mexico to the U.S., students and workers separated by a few miles and a river overcome these barriers and are planning to do it again. From Newark to Brooklyn and New York to Beijing, the struggle continues!

 

This is part one of a three-part series. This article is a republication and originally appeared in CHALLENGE in February 2021. The history here is worth reprinting, revisiting, and relearning every year.

Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly for Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and organizers made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers.    
The 1930s was also the decade when many well-known artists embraced communist ideas in their quest to end the racist inequalities of capitalism. In 1932, Hughes went to the Soviet Union with a group of Black artists and filmmakers to create a film about Black life and racism in the U.S. South (The project was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt recognized the USSR). Later Hughes traveled to Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly newspaper, to cover the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War. This was the period of his most radical poetry, much of it submitted to New Masses, a weekly edited by members of the Communist Party USA (CP).  One of his most famous was “Good Morning Revolution,” which Hughes wrote in 1932. It openly calls for a society run by and for the working class. Here are some excerpts:  

Good-morning, Revolution:
    You’re the very best friend
    I ever had
  We gonna pal around together from now on.
    …
    Listen, Revolution,
    We’re buddies, see –
    Together,
    We can take everything:
    Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
    Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
    Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
    (Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
    Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
    All the tools of production,
    (Great day in the morning!)    
    Everything –
    And turn ‘em over to the people who work.
    Rule and run ‘em for us people who work.

Fighting Jim Crow and police murder
The political ground shifted in the 1940s, as the CP focused less on communist revolution and more on building an anti-fascist united front to defeat Germany in World War II. Black workers and communists advanced the “Double V” goal—victory against the fascists in Europe and victory against segregation at home.  In 1942, Hughes was hired by the Chicago Defender, another prominent Black newspaper. His columns attacked the racist abuse of Black soldiers stationed in the South, which Hughes compared to Nazi Germany. In a February 26, 1944 column, Hughes described a Black soldier just returned to the U.S. from fighting overseas.  The soldier suffered from “Jim Crow shock, too much discrimination—segregation-fatigue which, to a sensitive Negro, can be just as damaging as days of
heavy air bombardment.”  In August 1943, when a Black soldier was shot and wounded by a cop after a fracas at the Braddock Hotel at West 126th Street, the rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. In the ensuing rebellion, stores were looted and property damage was estimated at up to $5 million. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called in and over six hundred people were arrested. (See Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943, Philadelphia: 1977.)
To Hughes, the politics of the incident were clear. In his August 14, 1943, Chicago Defender column addressed to “White Shopkeepers Who Own Stores in Negro Neighborhoods,” Hughes wrote: “The damage to your stores is primarily a protest against the whole rotten system of Jim Crow ghettos, Jim Crow cars, and Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers.  But, you say, you are not responsible for those Jim Crow conditions.  Why should your windows be broken?  They shouldn’t.  I am sorry they are.  But I can tell you WHY they are broken.” Hughes goes on to cite Black workers’ grievances, from racist unemployment to price gouging and substandard housing. He ends by observing: “I do not believe in mob violence as a solution for social problems.  But I do understand what it is that makes many young people in Negro neighborhoods an easy prey to that desperate desire born of frustration—to which you contribute—to hurl a brick through a window.”  
    In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes included the poem “Harlem,” which expresses visceral sensations of pent-up rage:  

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore----
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over ----
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Writing and Fighting anti-communist opppression
In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalist rulers vied for world supremacy against the socialist Soviet Union, the bosses’ federal government led the charge to investigate and harass members of the Communist Party USA.  In January 1949, twelve CPUSA leaders, including Black New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr., went on trial for violating the Smith Act by “advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Though Hughes never officially  joined the CPUSA, his communist sympathies were clear. The FBI placed him under surveillance. Writing in the Chicago Defender, February 5, 1949, he declared that the trial was
the most important thing happening in America today . . . because it is your trial—all who question the status quo—who question things as they are—all poor people, Negroes, Jews, un-white Americans, un-rich Americans are on trial. . . . They are being tried because they say it is wrong for anybody—Mexicans, Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Armenians—to be segregated in America; because they say it is wrong for anybody to make millions of dollars from any business while the workers in that business do not make enough to save a few hundred dollars to live on when they get old and broken down and unable to work anymore; they are being tried because they do not believe in wars that kill millions of young men and make millions of dollars for those who already have millions of dollars; they are being tried because they believe it is better in peace time to build schools, hospitals, and public power projects than to build warplanes and battleships.
By the 1950s, the bosses’ blacklisting and FBI harassment led many communists and leftists to retreat from open activism. But Hughes kept writing for the Chicago Defender until 1962. His bold and lyrical poetry, notably the two poems of One-Way Ticket (1951) that address lynchings in the South, live on as an inspiration to all who struggle against racism and for the international working class.

The Russian Revolution of November 7, 1917, is the most important event in the history of class struggle. The multi-national Russian working class seized state power and held it for decades. The Bolsheviks (the Russian Communist Party) led the workers to defeat Russian and foreign armies that tried to overthrow them in a hard-fought four-year civil war from 1917 to 1921.

From 1929 to 1941 the Bolsheviks, now under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, ended the remnants of capitalism and collectivized agriculture to stop the endless series of devastating famines. They created the Five-Year Plans to industrialize the enormous country.

They outlawed racism! The Bolsheviks led the American Communist Party to make the fight against racism primary in all its struggles. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continues to be the only leftist party to make the fight against racism and nationalism primary in our struggle to build a revolutionary party.

The Bolsheviks also organized the Soviet working class to build a mighty Red Army for the wars that they knew would come. The ruling class celebrates D-Day as the end of World War II (WWII) but it was really the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad that dealt the death blow to the fascist armies. The ruling class pushes WWII as a victory for so-called democracy and uses it to rally the working class to support future imperialist wars. Instead, we celebrate the communist discipline and heroism of the working class in the Battle of Stalingrad!

Fascists invade
On June 22, 1941, the fascist German, Italian, and Finnish armies invaded the Soviet Union, with hundreds of thousands of troops from other fascist and German occupied countries. The German Blitzkrieg tactic was to punch through defense lines and cut off and capture huge pockets of encircled enemy troops. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in the first few months. But many continued to fight on, breaking out of encirclement, and forming partisan bands behind the fascist lines.

 The Germans had never met fighters like the Soviet troops. “The Russian troops... [act] in striking contrast to the Poles and the Western Allies,” wrote the German commanding general. “Even when encircled, the Russians stood their ground and fought.” Then there turned out to be more Soviet soldiers, better equipped, than the Germans thought possible. As summer 1942 approached, the Nazis again seized the initiative. Now they tried an indirect approach.

Stalingrad
They aimed an offensive south at Stalingrad, center of critical war production and the southern oil fields. Without oil and production capacity the Soviets would be defeated. In August, the Nazi 6th Army launched massive air, artillery and tank attacks.

 The Red Army fought to the death for literally every building in the city. Their orders from Supreme Headquarters were “Not one step back.” (https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943-2/the-nazi-tide-stops/no-one-steps-back/) Their mission was to pin down the enemy to buy time for a counterattack to be launched.

The Nazis captured 80 percent of the city. Finally, the Soviets controlled only a narrow strip of land. At their backs was the Volga River. On the far bank was their artillery support.

Next the Soviet soldiers were sent to factory strongpoints. They were organized in small groups of six to eight men, trained in hand-to-hand combat. The heroic workers continued production at the tank factory. They drove each newly built tank directly from the assembly line into battle.

“Here [in Stalingrad], heavily outnumbered and outgunned, Soviet defenders fought battles house-to-house. It was in that city that workers, men and women, were won to the necessity of defending their new workers' society. They voluntarily remained at their machines making tanks for the battlefield just outside their factory while bombs fell all around them. If ever an example is needed of the Communist spirit, it is Stalingrad. These defenders had courage, sacrifice, determination and camaraderie--what a boundless sea of what's best in humanity!” (CHALLENGE SUPPLEMENT, 05/17/1995)

By January 1943, preparations were complete. Shocking the German command, the Soviets counterattacked with over a million fresh, well-armed reserves. Outflanking and outfighting the Nazis; they encircled the fascist armies. On February 2, 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended, marking the turning point of WWII and the beginning of the end of the Nazis.

Standing on the shoulders of giants
Today, as the imperialists prepare for more wars for oil profits, PLP is fighting to rebuild the international communist movement to turn imperialist wars into communist revolution. We struggle alongside our working class brothers and sisters in fights on the job, during strikes, and in our neighborhoods against police terror. We fight for revolutionary discipline and against the racism, nationalism, sexism, and individualism that capitalism uses to divide us. We fight for the Red Army of the future, Join us!

 

In 1943, the New York City government expected a huge demand for affordable housing from returning soldiers. It approved construction of 1,232 middle-income apartments to be named Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village. The new apartment complex was built by the notoriously racist Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. that “had two million Black policyholders carrying $77 million in insurance while employing no Blacks.”

This involved demolishing 18 square blocks of the “gas house” section of lower Manhattan’s East Side, displacing 11,000 low-income workers and their families. No more than 3 percent of them would be able to afford even the modest rents in the new development.

Bosses’ stooges back racist exclusion
MetLife “developed Stuyvesant Town with the understanding that better living conditions would improve the company’s mortality numbers and therefore annual earnings”(nycurbanism.com). “Both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune argued passionately for the right of Met Life to bar Blacks from the complex” (Horne, page 126). 

Communist councilman Benjamin Davis and allies got a City Council bill passed fining corporations that discriminated. But Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Port Authority Chairman Robert Moses, and MetLife chairman Frederick Ecker made sure MetLife was exempted. MetLife agreed to build the Riverton Houses in Harlem for Black residents – but these were much smaller and substandard. Of course, this in no way excused MetLife’s refusal to rent to Black workers at Stuytown.

Davis and a few others insisted that “Stuytown” be integrated. Frederick Eckert, president of racist MetLife, refused, saying:
"Negroes and whites don’t mix … If we brought them into this development, it would be to the detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all the surrounding property."

Reds lead fightback
In a 1947 lawsuit filed by three Black veterans, the court sided with MetLife. No Black families were allowed to rent. Davis kept up the pressure on MetLife even after he was defeated in an anticommunist campaign in 1949. He called MetLife chair Ecker “the white supremacy architect of Stuyvesant Town [and] head of the biggest Jim Crow oligarchy in the world.”

Lee Lorch, a Communist Party member and a leader of the antiracist struggle, said it was well known that Stuyvesant Town:
"was going to be an all-white project… going there carried an obligation to fight discrimination. That’s the way a lot of people felt."

In a 2010 interview, Lorch added:
"When you got into Stuyvesant Town, there was a serious moral dilemma … In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, people had seen the end results of racism."

Committee formed to combat racist attacks
In 1948, with communists in the lead, residents formed the Town and Village Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town. The poll they took proved that 62 percent of Stuytown residents supported integration.

The Committee published a pamphlet titled A Landlord vs the People … The cover photo shows all the Committee’s leadership.

Liberal courts defend racists
When the court denied the lawsuit, the Committee swung into action. First, they arranged for the Hendrixes, a Black working-class family, to stay in the apartment of the Kessler family while they were away. Jesse Kessler, an organizer for the union District 65, CIO, was a communist too. When he returned, the Lorch family invited the Hendrix family to live in their apartment.

Led by communists and union activists, the Tenants Committee put out flyers and pamphlets attacking MetLife’s racism.

Leo Miller, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where “the courage and sharp shooting of a Negro machine-gunner saved my life with a dozen other white GIs,” asked, “Can anyone of us who live in Stuyvesant Town say he may not be my neighbor? I can’t.” Another veteran and his wife said: “We don’t want our children growing up as part of a privileged group and believing from their experiences that Negroes are a people apart.” (Biondi, page 128)

MetLife refused to renew the leases of the Committee organizers and scheduled their forcible evictions. Lorch recalled:

"We had decided -- and this was the general feeling on the committee -- we weren't going to go quietly, that we would resist, they'd have to throw us out by force."

The Committee and activists from pro-communist unions guarded the apartments and prevented the evictions.

MetLife finally gave in – but only a little. It permitted 15 Black families to move in. However, it insisted that “in return” the Committee organizers move out! The Lorch family and others did so, so that Stuytown would no longer be “Jim Crow.”

Red-baiting of an antiracist fighter
City College fired Lorch because of his antiracist work in the Stuytown committee. He then moved to Penn State, where the president told him:

.. to explain this stuff about Stuyvesant Town  they'd been getting phone calls from wealthy alumni essentially wanting to know why I had been hired and how quickly I could be fired.

Lorch lasted only a year at Penn State.  A college official told him that his decision to permit a Black family to live in his New York apartment was “extreme, illegal and immoral and damaging to the public relations of the college.”

One thousand students signed a petition saying that his dismissal was “unacceptable.” The world-famous scientist, Albert Einstein, also weighed in on his behalf. (Bagli)

Lorch and his family then moved to Fisk, a histroically Black university in Nashville, TN.

At Fisk, Mr. Lorch taught three of the first Blacks ever to receive doctorates in mathematics. But there, too, his activism, like his attempt to enroll his daughter in an all-Black school and refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Communist ties, got him in trouble.

Fired from Fisk in 1955, he moved to Philander Smith, a small Black college in Arkansas. There Grace Lorch, who had organized teachers in Boston, organized help for Black students who were integrating Little Rock’s Central High School, walked with the Black students and tutored them. She and Lorch enrolled their daughter in an all-Black school and became active in the NAACP.

Lorch was fired here too because he refused to cooperate with the anticommunist Congressional committee. The field secretary of the NAACP wrote him:

The best contribution you could make to the cause of full citizenship for Negroes in Arkansas at this time would be to terminate, in writing, your affiliation with the Little Rock Branch, N.A.A.C.P.

 Meanwhile, Lorch said, “Thurgood Marshall has been busy poisoning as many people as he can against us.” Marshall later became a Supreme Court justice.

Ethel Payne, of the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender wrote:

Because he believed in the principles of decency and justice, and the equality of men under God, Lee Lorch and his family have been hounded through four states from the North to the South like refugees in displaced camps … And in the process of punishing Lee Lorch for his views, three proud institutions of learning have been made to grovel in the dust and bow the knee to bigotry.

Communist Black poet Langston Hughes had written about the promotion of anti-Black racism by these and other Black colleges in the essay Cowards From the Colleges.

Unable because of racism and anticommunism to get a job anywhere in the U.S., the Lorches moved to Canada, where Lorch taught and did research for the next 60 years. He does not regret the decision he made at Stuyvesant Town six decades ago.

I would have paid a higher price living with my conscience if I hadn’t done it … I thought then, and still do, that it was an important struggle worth any sacrifice in pursuing it. I have no regret over what we did, or what it cost us …

“Stuytown” remained open to Black residents until it was “privatized” 20 years ago.J

Sources: Martha Biondi. To Stand and Fight (Harvard, 2003); Liz Fox, “Desegregating the ‘Walled Town’ (online); Amy Fox, “Battle in Black and White;” Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects (Oxford, 2010); Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money (Dutton, 2013); Bagli, New York Times 11.21.2010; Obituary of Lee Lorch, L’Humanité March 5, 2014 (in French); Lee Lorch obituary, New York Times March 3, 2014; Gerald Horne, Black Liberation, Red Scare (Newark, DE 1994). “Lee Lorch”, “Grace Lorch”, Wikipedia; CHALLENGE January 30, 2002.