Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry

Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry  

 

Chapter Seven
Preparing to “take the war into Africa”

Unless otherwise noted, all images are from the Boyd B. Stutler Collection

By the time John Brown returned to the West, the situation in Kansas was more settled and his attention had shifted to his larger plan to overthrow slavery. While in New England, he had arranged for Charles Blair, a Connecticut blacksmith, to manufacture samples of pikes. In addition, Brown engaged Hugh Forbes, an English mercenary, to prepare a manual on military tactics and to provide training to his recruits. In July, John Brown crossed into Iowa, reaching Tabor in early August. Forbes arrived shortly afterwards with “The Duty of a Soldier,” but the relationship between Brown and Forbes soon soured when the two disagreed over the details of Brown’s plan, including Brown’s reliance on slaves flocking to his side once the attack was underway. In November, Forbes suddenly left and journeyed to the East, where he created trouble for Brown.

Charles Blair

In the meantime, after a brief trip to Kansas in November, John Brown quickly returned to Iowa, where he shared his plan to attack slavery in Virginia with the men who had joined him—Owen Brown, John E. Cook, John Henry Kagi, William H. Leeman, Charles W. Moffett, Luke F. Parsons, Richard Realf, Richard Richardson, Aaron D. Stevens, and Charles P. Tidd. In January 1858, Brown left the men in Iowa, went to Ohio, and then on to Rochester, New York, to see Frederick Douglass. Brown spent several weeks with Douglass while he worked on his plan and drafted a new constitution of government for the United States that included African Americans as full members of society. He also met with the Secret Six and several prominent African Americans in the North and Canada during the winter and early spring of 1858.

“Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion . . . in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence: Therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions: . . ." – Preamble to the Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States

Early in May, John Brown and his men, now including George B. Gill and Stewart Taylor, gathered in Chatham, Canada, home to many free and fugitive African Americans and not far from the United States border in Michigan. Brown had called a secret constitutional convention to ratify the new constitution and give legitimacy to the government it created. On May 8, Brown addressed an assembly of nearly four dozen men, comprised of his white recruits and more than thirty blacks. Delegates adopted Brown’s Provisional Constitution, a 48-article document to govern the group while the war of liberation was underway, and elected officers. First Baptist church in Chatham, where the last of a series of meetings were held during the Chatham Convention in May 1858 Richard Realf George B. Gill

John Brown was ready to implement his plan after the Chatham Convention, but the activities of Hugh Forbes forced him to delay. After leaving Brown late in 1857, Forbes had begun writing angry letters to John Brown, a few members of the Secret Six, and Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Then, in May, Forbes approached Sen. Henry Wilson, also of Massachusetts, in the Senate, about John Brown. He also contacted Sen. William H. Seward of New York and Sen. John Hale of New Hampshire. Distressed over what Forbes might know about Brown’s plan and their involvement, the Secret Six wanted to postpone Brown’s undertaking and requested that he return to Kansas to draw attention to himself as part of the Kansas struggle and away from his other plans.

Going by the name Shubel Morgan, over the summer Brown established himself in Kansas near the Missouri border, where he built a small stone and wood fortification. In July, he drew up Articles of Agreement for his company of men. Brown also teamed up with free-state guerilla leader James Montgomery, but he was largely inactive until late in the year, during which time he suffered an extended bout of malarial fever. In November and December, Brown accompanied Montgomery on two expeditions but apparently did not actually participate on either occasion. John Brown’s most memorable activity came at the end of December, when he crossed into Missouri to liberate some slaves. In response to a plea from a Missouri slave whose family soon would be sold in an estate sale, Brown and his men split into two groups, one led by himself and the other by Aaron Stevens, and entered Missouri. They freed eleven slaves at three plantations, with Stevens killing a slaveholder in the process. Missouri’s governor demanded action, President James Buchanan offered a $250 reward for Brown’s capture, and the Kansas countryside was in a state of alarm, anticipating an invasion from Missouri. Before leaving Kansas in January 1859, Brown penned “Old Brown’s Parallels,” a defense of his Missouri raid that appeared in the New York Tribune. Brown guided the eleven liberated blacks, and a baby born along the way, more than 1,000 miles from Kansas to Detroit, where the fugitives crossed the Detroit River into Canada in March.

James Montgomery

Brown went on to Ohio, giving lectures on Kansas in Cleveland and Jefferson, and then to New England to see the Secret Six and to raise money. He found Gerrit Smith, George Stearns, and Frank Sanborn firmly supportive; however, Samuel Howe’s support had cooled, Thomas Higginson’s faith in some of Brown’s advisors was shaken by the year’s delay, and Theodore Parker was dying of tuberculosis in Europe. Brown also was met with disapproval of his Missouri raid by some abolitionists from whom he had hoped to obtain funds. Still, he received enough money to arrange, in June, for completion of his order for pikes from Charles Blair. He also arranged for the transfer of weapons then stored in Ohio to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. At the end of the month, he started for Harpers Ferry.

Primary Documents:

Letter, T. W. Carter to George L. Stearns, May 29, 1857
Manuscript, "The Duty of a Soldier," by Hugh Forbes
Letter, John Brown to Frank Sanborn, October 1, 1857
Letter, John Brown to John Brown Jr., February 1858
Letter, E. B. Whitman to George L. Stearns, February 20, 1858
Journal of the Chatham Convention and Provisional Constitution
Form Letter, Chatham Convention Committee, May 1858
Letter, John Brown to Mary Ann Brown, May 12, 1858
Letter, John Brown to George L. Stearns, May 14, 1858
Letter, George L. Stearns to John Brown, May 14, 1858
Articles of Agreement for Shubel Morgan's Company (from Sanborn, Life and Letters)
Letter, John Brown to John Brown Jr., July 9, 1858
Letter, John Brown to Mary Ann Brown, July 9, 1858
Letter, John Brown to Mary Ann Brown, December 2, 1858
Old Brown's Parallels
New York Semi-Weekly Tribune Articles on John Brown and Missouri Slaves
Testimony of Charles Blair to Senate Select Committee
Testimony of Richard Realf to Senate Select Committee
Testimony of Sen. Henry Wilson to Senate Select Committee

Secondary Sources:

“John Brown: They Had a Concern,” by Jeannette Mather Lord (West Virginia History, Vol. 20)

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*****The Search For The Great Working-Class Love Song - With Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning In Mind

*****The Search For The Great Working-Class Love Song - With Richard Thompson’s  Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

 

Several years ago, maybe about eight years now that I think about it, I did a series of sketches on guys, folk-singers, folk-rockers, rock-folkers or whatever you want to call those who weened us away from the stale Pablum rock in the early 1960s (Bobby Vee, Rydell, Darin, et. al, Sandra Dee, Brenda Lee, et. al) after the gold rush dried up in what is now called the classic age of rock and roll in the mid to late 1950s when Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Chuck, Bo and their kindred made us jump. (There were gals too like Wanda Jackson but mainly it was guys in those days.) I am referring of course to the savior folk minute of the early 1960 when a lot of guys with acoustic guitars, some self-made lyrics, or stuff from old Harry Smith Anthology times gave us a reprieve. That Harry Smith stuff, commercial music from back in the 1920s and 1930s saved many a weary folk-singer on a tough night when he or she had run out of ideas and yet the girls or guys were still transfixed and thus provided for a last few tunes.

(One old-time, now old-time folk-singer from the 1960s folk minute who is still performing at small clubs and coffeehouses that small dot the country still in places like Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Joshua Tree out in California, Seattle, both Portlands and so on, small dots, made a gradation of folk-singer, male folk-singer expectations-if you knew three chords you could gather young straight long-haired women around you, four or five chords would help fill out your date book, a dozen chords and you could have whatever you wanted. Sounds about right about the times even if you didn’t play an instrument, or sing, but knew about two thousand arcane folk facts, although songs better. Any old-time women folksingers can add their recollections if they were similar.)  

 

The series titled Not Bob Dylan centered on why those budding folkies like Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Jesse Winchester and the man under review Richard Thompson to name a few did not make the leap to be the “king of folk” that had been ceded by the media to Bob Dylan and then whatever happened to them once the folk minute went south after the combined assault of the British rock invasion (you know the yah, yah, Beatles, the no satisfaction Stones, the really got me Kinks, hell, even I’m Henry the Eighth Herman’s Hermits got serious play for a while),  and the rise of acid rock put folk in the shade (you know the White Rabbit Alice in Wonderland Jefferson Airplane, the let’s keep trucking Dead, the this is the end  Doors, The ripped Who, hell, even the aforementioned non-yah, yah Beatles and non-no satisfaction Stones got caught up in the acid-etched fray although not to their eternal musical playlist benefit nothing that would put then into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame anyway). I also did a series on Not Joan Baez, the “queen of the folk minute” asking that same question on the female side but here dealing with one Richard Thompson the male side of the question is what is of interest.

I did a couple of sketches on Richard Thompson back then, or rather sketches based on probably his most famous song, Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 which dove-tailed with some remembrances of my youth and my semi-outlaw front to the world in that working poor neighborhood where I grew up and the pervasive role that motorcycles played in that world. Additionally, in light of the way that a number of people whom I knew back then, classmates whom I reconnected on a class reunion website several years ago responded when I posed the question of what they thought was the great working-class love song since North Adamsville was definitely a working class town driven by that self-same ethos I wrote some other sketches driving home my selection of Thompson’s song as my choice.

Those later sketches about the world of motorcycles are what interest me here since Thompson gave up the “king of the hill” folk idea. See Thompson at various times packed it in, said he had no more spirit or some such and gave up the road, the music and the struggle to made that music, as least professionally. Took time to make a more religious bent to his life and other such doings. Not unlike a number of other performers from that period who tired of the road or got discouraged with the small crowds, or lost the folk spirit. Probably as many reasons as individuals to give them. Then Thompson, they, years later had an epiphany or something, got the juices flowing again and came back on the road.  That fact is to the good for old time folk (and rock) aficionados like me.

What that fact of returning to the road by Thompson and a slew of others has meant is that my friend and I, (okay, okay my sweetie who prefers that I call her my soulmate but that is just between us so “friend”) now have many opportunities to see acts like Thompson’s Trio, his current band configuration, to see if we think they still “have it” (along with acts of those who never left the road like Bob Dylan who apparently is on an endless tour whether we want him to do so or not). That idea got started about a decade ago when we saw another come-back kid, Geoff Muldaur of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, solo, who had taken something twenty years off. He had it. So we started looking for whoever was left of the old folks acts (rock and blues too) to check out that question-unfortunately the actuarial tables took their toll before we could see some of them at least one last time like Dave Von Ronk.

That brings us back to Richard Thompson. Recently we got a chance to see him in a cabaret setting with tables and good views from every position, at least on in the orchestra section, at the Wilbur Theater in Boston with his trio, a big brush drummer and an all-around side guitar player (and other instruments like the mando). Thompson broke the performance up into two parts, a solo set of six or seven numbers highlighted by Vincent Black Lightning, and Dimming Of The Day which were fine. The second part based on a new album and a bunch of his well-known rock standards left us shaking our heads. Maybe the room could not handle that much sound, although David Bromberg’s five piece band handled it well a couple of weeks before, or maybe it was the melodically sameness of the songs and the same delivery voice and style but we were frankly disappointed and not disappointed to leave at the encore.  Most tunes didn’t resonant although a few in all honesty did but we walked out of the theater with our hands in our pockets. No thumbs up or down based on that first old time set. However, damn it, Bob Dylan does not have to move over, now.  

Which brings us to a later sketch I did based on Brother Thompson’s glorious Vincent Black Lightning. When I got home I began to revise that piece which I have included below.

Mimi’s Glance, Circa 1963

Mimi Murphy knew two things, she needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as hell of moving, of the need, of the self-impose need, to keep moving ever since that incident five years before, back in 1958, with her seems like an eternity ago sweet long gone motorcycle boy, her “walking daddy,” Pretty James Preston, although he as long as she had known him never walked a step when his “baby,” his bike was within arm’s length. I knew this information, knew this information practically first hand because the usually polite but loner Mimi Murphy had told me her thoughts and the story that went with it one night after she had finished a tough on the feet night working as a cashier at concession stand the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater out on Route One in Olde Saco, Maine.

That night, early morning really, she had passed me going up to her room with a bottle of high-end Scotch, Haig& Haig, showing its label from a brown bag in her hand while I was going down the stairs in the rooming house we lived in on Water Street in Ocean City, a few miles from Olde Saco. A number of people, including Mimi and me, were camped out there in temporary room quarters after the last of the summer touristas had decamped and headed back to New York, or wherever they came from. The cheap off-season rent and the short stay-until-the-next-summer-crowd-showed-up requiring no lease drew us there. Most residents, mostly young and seemingly unattached to any family or work life kept to themselves, private drinkers or druggies (probably not grass since I never smelled the stuff which I had a nose for from youthful smoke-filled dreams while I was there so coke, opium, speed, maybe horse although I saw no obvious needle marks on arms or cold turkey screams either), a couple of low profile good looking young hustling girls, probably just graduating from amateur status and still not jaded “tarts” as my father used to call them, who didn’t bring their work home, guys maybe just out of the service, or between jobs, and so on. I had seen a couple of guys, young guys with horny looks in their eyes, maybe an idea of making a play, making passes at Mimi but thought nothing of it since they also targeted the hustling girls too.

 

Since I had never bothered Mimi, meaning made a pass at her, she must have sensed that being contemporaries, she was twenty-one then and I twenty-two, that maybe she could unburden her travails on a fellow wayward traveler. That no making a pass business by the way due to the fact that slender, no, skinny and flat-chested Irish red-heads with faraway looks like Mimi with no, no apparent, warm bed desires, that year and in those days not being my type after tumbledown broken-hearted youthful years of trying to coax their Irish Catholic rosary bead novena favors to no avail over in the old Little Dublin neighborhood around the Acre in Olde Saco.

 

Whatever she sensed and she was pretty closed-mouth about it when I asked her later she was right about my ability to hear the woes of another wanderer without hassles, and she did as she invited me up into her room with no come hither look (unlike those pretty hustling girls who made a profession of the “come hither look” and gave me a try-out which after proving futile turned into small courtesy smiles when we passed each other). But she showed no fear, no apparent fear, anyway.

After a couple of drinks, maybe three, of that dreamboat scotch that died easy going down  she loosened up, taking her shoes off before sitting down on the couch across from me. For the interested I had been down on my uppers for a while and was drinking strictly rotgut low-shelf liquor store wines and barroom half empty glass left-overs so that stuff was manna from heaven I can still taste now but that is my story and not Mimi’s so I will move on. Here is the gist of what she had to say as I remember it that night:

She started out giving her facts of life facts like that she had grown up around this Podunk town outside of Boston, Adamsville Junction, and had come from a pretty pious Roman Catholic Irish family that had hopes that she (or one of her three younger sisters, but mainly she) might “have the vocation,” meaning be willing, for the Lord, to prison cloister herself up in some nunnery to ease the family’s way into heaven, or some such idea. And she had bought into the idea from about age seven to about fourteen by being the best student, boy or girl, in catechism class on Sunday, queen of the novenas, and pure stuff like that in church and the smartest girl in, successively, Adamsville South Elementary School, Adamsville Central Junior High, and the sophomore class at Adamsville Junction High School.

As she unwound this part of her story I could see where that part was not all that different from what I had encountered in my French-Canadian (mother, nee LeBlanc) Roman Catholic neighborhood over in the Acre in Olde Saco. I could also see, as she loosened up further with an additional drink, that, although she wasn’t beautiful, certain kinds of guys would find her very attractive and would want to get close to her, if she let them. Just the kind of gal I used to go for before I took the pledge against Irish girls with far-away looks, and maybe red hair too.

 

About age fourteen thought after she had gotten her “friend” (her period for those who may be befuddled by this old time term) and started thinking, thinking hard about boys, or rather seeing that they, some of them, were thinking about her and not novenas and textbooks her either she started to get “the itch.” That itch that is the right of passage for every guy on his way to manhood. And girl on her way to womanhood as it turned out but which in the Irish Roman Catholic Adamsville Junction Murphy family neighborhood was kept as a big, dark secret from boys and girls alike.

Around that time, to the consternation of her nun blessed family, she starting dating Jimmy Clancy, a son of the neighborhood and a guy who was attracted to her because she was, well, pure and smart. She never said whether Jimmy had the itch, or if he did how bad, because what she made a point out of was that being Jimmy’s girl while nice, especially when they would go over Adamsville Beach and do a little off-hand petting and watching the ocean, did not cure her itch, not even close. This went on for a couple of years until she was sixteen and really frustrated, not by Jimmy so much as by the taboos and restrictions that had been placed on her life in her straight-jacket household, school and town. (Welcome to the club, sister, your story is legion) No question she was ready to break out, she just didn’t know how.

Then in late 1957 Pretty James Preston came roaring into town. Pretty James, who despite the name, was a tough motorcycle wild boy, man really about twenty-one, who had all, okay most all, of the girls, good girls and bad, wishing and dreaming, maybe having more than a few restless sweaty nights, about riding on back of that strange motorcycle he rode (a Vincent Black Lightning, a bike made in England which would put any Harley hog to shame from rev number one when I looked for information about the beast later, stolen, not by Pretty James but by third parties, from some English with dough guy and transported to America where he got it somehow, the details were very vague about where he got it, not from her, him) and being Pretty James’ girl. One day, as he passed by on his chopper going full-throttle up Hancock Street, Mimi too got the Pretty James itch.

But see it was not like you could just and throw yourself at Pretty James that was not the way he worked, no way. One girl, one girl from a good family who had her sent away after the episode, tried that and was left about thirty miles away, half-naked, after she thought she had made the right moves and was laughed at by Pretty James as he took off with her expensive blouse and skirt flying off his handle-bars as he left her there unmolested but unhinged. That episode went like wildfire through the town, through the Monday morning before school girls’ lav what happened, or didn’t happen, over the weekend talkfest first of all.

No Pretty James’ way was to take, take what he saw, once he saw something worth taking and that was that. Mimi figured she was no dice. Then one night when she and Jimmy Clancy were sitting by the seawall down at the Seal Rock end of the beach starting to do their little “light petting” routine Pretty James came roaring up on his hellish machine and just sat there in front of the pair, saying nothing. But saying everything. Mimi didn’t say a word to Jimmy but just started walking over to the cycle, straddled her legs over back seat saddle and off they went into the night. Later that night her itch was cured, or rather cured for the first time.

Pouring another drink Mimi sighed poor Pretty James and his needs, no his obsessions with that silly motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black Lightning that caused him more anguish than she did. And she had given him plenty to think about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to settle down a little, just a little, but what was a sixteen-year old girl, pretty new to the love game, totally new, new but not complaining to the sex game, and his well-worn little tricks to get her in the mood, and make her forget the settle down thing. Until the next time she thought about it and brought it up.

Maybe, if you were from around Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you had heard about Pretty James, Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back in about 1957 and 1958. Those got a lot of play in the newspapers for months before the end. Before that bank job, the one where as Mimi said Pretty James used to say all the time, he “cashed his check.” Yes, the big Granite City National Bank branch in Braintree heist that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as stooge look-out. She had set him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she didn’t ask him to do it but she got him thinking, thinking about settling down just a little and if that was to happen he needed a big score, not the penny ante gas station and mom and pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as he also used to say, “coffee and cakes” but a big payday and then off to Mexico, maybe down Sonora way, and a buy into the respectable and growing drug trade.

And he almost, almost, got away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood across the street, an extra forty-five in her purse just in case he needed it for a final getaway. She never having handled a gun mush less fired one was scared stiff it might go off in that purse although she Pretty James had her in such a state that she would have emptied the damn thing if it would have done any good. But he never made it out the bank door. Some rum brave security guard tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting nicking Pretty James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick blasts and felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough for the real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her, with a tear, sweet boy Pretty James.

According to the newspapers a tall, slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen across the street from the bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness, nervously. The witness had turned her head when she heard the shots from the bank and when she looked back the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone, maybe an accessory to felony murder or worst charge hanging over her young head, and long gone before the day was out. She grabbed the first bus out of Braintree headed to Boston where eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end whorehouse doing tricks to make some moving on dough. (She mentioned some funny things about that stay, which was not so bad at the time when she needed dough bad, and about strange things guys, young and old, wanted her to do but I will leave that stuff out here.)

And she had been moving ever since, moving and eternally hate moving. Now, for the past few months, she had been working nights as a cashier in the refreshment stand at Olde Saco Drive-In to get another stake to keep moving. She had been tempted, a couple of times, to do a little moon-lighting in a Portland whorehouse that a woman she had worked with at her last job, Fenner’s Department Store, where she modeled clothes for the rich ladies, had told her about to get a quick stake but she was almost as eternally tired at that prospect as in moving once again.

And so Mimi Murphy, a few drinks of high-shelf scotch to fortify her told her story, told it true I think, mostly. A couple of days later I saw her through my room’s window with a suitcase in hand looking for all the world like someone getting ready to move on, move on to be a loner again after maybe an indiscrete airing of her linen in public. Thinking back on it now I wish, I truly wish, that I had been more into slender, no skinny, red-headed Irish girls with faraway looks that season and maybe she would not have had to keep moving, eternally moving.

 

ARTIST: Richard Thompson
 
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
 

Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike

A girl could feel special on any such like

Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you

It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952

And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems

Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme

And he pulled her on behind

And down to Box Hill they did ride

/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A /

/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /

Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand

But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man

I've fought with the law since I was seventeen

I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine

Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22

And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you

And if fate should break my stride

Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae

For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery

Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside

Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside

When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left

He was running out of road, he was running out of breath

But he smiled to see her cry

And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world

Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl

Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do

They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52

He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys

He said I've got no further use for these

I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome

Swooping down from heaven to carry me home

And he gave her one last kiss and died

*****From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Socialist Future

*****From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Socialist Future

Logo Of The Communist Youth International

Click below to link to a Communist Youth archival site

http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/yci.html



Sam Eaton, once he got “religion” on the questions of war and peace after a close high school friend in Carver was killed in the jungles of Vietnam in 1968, and Ralph Morris, once he had served in Vietnam after having become totally disenchanted with the war effort and had been discharged back to Troy, New York in 1970 were both very interested in left-wing anti-war politics, in studying about how previous generations fought against the highly-charged war blood lust currents that periodically burned over the American landscape.

Sam, exempt from the military draft since he was the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away suddenly of a heart attack in 1965, who had been prior to his friend Jeff Mullin’s death been very political in a conventional way but somewhat indifferent to the war blazing all around him in this country as well as in Vietnam and Ralph who was as gung-ho as any naïve young soldier before the “shit hit the fan” (his expression) when he went into Vietnam had met down in Washington, D.C.  

Had met under frankly odd circumstances, circumstances which kind of came with the times when people who ordinarily would not run into each other did so as they came to oppose the war in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, home of the Washington Redskins football team after they had been arrested in different incidents during the May Day 1971 actions. The idea behind those actions by those like Sam and Ralph who were enraged by the continuation of the war was to attempt to close down the government if it did not close down the war. For their efforts, Sam trying to help close down Massachusetts Avenue a main thoroughfare and Ralph at an action at the White House (which his group never got close to), along with thousands of others were placed in the bastinado for several days without much food or shelter and without the quick release demanded by law for such minor infractions (in the event they had actually just walked out of a side exit one day and nobody stopped them, some kind of poetic justice, since law enforcement was totally overworked out on the streets). They had met in some forlorn line when Ralph noticed that Sam had a Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) button on his lapel and had asked him whether he was a member. Sam told him why he was a supporter of VVAW after Ralph told him he was a member and had taken part in a couple of actions on the streets that made people freeze in their tracks when they saw the long lines of anti-war veterans, some on crutches and others in wheelchairs silently marching as was a tactic of the time. That meeting in any case formed a lifelong friendship as Ralph recently had mentioned to Sam when they met for one of their periodic Boston meetings when Ralph came to town.          

That May Day event more than any other of the actions which they had participated in during those years was pivotal in bringing them to an understanding that if you were going to take on the government then you had better have more than a few thousand committed souls with you and better be better prepared, damn better, when the “shit hits the fan” (again Ralph’s expression). So they both started to hit the books, to read old time left-wing Socialist and Communist literature to get a fix on things that went wrong with May Day (although Ralph admitted he was not much of a reader of such materials he did plod through the stuff and still remembered a fair amount of it). They would talk about what they had read between themselves and even began to attend study classes provided by a collective in Cambridge (the Red Book collective some of whose members are still around Cambridge although not "red" but aging faculty members at local colleges if anybody is asking) where both young men were staying for the summer of 1972.

Sam and Ralph were especially intrigued by the work that left-wing political organizations did in recruiting young people to the cause, a task that would have made it far easier for them to get involved if such organizations had existed in their respective growing up towns of Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York. So for a while they were all abuzz with thoughts of the Socialist and Communist youth organizations, especially when they read about Spain the 1930s and the key role left-wing youth played there and on the battle fronts. Although both would slide away from 24/7 type politics that had driven them early in the decade later in the decade as the aura of 1960s confrontation faded back into “normalcy” and they began careers and families they for a time considered themselves “left-wing youth,” maybe even communist youth although that designation was a tough dollar to swallow given their backgrounds.

During that period Sam, more of a writer than Ralph, wrote up some materials about their experiences. He more recently in the age of the Internet got involved with a blog, American Socialist History, which was accumulating stories about anything related to socialist youth in the 1960s and Sam had written another short piece for that publication. Here is what he had to say:

“One of the declared purposes of this blog is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past, spotty and incomplete as they may be, here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-socialist and communist wing. And particularly how to draw the young into the struggle. Historically these lessons would be centrally derived from the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, especially in France, the Paris Commune of 1871, and most vividly under the impact of the Lenin and Trotsky-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, a world historic achievement for the international working class whose subsequent demise was of necessity a world-historic defeat for that same class. To that end I have made commentaries and provided some archival works in this space in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over.

More importantly, for the long haul, and unfortunately given that same spotty and incomplete past the long haul is what appears to be the time frame that this old militant will have to concede that we need to think about, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common socialist future. An education that masses of previous generations of youth undertook gladly but which now is reduced to a precious few.  That is, beside the question of numbers, in any case no small or easy task given the differences of generations (the missing transmission generation problem between the generation of ’68 who tried unsuccessfully to turn the world upside down and failed, the missing “in between” generation raised on Reagan rations and today’s desperate youth in need of all kinds of help); differences of political milieus worked in (another missing link situation with the attenuation of the links to the old mass socialist and communist organizations decimated by the red scare Cold War 1950s "night of the long knives" through the new old New Left of the 1960s and little notable organizational connections since); differences of social structure to work around (the serious erosion of the industrial working class in America, the rise of the white collar service sector, the now organically chronically unemployed, and the rise of the technocrats); and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses (today’s  computer, cellphone, and social networking savvy youth using those assets as tools for organizing).

There is no question that back in my youth in the 1960s I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available on-line at the press of a button today. When I developed political consciousness very early on in my youth, albeit a liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.

As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically worrying more about a possible cushy career on the backstairs of politics. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I vaguely knew they were around from my readings but not in my area. In any case the aura of the red scare was still around so it is a toss-up if I had known about those groups that I would have contacted them.   

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me on-line and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a left-wing youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become radicals with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.

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Third Congress of the Communist International

The Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement

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Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

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12 July 1921

1 The young socialist movement came into existence as a result of the steadily increasing capitalist exploitation of young workers and also of the growth of bourgeois militarism. The movement was a reaction against attempts to poison the minds of young workers with bourgeois nationalist ideology and against the tendency of most of the social-democratic parties and the trade unions to neglect the economic, political and cultural demands of young workers.


In most countries the social-democratic parties and the unions, which were growing increasingly opportunist and revisionist, took no part in establishing young socialist organisations, and in certain countries they even opposed the creation of a youth movement. The reformist social-democratic parties and trade unions saw the independent revolutionary socialist youth organisations as a serious threat to their opportunist policies. They sought to introduce a bureaucratic control over the youth organisations and destroy their independence, thus stifling the movement, changing its character and adapting it to social-democratic politics.

2 As a result of the imperialist war and the positions taken towards it by social democracy almost everywhere, the contradictions between the social-democratic parties and the international revolutionary organisations inevitably grew and eventually led to open conflict. The living conditions of young workers sharply deteriorated; there was mobilisation and military service on the one hand, and, on the other, the increasing exploitation in the munitions industries and militarisation of civilian life. The most class-conscious young socialists opposed the war and the nationalist propaganda. They dissociated themselves from the social-democratic parties and undertook independent political activity (the International Youth Conferences at Berne in 1915 and Jena in 1916).


In their struggle against the war, the young socialist organisations were supported by the most dedicated revolutionary groups and became an important focus for the revolutionary forces. In most countries no revolutionary parties existed and the youth organisations took over their role; they became independent political organisations and acted as the vanguard in the revolutionary struggle.

3 With the establishment of the Communist International and, in some countries, of Communist Parties, the role of the revolutionary youth organisations changes. Young workers, because of their economic position and because of their psychological make-up, are more easily won to Communist ideas and are quicker to show enthusiasm for revolutionary struggle than adult workers. Nevertheless, the youth movement relinquishes to the Communist Parties its vanguard role of organising independent activity and providing political leadership. The further existence of Young Communist organisations as politically independent and leading organisations would mean that two Communist Parties existed, in competition with one another and differing only in the age of their membership.

4 At the present time the role of the Young Communist movement is to organise the mass of young workers, educate them in the ideas of Communism, and draw them into the struggle for the Communist revolution.


The Communist youth organisations can no longer limit themselves to working in small propaganda circles. They must win the broad masses of workers by conducting a permanent campaign of agitation, using the newest methods. In conjunction with the Communist Parties and the trade unions, they must organise the economic struggle.

The new tasks of the Communist youth organisations require that their educational work be extended and intensified. The members of the youth movement receive their Communist education on the one hand through active participation in all revolutionary struggles and on the other through a study of Marxist theory.

Another important task facing the Young Communist organisations in the immediate future is to break the hold of centrist and social-patriotic ideas on young workers and free the movement from the influences of the social-democratic officials and youth leaders. At the same time, the Young Communist organisations must do everything they can to ‘rejuvenate’ the Communist Parties by parting with their older members, who then join the adult Parties.

The Young Communist organisations participate in the discussion of all political questions, help build the Communist Parties and take part in all revolutionary activity and struggle. This is the main difference between them and the youth sections of the centrist and socialist unions.

5 The relations between the Young Communist organisations and the Communist Party are fundamentally different from those between the revolutionary young socialist organisations and the social-democratic parties. In the common struggle to hasten the proletarian revolution, the greatest unity and strictest centralisation are essential. Political leadership at the international level must belong to the Communist International and at the national level to the respective national sections.


It is the duty of the Young Communist organisations to follow this political leadership (its programme, tactics and political directives) and merge with the general revolutionary front. The Communist Parties are at different stages of development and therefore the Executive Committee of the Communist International and the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International should apply this principle in accordance with the circumstances obtaining in each particular case.

The Young Communist movement has begun to organise its members according to the principle of strict centralisation and in its relations with the Communist International – the leader and bearer of the proletarian revolution – it will be governed by an iron discipline. All political and tactical questions are discussed in the ranks of the Communist youth organisation, which then takes a position and works in the Communist Party of its country in accordance with the resolutions passed by the Party, in no circumstance working against them.

If the Communist youth organisation has serious differences with the Communist Party, it has the right to appeal to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

Loss of political independence in no way implies loss of the organisational independence which is so essential for political education.

Strong centralisation and effective unity are essential for the successful advancement of the revolutionary struggle, and therefore, in those countries where historical development has left the youth dependent upon the Party, the dependence should be preserved; differences between the two bodies are decided by the EC of the Communist International and the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International.

6 One of the most immediate and most important tasks of the Young Communist organisations is to fight the belief in political independence inherited from the period when the youth organisations enjoyed absolute autonomy, and which is still subscribed to by some members. The press and organisational apparatus of the Young Communist movement must be used to educate young workers to be responsible and active members of a united Communist Party.


At the present time the Communist youth organisations are beginning to attract increasing numbers of young workers and are developing into mass organisations; it is therefore important that they give the greatest possible time and effort to education.

7 Close co-operation between the Young Communist organisations and the Communist Parties in political work must be reflected in close organisational links. It is essential that each organisation should at all times be represented at all levels of the other organisation (from the central Party organs and district, regional and local organisations down to the cells of Communist groups and the trade unions) and particularly at all conferences and congresses.

In this way the Communist Parties will be able to exert a permanent influence on the movement and encourage political activity, while the youth organisations, in their turn, can influence the Party.

8 The relations established between the Communist Youth International and the Communist International are even closer than those between the individual Parties and their youth organisations. The Communist Youth International has to provide the Communist youth movement with a centralised leadership, offer moral and material support to individual unions, form Young Communist organisations where none has existed and publicise the Communist youth movement and its programme. The Communist Youth International is a section of the Communist International and, as such, is bound by the decisions of its congresses and its Central Committee. The Communist Youth International conducts its work within the framework of these decisions and thus passes on the political line of the Communist International to all its sections. A well-developed system of reciprocal representation and close and constant co-operation guarantees that the Communist Youth International will make gains in all the spheres of its activity (leadership, agitation, organisation and the work of strengthening and supporting the Communist youth organisations).

A View From The Left-Charlotte, North Carolina-Black People in Cop Crosshairs

Workers Vanguard No. 1097	7 October 2016

Charlotte, North Carolina-Black People in Cop Crosshairs

Break with the Democrats! For a Workers Party!

On September 20, Keith Lamont Scott became one of the latest victims of the racist executioners in blue. The 43-year-old father of seven was gunned down by the police in broad daylight in the parking lot of the suburban apartment complex where he lived with his family, just minutes from the campus of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. The small portion of the cops’ own video footage that was released after days of protests shows Scott walking slowly backwards from his parked vehicle with his hands by his sides. He is then shot four times by a black undercover officer who is off camera. Contrary to the police lie that Scott “posed an imminent deadly threat,” he was quite simply killed for the “crime” of sitting in his own car while waiting for his son to get off the school bus.

Keith Scott is one of over 800 people killed by the police in the U.S. so far this year; roughly one in four were black. Only a few days before the Scott killing, 40-year-old Terence Crutcher was shot dead by a Tulsa, Oklahoma policewoman as he held his hands above his head. On September 27, Ugandan immigrant Alfred Olango was blown away in El Cajon, a San Diego suburb, for holding an electronic cigarette. On September 30 and October 1, two black men, Reginald “Junior” Thomas and Carnell “CJ” Snell, were killed in the Los Angeles area. The bitter reality is that in a country whose capitalist economy was founded on chattel slavery, black lives don’t matter to the ruling class. The cops are armed thugs enforcing a system in which workers are brutally exploited and the mass of the black population is forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. This is why the fight against racist cop terror must be linked to the fight for the working class to overthrow this whole rotten, capitalist system through socialist revolution. A team of comrades from Workers Vanguard traveled to Charlotte the weekend following the killing of Keith Scott to distribute our Marxist propaganda and argue for this revolutionary perspective with those who had taken to the streets in protest.

The cops in “open carry” North Carolina didn’t even bother to pretend that a black man might have the same rights as a white man to carry a firearm, immediately justifying their shooting of Keith Scott by claiming he was armed. They later announced that Scott drew their attention while they were waiting to serve a warrant on someone else because he was supposedly rolling a marijuana “blunt” inside his vehicle, demonstrating that the racist “war on drugs” is a license for the cops to kill black people. Scott’s wife and other witnesses to the shooting all maintain that he was not armed. When our team visited the memorial set up for Scott in the parking lot where he was killed, we heard a neighbor who was lighting candles on the memorial ask who people were supposed to believe, the neighbors who were there, or the cops?

The cops and their media mouthpieces then resorted to the tried and tested technique of character assassination of Scott himself. Burying or disappearing the fact that they gunned down a family man, married for 20 years, disabled and recovering from a traumatic brain injury, the capitalist press has instead grotesquely tried to depict Scott as a lifelong criminal. Scott’s wife, Rakeyia, courageously filmed and made public her own cellphone video of her husband’s killing. She repeatedly appealed to the cops that her husband was not armed and explained that he suffered from a brain injury for which he had just taken medication.

Police Riot Against Protesters

As word of the killing spread on the evening of September 20, protesters chanting “Black lives matter!” took to the streets in Scott’s University City neighborhood. They were met with riot cops who tear-gassed the protesters. The following night, hundreds took to the streets in Charlotte’s Uptown, the second-largest banking center in the U.S., where gleaming skyscrapers, luxury hotels and expensive restaurants abound. Activists described how a prayer vigil and march that night turned into a scene of police violence when the cops unleashed tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets on marchers in front of the upscale Omni Hotel.

In the chaotic scene caused by the police assault on the demonstration, 26-year-old Justin Carr, who had joined the protest on his way to work, was fatally shot in the head. The police claim that another civilian shot Carr, although protesters who were present at the time told us that they believed Carr may have been shot “pointblank” by a police rubber bullet. While the truth behind Carr’s killing may never come to light, it is clear that those responsible for creating a deadly environment were the cops. In a TV interview, Carr’s mother said of her son, “I know that he died for a cause.”

Not missing a beat, Republican governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency in Charlotte and the National Guard was deployed to protect the capitalists’ sacred Uptown real estate. The Democratic Party mayor declared a midnight to 6 a.m. curfew, which ensnared several people who weren’t even protesting. Throughout the week, the cops kept rounding up activists for blocking roads and purported looting of businesses like fast-food joints days earlier.

Extraordinary security measures were announced for the home NFL game that weekend, and local news whipped up hysteria about the “safety” of the fans. Phalanxes of riot cops stood ready to “protect” some 70,000 fans from about 200 protesters, who carried posters ranging from “Don’t Demonize My Blackness” and “Silence=Violence, Am I Next” to “Love Is Unstoppable.” Vans and trucks full of riot cops and National Guardsmen raced around the city to confront what were often no more than dozens of protesters. The state of emergency and curfews have now been lifted, and the National Guard withdrawn. Yet many people are still facing prosecution; over 80 people were arrested during the protests and arrest warrants have been issued for almost 100 more. Release the arrested protesters! Drop all the charges!

Democrats, Reformists Push Police Reform

Charlotte is a textbook case of why capitalist Democratic Party politics and schemes for community control of the police are a dead end. Living under a liberal Democratic mayor, a “progressive” black police chief and a black president made no difference for Keith Scott when he came into the crosshairs of the killer cops. Yet black preachers, Democratic Party operatives and the “radicals” who tail them descended on Charlotte to repackage the same old schemes to reform the police and divert the protests into the safe channels of electoral politics. Leading this effort was the Reverend William Barber II, Democratic Party darling and president of the North Carolina NAACP, who called on protesters to “march and vote together.” With North Carolina a swing state in the Clinton-Trump contest, the Democrats were particularly eager to tamp down images of militant black protesters.

The reformist Workers World Party (WWP) also showed up to promote liberal demands for an “independent investigation” into Scott’s killing and for a freeze on federal funds to the Charlotte police department. This amounts to appealing to the imperialist Obama administration, which is the pinnacle of the whole apparatus of racist capitalist oppression and which is carrying out daily bombing raids against dark-skinned peoples abroad, to help black people at home. WWP also supports the Charlotte Uprising group’s demands for “community control of the police, starting with the creation of a civilian oversight board that has the power to hire and fire officers.”

In fact, Charlotte already has a Citizens Review Board, which was set up in 1997 after three black men were killed by white officers and was given expanded powers in 2013. This made no difference for Keith Scott or for Jonathan Ferrell, a black man who was shot ten times by a Charlotte cop after he sought help at a white family’s home following a car accident in 2013. Even though that cop was indicted for manslaughter, he predictably walked after a mistrial. Schemes for community control of the police only serve to sow illusions that workers and the oppressed can have a say in running the forces of state repression, which exist only to “protect and serve” the interests of the capitalist class against those very same workers and oppressed people. The WWP cynically tries to cover up its role as promoters of this deadly illusion by simultaneously calling to “Abolish the Police!”—a utopian call on the capitalist state to dissolve itself.

“New South”: Liberal Veneer for Vicious Racism

A 35 percent black city of just under a million people, Charlotte is held up as a symbol in the “New South” of what the New York Times calls “racial amity.” In the shadow of the Uptown bank towers, the NASCAR Hall of Fame and the headquarters of Billy Graham’s right-wing evangelical association are sites like Romare Bearden Park (named after the renowned black artist) and a center for African-American Arts and Culture. But the genteel veneer is thin—as in most Southern cities, you can’t go a couple of blocks without seeing a historical marker commemorating the bloody rule of the Confederate slavocracy. It took a bloody Civil War to abolish slavery, yet the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists ended the period of Radical Reconstruction. The black population throughout the U.S. was consolidated as a specially oppressed race-color caste, forcibly segregated at the bottom of the social and economic order.

The white propertied classes subjected black people to legally enforced racial segregation, stripped them of all democratic rights and held them down through terror, especially lynching. In North Carolina, the former slaveowners mobilized the “White Supremacy Campaign” in order to pit poor white sharecroppers against black freedmen, breaking up the alliance between white populists and black Republicans known as the Fusion movement in the 1890s. Despite the smashing of legally enforced Jim Crow segregation in the South through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, the de facto segregation of black people north and south was not uprooted.

From chattel slavery to wage slavery, the racial oppression of black people is materially rooted in the social and economic structure of American capitalism. This is evident not only in the statistics of those killed, arrested and imprisoned by the U.S. “justice” system, but also in the poverty rates of cities like Charlotte where three times as many blacks and Latinos live in poverty as whites, while 36 percent of black and 39 percent of Latino children are poor. Black people are forced by the capitalist economy into segregated housing and schools, are the last hired and first fired in the workplace, and are subjected to chronic unemployment and mass incarceration. Because black oppression is integral to the very workings of the capitalist system in the U.S., it will take a third American revolution, a socialist revolution, to achieve black liberation.

Racism has long served the capitalist rulers in propping up their oppressive system by keeping working people divided so that they cannot unite in joint struggle against the exploitative profit system. Many white protesters in Charlotte carried signs with slogans like “White Silence Is White Violence” as if all white people who don’t speak up are implicated in the crimes of the rapacious rulers of this country and their cops. This deflects responsibility for racist police terror away from the capitalist rulers who not only oppress black people and other minorities, but also viciously exploit workers of all races.

The Social Power of the Working Class Is Key

A number of activists from around North Carolina described to us how white-supremacists are now increasingly crawling out of the woodwork in their towns and cities, emboldened by the Trump campaign. Racist Ku Klux Klan terror in the South has historically served as an auxiliary to the forces of the state in subjugating black people and keeping trade unions out. Today, the South remains a bastion of open shop, low-wage exploitation for capitalist industry; North Carolina has the lowest unionization rate of any U.S. state. Any fight to organize the “right to work” South poses the centrality of the fight for black rights in the fight to defend the working class as a whole. Yet the existing pro-capitalist trade-union misleaders barely lift a finger to organize the millions of non-union Southern workers into what could be strong, multiracial unions. Instead, they pour massive amounts of union funds into election campaigns for the racist, capitalist Democrats.

At an integrated rally of more than 500 on September 24 in a park opposite the complex of court and police buildings in Uptown Charlotte, protesters expressed to us their immense frustration over the lack of a solution to the epidemic of cop terror. There was a palpable sense of despair that after two years of protests around the country in response to one police killing after another, nothing has changed. This was captured in a poster at the rally outside the football game the next day: “I Can’t Believe We’re Still Protesting This.” A popular sentiment among protesters who were tired of impotently pleading with the powers that be was that only by shutting things down would the rulers respond. Some protesters tried to shut down the surrounding highways while others argued for consumer boycotts of big businesses. These tactics were often tied up with illusions in local community control: promoting local businesses and community-organized social work.

The understanding that protest action needs to hit the capitalists in their pocketbooks in order to have some impact is the beginning of wisdom. But, as we explained in our discussions, the power to do so rests not with small groups of activists nor the consumer, but with the multiracial working class. It is the working class whose labor keeps the wheels of the economy turning; thus it has the power to stop the flow of capitalist profit. And black workers form a strategic component of the U.S. working class. In Charlotte we often used the example of the powerful and heavily black and Latino transit union in New York City, whose members can cripple the finance capital of the world by striking. The power of the working class should be mobilized in demonstrations against cop terror, ensuring that black youth do not stand alone against the bloody might of the armed forces of the state. In itself, this won’t put a stop to cop terror, but it would go a long way toward forging the fighting unity of the workers and oppressed against the capitalist order.

The key to unlocking that power is a fight against the existing leadership of the trade unions and their reformist hangers-on, who tie the workers politically to capitalist parties like the Democrats and Greens. What is needed is a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions. Not surprisingly, the prospect of such working-class struggle seemed either remote or impossible to most of the protesters we spoke with. It was often when we pointed to the need to study the history of class and revolutionary struggle in the U.S. in order to understand why the working class is key that protesters got copies of our publications, including our journal Black History and the Class Struggle. As for the idea of “community control” of the local economy and social programs, we explained that small-time local capitalism and social work are no solution to the rampant homelessness, unemployment and poverty faced by millions under capitalism. Only by ripping the banks and industry out of the hands of the capitalist class and reorganizing the economy on a socialist basis under workers rule can the wealth created by working people be dedicated to quality education, housing, health care and jobs for all.

We in the Spartacist League seek to win anti-racist activists to the understanding that only the overthrow of the capitalist system through the revolutionary struggle of the working class leading all of the oppressed can put an end to cop terror. Linking up the anger of the oppressed with the power of the workers in a fight to sweep the capitalist state apparatus into the dustbin of history and establish a workers government requires the leadership of a multiracial, revolutionary workers party. We are committed to forging such a party through struggle. For black liberation through socialist revolution!