This August marks 75 years since the United States’ horrific nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the first and so far only deliberate use of atomic bombs against a human population in history. Over 220,000 Japanese civilians lost their lives in the span of two days. Survivors reported seeing charred heads and limbs of loved ones and neighbors strewn through the streets. The cities were flattened within a matter of seconds. Survivors faced a decades-long struggle to recover from the fallout, including nuclear contamination of water and agricultural fields, cancer, and birth defects.
75 years later, despite the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Trump administration and the Pentagon are systematically withdrawing from international treaties that limit the use of nuclear aggression. The Trump administration declined to renew the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in August of 2019. That same year 22 billion in tax payer dollars were budgeted towards the further development and accumulation of the nuclear arsenal. The likelihood that the U.S. will renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 2021 seems increasingly remote.
Despite the irreversible destruction that nuclear weapons pose to the very existence of our planet and human life, the Trump administration, Pentagon and allies are forging ahead to expand the US nuclear arsenal program over the next decade to the tune of $1.7 trillion in American taxpayer dollars. Congress has approved the 2020 National Defense Military Act, which will allot $740.5 billion to military spending (the most US military spending since WWII) to further develop and amass a nuclear arsenal to be stored in US military bases around the world. This same act hypocritically renews sanctions on North Korea due to their ownership of nuclear weapons. The Federation of American Scientists report that while the US has nearly 7,000 nuclear weapons, it is estimated that North Korea has 30 to 60 at most.
It’s clear the National Defense Act has nothing to do with defending the American people and everything to do defending American capitalist profits abroad, through war and fear-mongering. With only a fraction of what the Pentagon is proposing for weapons of mass destruction, every person in the US could have quality healthcare, safe jobs or universal income.
It’s time for the resurgence of a mass movement in the US to demand that working people are no longer looted to fatten the wallets of arms manufacturers and war-hungry CEOs. The wealth American working people create must be used to feed and protect the people, not to export mass destruction and terror on other working people of the world.
Anti-government protests have continued in Iraq since early October.
By Jennifer Lin
Protesters in Iraq are demanding the resignation of their government that is a product of U.S. imperialist occupation. Iraqis had built for themselves a highly developed country before the U.S. government destroyed it for access to its oil. After the Iraq monarchy was overthrown in 1958, British and American oil companies were kicked out and the oil was nationalized. By 1990, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East. The literacy rate was around 80% and people had access to free healthcare and education. More women were in the Iraqi parliament than in the U.S. Congress. Iraq’s children’s hospital accepted patients from all over the Middle East for free.
Determined to free themselves of U.S. imports, Iraq was moving to produce its own food as it did before British occupation. Similarly, they were moving to cut dependence on other industrial goods. Not buying U.S. commodities, using oil for their own national development: these were the real “crimes” that led to the U.S. wars.
Documents prove that the U.S. CIA considered Saddam a reliable ally when he was suppressing left and nationalist elements. But as soon as he implemented policies aimed at uplifting the working class and making Iraq economically self-sufficient, he became a threat to the economic and political dominance of the U.S. corporations.
To block the self-determination of the Iraqi people, the U.S. bombed the country in 1991. More than 90% of the country’s electrical capacity and most of its telecommunications, irrigation, water purification, and hydroelectric systems were destroyed. Bombs were aimed at farms, schools, hospitals, public transit stations, mosques, and historic sites. Around 200,000 people were killed, and the depleted-uranium missiles used by the U.S. led to tens of thousands more cancer-related deaths in the following years. Sanctions killed over half a million children.
In 2000, Saddam stopped accepting U.S. dollars as payment for oil. This was unprofitable for the U.S. capitalist class, so the U.S. invaded the country again. Bush invented propaganda accusing Iraq of developing weapons of mass destruction, but this was just a lie used to justify the invasion so the U.S. could control Iraq’s oil wealth. After the invasion, most of Iraq’s economy was either destroyed, shut down, or privatized. Poverty and unemployment skyrocketed.
The U.S. occupation was a bonanza for war profiteers and an assault on the working class. Both Iraqi and U.S. workers bore the costs of this violent imperialist war, as U.S. taxpayer dollars were stolen to fund the destruction of Iraqi lives and livelihoods.
The U.S. trained and armed Special Police Commandos to quell resistance. These death squads terrorized civilians with open gunfire, torture, arrests, and mass murders. Continued U.S. involvement in Iraq fomented sectarian violence and pushed people to join the Islamic State, locking Iraq in a state of perpetual warfare. In 2014, Obama sent troops to Iraq to “fight terrorism,” but this was just another lie used to maintain the U.S. military stronghold in the country.
On October 1, 2019 Iraqi people from all walks of life took to the streets to demand an end to the succession of repressive governments that have ruled the country since the U.S. invasion. Beholden to the ruling elites of Iraq and the U.S., these governments have stripped the Iraqi people of jobs and access to public services.
Protesters have rejected President Salih’s promises for reform, demanding that the entire government be removed from power. Despite violent repression by security forces, the Iraqi people are refusing to back down.
U.S. Ignores Poverty, Tries to Use Protests to Attack Iran
The U.S. government which only represents the oil companies and big business is not interested in the conditions of workers in Iraq or anywhere else. Always seeking to use a situation for their own purposes, however, the U.S. working through the most reactionary clerics have tried to cast the protests as anti-Iran as this fits the agenda of the U.S. There is no credible evidence that any but a small grouping are buying into this.
Workers have nothing to gain from U.S. imperialism, which imposes capitalist poverty on other countries to make the world safe for U.S. corporate control. U.S. imperialism crushes democracy wherever it goes, as the history and current situation of Iraq show. Our struggle to live a healthy life with access to jobs, food, housing, and healthcare is connected to the ongoing struggle of the Iraqi people. Our hard-earned money is stolen and used to destroy the livelihoods of Iraqi people rather than to fund public programs that would benefit us. We must stand in solidarity with any country resisting U.S. imperialism and call for an end to U.S. intervention in the country.
The separation of families has a long history in the U.S. This image shows the fate of many Indigenous and African children.
If this can happen, whose children are next?
Attorneys visiting a detention facility near El Paso, Texas reported that 250 infants, children and teens had been held for 27 days without adequate food, water or sanitation. Children were taking care of sick infants. 15 children had the flu. They were fed uncooked frozen food and had gone for weeks without bathing or a change of clothing. The facility is located in Clint, Texas, in the desert.
The children had been separated from adult caregivers. At least six children have died in detention since December. A teenage mother with a premature baby was in detention for nine days.
The attorneys went to court, but the Trump administration argued that the government is NOT required to give children soap, toothbrushes or diapers.
The Justice Department argued that the camps were not required to provide children with beds. Children have been sleeping on concrete floors with aluminum foil blankets.
Toddlers have been separated from parents and caged in camps.
U.S. imperialist policies like NAFTA have destroyed rural economies. They have put in place dictatorships such as the one in Honduras which has driven thousands from their homes. But they don’t find refuge here.
The Trump administration has threatened to carry out terror raids to deport millions across the U.S. Trump also says the U.S. can keep migrants in unlimited detention. These concentration camps are being run by private corporations for profit so the government wants to fill them up.
This is what was done during slavery to Black and Indian children. This is what they did to Japanese Americans during WWII. This is what the Nazis did.
This policy is an attack on all workers, citizen and immigrant. They want to push down all our wages and take away all benefits. We must stand up together to demand their release.
Close the concentration camps!
Abolish ICE!
Free the children and the families!
Full legalization and equality for all immigrants!
Children at the McAllen, Texas, Border Patrol station are denied bedding, nutrition, and sanitation.
Protesters march ahead of the corporate Pride parade to protest attacks on the LGBTQ community. New Orleans, June 9, 2018.
By Gregory William and Sally Jane Black
On June 28, 1969, the cops raided the Stonewall Inn in New York, and the mostly working class queer and trans people there fought back. For three days they fought, forcing the cops to withdraw. This was a small victory over the police, but that victory was won with blood and sacrifice. And it inspired the whole world.
Stonewall was an important moment of resistance because it brought working class LGBTQ people together to fight back, and in the wake of the rebellion, they began to organize. Within a week of Stonewall, a group known as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) formed, naming themselves after the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Taking cues from the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the labor movement, the resistance around the world against imperialism, and especially from those who had been fighting for LGBTQ rights before them, the GLF and other organizations like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) fought for the rights of LGBTQ people with militant action, collective visibility, and radical anti-capitalism.
Without the radical resistance that followed, ACT UP and other groups might never have forced the pharmaceutical corporations, the FDA and other government agencies to respond to the AIDS crisis at all. Without it, homophobic anti-sodomy laws might never have been struck down. Without it, our spaces would be raided more frequently, and our love would still be hidden away. Without it, many more of us would have died in the closet.
The rebellion at Stonewall and the radical organizing that came afterward were the birth of what is now known as Pride, but Pride no longer reflects this legacy. Instead of fighting the police, Pride celebrations often include them despite their role as our oppressors. Instead of being anti-capitalist, they have corporate sponsorships. Instead of taking inspiration from anti-imperialist movements, they celebrate the U.S. military that wages murderous wars for profit around the world.
The current administration has taken away many of our rights. Last year, the Trump regime released a memo instructing federal agencies to define gender strictly based on biology, effectively erasing trans people’s legal rights, and attempting to set up a DNA database to match people to their sex chromosomes. They also instructed them to reinterpret Title VII, the law that protects against employment discrimination, so that no protections would be extended to LGBTQ people at all. Now, three similar cases are going to the Supreme Court to determine if this reinterpretation will be upheld.
At the same time, cases have made it legal for businesses and healthcare professionals to refuse to serve LGBTQ people on religious grounds, and insurance companies and Medicaid have stopped covering trans healthcare needs–if they ever did to begin with. Furthermore, bathroom bills continue to be announced, anti-sex work laws that disproportionately affect LGBTQ people are being passed, murder and suicide rates of LGBTQ people are rising, and more.
This is no time to throw a party. This is a time to fight back.
These attacks are not fueled by religion or morality, but by the capitalist class’s growing fear of a united working class. As the economy continues to head toward crisis, the capitalists know that they are vulnerable. If a crisis occurs while the ruling class is not strong enough to fight back, the capitalist class will fall. Trying to divide us, they pass these laws and policies to scapegoat and criminalize LGBTQ people (just as they do with immigrants, women, prisoners, black people, indigenous people, etc.) They’re terrified that we workers will unite in our understanding that the greedy rich are the real criminals.
We will not be liberated unless we are united. We must stand in solidarity with one another against all of their attacks. There is no race or nation that does not include us. Attacks on immigrants, women, prisoners, and sex workers are attacks on LGBTQ people. Attacks on black, brown, and indigenous people are attacks on LGBTQ people. We must all stand together to protect our rights as workers.
The ruling class wants us to forget that everything we’ve won has been through our own blood and sweat. For this reason, they sometimes pander to us or take our slogans for their own—only as long as we don’t name them as the enemy. But we must fight for ourselves. We must organize and take to the streets if we have any hope of winning true liberation.
We know that it is possible to fight back and make change even in this period of deep reaction. If the wave of teacher strikes since 2018 has shown us anything, it’s that mass, collective organizing still gets the goods.
In 2018, the TransLatin@ Coalition in Los Angeles unfurled a massive banner reading “Trans People Deserve to Live” at the 5th game of the World Series at Dodger Stadium. They did this at personal risk to themselves and were escorted by security out of the stadium. This kind of in-your-face politics is a far cry from the tame corporate Pride events we have become used to.
And the militant spirit and tactics of LGBTQ rights groups like ACT UP are alive and well here in Louisiana. On May 15, activists from the New Orleans Abortion Fund, Women with a Vision, the New Orleans Workers Group and the New Orleans Peoples Assembly staged a “die-in” in the style of ACT UP at the Louisiana State Capitol, protesting the suite of anti-abortion legislation being pushed through by the legislature. These brave demonstrators have been slapped with bogus charges of disturbing the peace and criminal destruction of property, but they are persevering. This is the politics of militant confrontation that we need and can inject into the LGBTQ and other peoples’ struggles today.
Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church on April 4, 2019. Opelousas, LABy Malcolm Suber and Gavrielle Gemma
The terrible burning of three historic Black Churches in St. Landry Parish was intended to inflict racist terror and trauma throughout the state. This follows the lead of the Trump administration who has welcomed the inclusion of white supremacists in the government and whose sympathies for white supremacist organizations have unleashed a torrent of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant attacks across the country.
The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL killed four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
This white supremacist attack fits the historic pattern of attacking Black churches as a way of intimidating and politically controlling Black communities. The Black church represents one of the only social institutions owned and controlled by Black people. The Black church has served not only as a house of worship but as a community meeting space where Black people can discuss and debate their response to their oppressed condition. Many churches have been active in the Black liberation struggle and have produced good leaders in the Black freedom struggle. The white supremacists unleashed by the rich white ruling class are bent on preventing the Black community from organizing to advance the social and political position of Black workers.
Once again, politicians have responded to the church burnings by offering prayers for the terrorist, by trying to cover up the racist purpose of the attack with phony psychiatry and by trying to paint it as an isolated event. Finally, they admitted what the whole world already knew: that this is a hate crime. They have yet to call it terrorism.
All these crocodile tears distract from the real story, which is the ongoing link between white supremacy, the police, the military, corporations and politicians. Although the ruling class mainly fosters racism through “legal” means of mass incarceration and economic and housing segregation, they’ve always relied on the existence of “extra-legal” white supremacist groups to foment division among the multi-national working class and to guard their own fortunes.
DEFENDING CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS, POLITICIANS AID KKK TERRORISTS
These politicians praise monuments to the confederacy and slavery and resist efforts to take them down. Why? Because they—hand in hand with the super-rich—want to maintain the current state of institutional racism that divides the working class of Louisiana. They turn a blind eye to the eight highly armed white supremacist groups functioning in the state. Many of these groups have members and friends in the police as well as links to the U.S. military.
After the civil war, the KKK and its allies, such as the White League, were used to terrorize Black people. Their aim was to prevent Black freedmen from voting and adopting socially progressive policies. During Reconstruction, the Louisiana legislature was majority black and had a Black Governor. The northern bankers and industrialists wanted more than anything to reach a new unity with former slaveholders. Lynchings and church burnings were rampant and voting rights were taken away from the Black population. The new white politicians were secretly or openly in the KKK. Several members of the U.S. Supreme Court were in the KKK. In just one century, 64 Black churches were burned.
Today nearly all white politicians in Baton Rouge are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) an organization which pays legislators to promote racist ALEC-drafted laws. On behalf of the oil companies and war profiteers, ALEC has been working to disenfranchise Black voters all across the country.
These politicians may distance themselves from openly white supremacist groups, but they share a common ideology. And across the country, they’ve allowed Klan-type groups to proliferate.
WHITE SUPREMACY IS PART OF CAPITALISM
The capitalists—who are few—can only maintain their undemocratic accumulation of huge wealth by dividing the workers, who are many. When the working class is divided, all sectors suffer from lowered wages and benefits, greater poverty, and fewer social programs. This is true for white workers although Black workers suffer much more. This is the legacy of racism and national oppression in the south, where workers are the poorest, the minimum wage lowest, and every indicator from infant mortality to educational quality is at the bottom.
Because the masses are currently quiet—despite ever worsening conditions—the bosses and politicians are moving ahead with even harsher assaults on the social and economic life of workers. They’re ramping up racism, scapegoating immigrants, vilifying other countries—all to distract from their thievery and their war profiteering.
The capitalist rulers’ insatiable drive to amass more wealth is the basis for the renewed growth of white supremacist and other racist groups. The more that wealth is concentrated in their hands, the more the capitalist system is endangered from below. That’s why they lean on extra-legal repression to maintain control.
This is true not only in the U.S. One has only to look to the outright fascist governments with whom the U.S. government is allied, including Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, Israel and others.
COPS & KLAN WORK HAND IN HAND
Charles Sims of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa stands defiantly on courthouse steps, displaying Klan hoods.
It is for this reason that one cannot rely on the capitalist state to stop racist terrorism. To combat white supremacist terrorism, workers and oppressed people must organize their own self-defense. When various Nazi and white supremacist groups announced they were coming to New Orleans to defend confederate monuments, the government headed by liberal democrat Mitch Landrieu allowed them total freedom—even to brandish arms in so-called “safe zones.” Take Em Down NOLA confronted the NOPD, asking why they weren’t enforcing the legal restrictions. The answer from former Police Chief Harrison was, “we don’t have the police able to do it.”
WORKERS & OPPRESSED PEOPLE MUST ORGANIZE THEIR SELF DEFENSE
Robert and Mabel Williams
It was the emergence of armed Black groups in the south that pushed the KKK back, including here in Louisiana. In 1964 the KKK burned down five churches in Jonesboro and carried out horrific assaults. This led to the formation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice which soon had 20 chapters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Many were workers with combat experience.
Even Dr. King employed armed body guards and had guns in his house during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party armed herself.
In North Carolina, Robert Williams led the arming of the NAACP chapter in Monroe to combat Klan terror. While the KKK and others were never—not even to this day—labeled domestic terrorists, the FBI and local police targeted Black civil rights and armed self-defense groups, labeling them terrorists for protesting their oppression and for defending their community.
We need to continue mass organizing and we need to increase our efforts to defend our communities, individuals, churches and unions from the instruments of capitalist terror.
Take Em Down NOLA demands the removal of a monument to E.D. White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice and member of the white supremacist terror organization, the White League.
“The BPP members made sacrifices for our collective liberation that can never be repaid short of the overthrowing the capitalist ruling class and ushering in the rule of the working class.”
The year 1968 was a high point of the Black Liberation struggle in the USA. The oppressed Black masses had decidedly turned away from the non-violent, assimilationist civil rights movement. The passage of the civil rights bill in 1964 and the voting rights bill of 1965 had to some extent marked the end of civil rights demands. The Black masses were seeking an end to government and extra-governmental oppression characterized by constant police terror. They also wanted better living and working conditions and a brighter future for their children. Especially in the northern, mid-western and west coast ghettos the Black masses were seeking a new vision of what genuine liberation would look like. Desegregation would not satisfy their thirst for genuine freedom and self-determination.
The Black Liberation Movement (BLM) in the early 1960s had been about organizing and mobilizing the masses of Black people and their allies to demand political and social equality for Black people, especially in the apartheid-like conditions of the South. The 1960’s were also the era of the anti-imperialist national liberation movements by the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Countless people were moved to become part of this worldwide fightback. Many of them embraced the clarion call for revolution!
By 1963, the Black masses in the ghettos of US cities began to explode in righteous indignation to the wretched conditions that existed in their neighborhoods. They began to see clearly that the white capitalist ruled USA was not going to own up to its racism and discrimination and voluntarily change these conditions. It would take the resistance of the Black people themselves to force the ruling class to improve their conditions.
The civil rights leaders of the NAACP, the SCLC and CORE had rallied people around the slogan- “free by 63”. They told the masses that it was possible that the formal political and social equality of Black people could be accomplished by 1963, the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This was part of the energy that produced the August 1963 March on Washington.
Stepping into the political landscape of the early 1960s were the Black Muslims whose chief spokesman, Malcolm X, challenged the civil rights movement as being too assimilationist and not having tactics that would mobilize the Black working-class masses in the ghettos of America. Malcolm X and other Black nationalists lambasted “non-violence” as a brake on the BLM and instead advocated identifying with national liberation movements that were taking up armed struggle for their freedom.
By 1965 “Black Power” had eclipsed “we shall overcome” as the slogan that captivated the imagination of revolutionary minded freedom fighters.
Stepping into this rapidly developing BLM, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded by Bobby Seal and Huey P. Newton in Oakland, CA in October 1966. They began a campaign of arming themselves and monitoring police activity. They relied on California laws that allowed open carry of weapons. They openly confronted police who were brutalizing Black residents. They modeled themselves after the armed self-defense of Black communities in the South that had been led by Robert Williams in North Carolina and the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana.
The BPP became a fixture in everyone’s consciousness after they marched into the California state capitol bearing arms in 1967. This action shocked the white capitalist government and brought pride to the oppressed Black masses. Finally, an organization was emerging that would stand up to capitalist Amerikkka and organize the Black masses for revolution.
The BPP grew rapidly and had chapters all across the USA. They openly declared themselves to be revolutionary nationalists and elaborated their aims in the famous 10-point program. The BPP characterized itself as an armed propaganda unit spreading revolution in the USA. They took an anti-imperialist stance in support of the national liberation struggles, especially in support of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam.
The BPP created a weekly newspaper that was widely circulated all over the USA. The BPP paper captured the mood of the Black masses. Of special universal interest were the powerful cartoons drawn by Emery Douglas that graphically portrayed the fight for liberation and the oppression of the pigs (the police).
The BPP grew swiftly and soon attracted the ire of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover declared the BPP as the greatest threat to domestic tranquility. All police forces, from the federal to the local level were ordered to harass and eliminate the BPP. Many BPP members were assassinated and many others arrested.
Government repression and the heavy infiltration of agent provocateurs ultimately caused the demise of the BPP as chapters pursued their own agenda. Whatever the shortcomings of the BPP, it was founded as a revolutionary organization and inspired the BLM. The BPP members made sacrifices for our collective liberation that can never be repaid short of overthrowing the capitalist ruling class and ushering in the rule of the working class.
Mardi Gras is a Billion-dollar busine$$, but who’s benefiting from it? It’s not the Flambeaux walkers, High school marching bands or Black Mardi Gras Indians. Nor is it any of the working class people that are the lifeblood of the city and the creators of the unique culture that makes New Orleans so desirable. The people that make the big $$ during MG are the big hotel chains, advertisement industry, beer/liquor companies and police/security forces. Progress has been made in the sense we’ve went from Quadroon balls to the modern-day festiveness, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I must say that this Mardi Gras season I really learned a lot. It was my first go around marching with my high school’s band & performance groups. The volume of lucid drunken people that’s out in the streets of New Orleans is crazy. I always knew it was bad, but once you out hitting ‘dem streets with yo Squad and all eyes on y’all, then you really feel and take on that “Us against the world” mentality. People tell ‘ya all kind of dumb reckless shit as you diligently pace that pavement, you gotta put in your head that they just full of that liquid courage and don’t respond to the bullshit they say.
There were people that would try and cut through the band, just for their own childish giggles, there were people that would throw those dam beads and trinkets over our heads, which a few hit us, and I would then have to restrain myself from going after them as I saw our students upset by this buffoonery. There is a lot of overt racism during Mardi Gras as well, such as the Krewe of Chaos having anti-Black Lives Matter floats, Endymion handing out sambo dolls to Black kids, and Rex masking in their Klanish masks, robes and horses.
There is a lot of drunken white privilege out there too. The people entertaining and cleaning was Black & Latino, while majority of the people reveling in the festivities was white. This was especially evident as we went into the Convention Center after the Bacchus parade, for their grandiose ball. It costs thousands of dollars to ride on the floats and thousands of dollars to be a tourist down here during MG.
I did love seeing my beautiful Black folk out there and getting some daps & hugs from them. I’m just glad I was able to be out there, because I mean it when I say the Assata Shakur chant and the part about “It is OUR duty to love & protect each other”. The students work hard at their craft and I felt proud to make sure nothing happened to any of them as we marched in them streets.
The police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York, and the queer and trans people there and in the neighborhood fought back. The raid began as many others had, with the police separating people in the bar, focusing their abuse on those who least conformed to their ideas of gender. The resistance was immediate, but as the night continued it grew.
At the height of the resistance, the police had to barricade themselves inside the bar they had come to raid, taking a hostage and trying to turn a fire-hose on the crowd. The crowd responded with bricks and fire until more cops arrived. By the second day of the battle, the LGBTQ people of New York were joined by allies, including local political and anti-war organizers, and groups of trans and queer people fought police in the streets. Days of tension followed, until a third and final day of violence brought an end to the Stonewall Riots.
For decades, LGBTQ struggle in the United States had been building, but Stonewall served as a turning point and the birth of new movements. Inspired by working class and anti-colonial struggles around the world (especially Vietnam, China, and Algeria) and the civil rights struggle in the United States, the LGBTQ community in America formed the Gay Liberation Front within a week of Stonewall. The modern gay rights struggle was born in opposition to the most violent oppression.
POLICE RAIDS
The police raids at Stonewall were not unique. Being gay was a crime in almost every state, and in most places anyone caught wearing less than three pieces of clothing that “matched” the gender they were assigned at birth could be arrested. In 1966, a similar riot broke out in California as black drag queens and trans women fought back against raids. Across the United States, LGBTQ people arrested in the raids of their bars (often the only safe spaces they had) were subjected to sexual assault, police brutality, and public humiliation as they were exposed by the local papers. Many lost their jobs and their families. Many lost their lives.
NEW ORLEANS CONNECTION
According to many accounts, a New Orleans-born woman, Storme Delarverie, threw the first punch at Stonewall. As the police dragged her away, she is reported to have called to the crowd to fight back. In other accounts, a “butch, black lesbian” unidentified by name not only threw the first punch, but fought her way back to the bar three times before being captured, inspiring the crowd to begin throwing bricks and trash at the police. A working class woman, Delarverie was known to others in the neighborhood as a protector of their streets.
WORKERS & OPPRESSED PEOPLE FIGHT BACK
Most of those who fought at Stonewall were not activists or community leaders at the time. They were working class queer and trans people, most of them black or LatinX. Many were homeless youth that lived nearby. They had been assaulted and harassed by the police. Future leaders in the LGBTQ struggle like Miss Major, Marsha P. Johnson, and Sylvia Rivera were all part of the fight.
It was a response not just to oppression of LGBTQ people, but to racist violence as well, as the people most targeted in the raids were the black and LatinX people.
PRIDE
Many radical queer and trans organizations were born in the wake of Stonewall. The GLF, Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and more formed. People around the country–and the world–were inspired to begin fighting back.
Militant actions were the heart of these early resistance organizations, and people of all ages, races, and genders were welcome in most. They were working class groups that fought not just homophobia and transphobia, but racism, imperialism, and capitalism.
Modern Pride celebrations, sponsored by corporations, overwhelmingly white, with police and military featured prominently in their parades, have strayed from the original spirit of queer resistance. As rights won in struggle are reversed by the courts and law-makers, there is an urgent need for LGBTQ resistance, inspired by the revolutionaries of Stonewall.
“Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”
– V. I. LENIN, THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RENEGADE KAUTSKY
Following the counter-revolutionary overthrow of the Louisiana Black Reconstruction government and its white radical allies (1870-1890’s), the former oppressor class was brought back to power; to political power, which is state power. The restoration of the oppressor class, which could no longer maintain chattel slavery, could now, in alliance with the former Northern adversary, jointly move forward in rebuilding Louisiana with ‘free labor’ or ‘wage labor’. The former Northern ally, the Republican Party, with its growing millionaire industrial class, would now betray the newly freed African people and conciliate to the new form of political rule, or state rule: Jim Crow. With its vicious ideology of white supremacy, the erection and proliferation of white chauvinist, white supremacist monuments, statues, markers, tombstones, fleur de lis, and other racist symbols would rise. These symbols represent the restoration of white supremacy rule, or the white supremacist dictatorship of the rich over the laboring masses, especially the Black masses who suffer from a double burden of oppression.
Like the whole United States, New Orleans society is divided into classes: the class of the rich millionaires and billionaires and the class of the poor workers, unemployed and incarcerated. The rich live a fine luxury life by paying low wages, piecemeal wages, poverty wages or, in some cases, no wages to the thousands of laboring masses. In order to maintain their system of thievery, the rich exercise their rule through control of the state and control of the state machinery-an organ of force, an organ of coercive rule, unrestricted by any law. The Tom Bensons, Marriotts, Entergy, etc. call this form of rule ‘democracy’.
The media flunkeys of the rich, i.e., the Times Picayune, WDSU television, Essence magazine, and all the intellectual flunkeys of the rich, Harvard, Tulane, LSU, etc. insist that our ‘democracy’ is the greatest expression of liberty, equality and freedom in the world.
The struggle to establish the democracy of the people, for the people and by the people, socialism, is really a struggle to establish a democracy of the majority, a struggle that must be waged to defeat the sham democracy of the rich, the democracy of the numerical few. What would Genuine Democracy look like? Once the class of millionaires and billionaires has been overthrown, once their resistance has been crushed, and once the bureaucratic machine of bourgeois state power has been smashed, the laboring masses can then erect a new state machinery to govern society. This new state, this new form of rule that represents the rule of the laboring people, will begin to reorganize a new economy by seizing the means of production, (factories, docks, hotels,) and capital (banks, financial institutions) and transforming them into the public property of the state, and hence, the laboring masses. These steps will end the exploitation of the laboring masses because the rich will no longer have control and a new economy can be organized and planned based on the needs of the laboring masses. The masses can then be drawn into the administration of the whole new state, trained and educated in the management of their new state power.
The New Orleans City Council would cease to be a ‘talking body’ and actually become a ‘working body’ for the genuine benefit of the laboring masses.
Institutions, including the schools, legislative bodies, courts, jails, and all other governing bodies would be converted into institutions of the laboring masses that suppress the rule of the rich millionaires and billionaires and their lackeys. The laboring masses would, obviously, establish a new legal framework, a new constitution that outlaws exploitation, all forms of oppression, including all forms and symbols of white supremacy.
New monuments, statues, markers, etc. that reflect the victory of the formerly oppressed over the oppressors would be erected widely to replace the current shameful reactionary monuments and street names today. The fight for democracy, true democracy, real democracy for the majority is part of the fight to defeat the rule of the rich today. Let us learn the lessons from the past. When George Washington and company got rid of English domination in 1783, they rightly made a clean sweep of all symbols of British oppression. They knew that if such symbols remained, the hand of reaction would be strengthened and oppression would not be eliminated. They tore down all statues of King George. The same should be done today!
FOR GENUINE DEMOCRACY!
SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NATION!
DOWN WITH WHITE SUPREMACY!
Leon A. Waters is a well known Black history expert. Born and raised in New Orleans, he has been a shipyard worker, a steel worker, a chemical worker, a custodian, a postal worker, a textile worker, a delivery man and a salesman during his life.
Chris Dier was born and raised in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. He was displaced by Katrina, but returned home in 2010. Like his mother, he is a history teacher at Chalmette High School, and author of a new book, Blood in the Cane Fields: The 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre.
W.V.: What was the St. Bernard Parish Massacre?
Chris Dier: In St. Bernard Parish there was a massacre in 1868, right after the Civil War. Following the war, many black males had gained the right to vote and that threatened the economic relations of these parishes, where white supremacy ruled the land. Around New Orleans, there were sugar-producing regions where black people were the majority, and had been locked into slavery. When they were emancipated and gained voting rights, many voted for the Republican Party, which in that time had sided with liberation. This threatened the white political and economic elite. That elite pushed the narrative that all the problems after the Civil War were caused by the freed people and a lot of poor whites bought into it…1868 was the first presidential election after the war. The Republican candidate was Union veteran, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Democratic candidate was Horatio Seymour, an opponent of Reconstruction and rights for African Americans…Days before the election, armed white groups, many poor planters – not the elites themselves, who had been stoking the fire – carried out one of the most violent episodes of the Reconstruction era in Louisiana. These groups went from plantation to plantation and executed up to 135 people in the streets.
W.V.: So this was a reaction to Reconstruction, which was coming down from the federal level, but did you also uncover information about what freed people were doing in the region at a grassroots level to secure their rights?
Chris Dier: Yes. The first Republican meeting in St. Bernard was a group of freed people coming together. They had their own processions and meetings. There were a lot of grassroots efforts in Louisiana. Interestingly, 19 years after the massacre, in 1887, black and white St. Bernardians marched in unison against the planter elite. That unity is terrifying to the rich…The idea of race had to be strongly imposed over the centuries, going back to the 13 colonies, where there were many instances of poor whites joining in struggle with enslaved people… During the labor movement in New Orleans, blacks and whites came together in 1892 and 1907 along the Mississippi River fighting for their common rights, and this is what brought about some of the harshest reactions from the rich…There are many lessons in this history for the struggle now.
W.V.: How have your students responded to this research?
Chris Dier: My students have been very eager to explore this event. Many see their last names in the book. Some of the last names of perpetrators as well as victims are those of students sitting in the same classroom today. This is their history and most knew nothing about it…It is so important for young people to learn about history, because they are the ones who are going to carry struggle forward.
