October League

October League was a pro-China communist organization. It morphed into the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist).

Founder

In late 1969, Mike Klonsky founded the October League, a a pro-Mao communist organisation which in 1977 became the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist). Klonsky chaired the CP-ML which was recognised by the Chinese Communist Party as their U.S. fraternal party. Klonsky made several trips to China beginning in July 1977 (with Eileen Klehr), where he was feted by Communist Chinese officials.

The October League was the result of a fusion in May 1972 of Mike Klonsky’s Los Angeles October League and the Georgia Communist League headed by Lynn Wells. Both of these local collectives originated in the RYM-II section of 1969 SDS. Wells was a leader of the Southern Student Organizing Committee.

Call for unity

Speakers from the Organizing Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party toured nine cities in August 1976, addressing the tasks ahead in building the party. Well over 1,200 people attended these forums.

Speaking in Boston to a crowd of 250 people made up largely of workers, OL Vice-Chairman Eileen Klehr pointed out the continuing role of ideological struggle in the organizational work of party building.

The Boston forum heard Shakoor Aljuwani of the Buffalo Unity Collective and a representative of the recently-formed Boston Unity Collective, as well as a cultural presentation that based itself on the struggle of communists to organize inside the St. Regis plant.

The theme of consolidating the political struggle with organizational unity was also addressed by Barry Litt of the League for Marxist-Leninist Unity, speaking in San Diego as a representative of the October League. Litt said Marxist-Leninists who support the “Call to Unite” should “enter the OC and struggle for a correct political line to be reflected in the Party program. We recognize the differences in our movement, but we also know that a high degree of unity now exists.”

Over 150 people in Birmingham and Atlanta heard speeches by Susan Klonsky of the October League and Ernie McMillan of the Dallas Collective. In his remarks, McMillan summed up the civil rights movement which he participated in as a leader of SNCC. He pointed out the militancy of the masses in the ’60s, but noted that it was the absence of a vanguard party which allowed the movement to be co-opted by reformism.

Sherman Miller, was the October League speaker in Chicago.

Reach

While a national organization, the October League was principally active in the greater metropolitan areas around Boston, Mass., Los Angeles, Calif., Denver, Colo., Atlanta, Ga., Chicago, Baltimore, Md., Washington, D.C., and New York, with other chapters located in Tampa and Tallahassee, Fla., Detroit, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Louisville, Ky., and other cities.

National Fight Back Conference

Rep. Larry McDonald of Georgia placed a list of those attending the October League's National Fight back Conference in Chicago, December 1975 into the Congressional Record EXTENSIONS OF REMARKS - OCTOBER LEAGUE FIGHT BACK CONFERENCE: PART Il: ADDENDUM March 3, 1976 page 5277 "while every person at the conference was not an OL member, they included large numbers of open and secret OL cadre, as well as persons being recruited through such fronts as the Communist Youth Organization, local Fight Back Committees, and the Southern Conference Educational Fund".

PERSONS ATTENDING THE NATIONAL FIGHT BACK CONFERENCE, DECEMBER 28-29, 1975 (Spellings based on phonetics )

COLORADO Bob Anyon, Richard Bates, Bob Brown, Cindy Burton, Mary Coe, Hank Colburn, Phil DeLeon, Lucius DuBerry, Michelle Flores, Candelario Foliz, Sue Garmony, Jeff Goldstein, Bob Hennig, Susan Hennig, Lana Karp, Linda Lieba, Ken Maier, Nel Maier, Barb Martin, Rebecca Naranjo, Deborah Palmieri, Carol Roderick, John Roderick, Don Russell, Ray Russell, Wayne Seaman, Debbie Singer, Kent Tobiska, Marsha Tremmel.

DC Fran Anderson, Jim Benn, Roger Blacklow, Beryl Blaustein, Randy Bregman, Carolyn Brinnon, Paul Cabarza, Linda Carcione, Patty Cook, Beth Destler, Tim Elston, Ernest Garner, Geraldine Garner, Tanya Garner, Patrice Gancie, Ellyn Greenberg, Lesley Guyton, Susanne Hecht, Debbie Hellerstein, Irene Hensel, Ray Johnson, Alta Keeton, Linda Kimball, David Kotz, Nancy Lee, Allen Lenchek, Jackie Lenchek, Armand Lenchek, Ann Longley, Patrick Loy, Roosevelt McNeil, Annetta Martin, Joe Martin, Liz Martin, Rawley Mastbrook, Sue Mastbrook, Mike Merloe, Carolyn Meyer, Andy Phelps, Jan Polllzzi, Kathryn Roark, Barbara Smith, Cliff Smith, Michael Weichbrod, Dorothy Weichbrod, Alice Wolfson, Philip Wolfson.

FLORIDA Jan Goodman, Joe Goodman, Eddie Ruth Marshall, John Marshall, Mary Martin, Joyce McHenry, Carl Van Ness, Betty Wood, Bob Wolfreys.

GEORGIA Pat Bryant, Janet Caldwell, Pete Carlson, Ron Carter, Ken Chastain, Pam Chastain, Paul Cobb, Clara Davis, Tom Davis, Dana Duke, Chuck Dunham, Chris Fleming, Ellen Fleming, Ginny Fletcher, John Fletcher, Marie Glynn, Perry Glynn, Nan Grogan Guerrero, Becky Hose, Mary Joyce Johnson, Nellie Lawson, Kathleen McGuier, Carol McLin, Nancy Neighbors, Charles Orrock, Sue Palmer, Ann Romaine, Louise Runyon, Lilly Rushin, Mike Serrett, David Smith, Vicky Smith, Donna Stewart, Marie Stewart, Mike Swanson, Cheryl Todd, Jonas Veal, Nanny Washburn, Phil Weldon, Janet Wheat, Pat Williams.

MARYLAND Tom Andrione, Kay Boyd, Ellen Bravo, Marcia Brown, Rick Brown, Lesley Dennis, Ron Haysfield, Dan Hardy, Mary Kellager, Fred Krasny, John Markley, Larry Miller, David O'Brien, Alexandra O'Brien, Cappy Pinderhughes, Vicky Peterson, Augustus Richardson, Wanda Scott, Mary Selhorst, Al Summerville, Mildred Summerville, Bill Uphoff, Ellen Williams, Louis Williams, Diane Wilson, Marty Wolfson, William Young.

MASSACHUSETTS Mary Anderson, John Auerbach, Jim Baker, Josephine Baker, Jean Bragan, Jonathan Brandell, Jacob Bredeur, Margie Butler, Debbie Coles, Joan Crimmins, Steve Crosby, Al Davis, Tim Dean, Alice DeVincent, Clair Dolllns, Jehu Eaves, Tess Ewing, Penny Fox, Tom Francis, Chuck Garment, Mike Glenn, Jim Gottschalk, Cindy Hamel, Roberta Helberg, Sam Ho, Wally Hollander, Ed Hunt, Sue Jhirad, Toni Jones, Barbara King, Debbie Knight, Paula La Pierre, Rich La Pierre, Dottie Lee, Dayton Leonard, Debbie Maggio, Steve Meacham, Ken Middleton, Paul Morgan, Ann Orkoff, Charles Pratt, Grace Quayle, Janice Reagan, Elsa Roberts, Howard Rotman, Malie Rouse, Charlotte Ryan, Toni Schatzman, Mary Shea, Elaine Sheets, Linda Stearns, Bart Stephens, Alan Toney, Wally Taylor, Angela Telfare, Rene Theberge, Janice Thompson, Vicky Tucker, Norman Turner, Luz Vega, Diane Villemaire, Amy Weliby, Bob Weiser, Dennis Williams, Ed Winbourne, Alan Winston.

NEW YORK Linda Ard, William Ard, Jr., Loretta Argue, Claude Jean Baptiste, Jose Baruta, Nillor Barunich, Nillor Barunich, Jr., Gene Bild, Rene Blakkan, Cherry Blatt, Ariella Borahate, Willie Cabet, Martha Cameron, Yolanda Caraballo, Sue Carrol, Tom Cocke, Dara Beth Cohen, Emma Cortez, Ramon Cortez, Carl Davidson, John Duffy, Gary Esno, Maureen Esno, Bev Falk, Bob Fram, Alan Frogenberg, Jack Frohlich, Kathy Garay, Gary Goff, Terry Goldman, Al Gonzalez, Hillary Gordon, Al Green, Mickey Green, Bob Gura, Dave Gura, Nancy Gura, Becky Hall, David Harris, Michael Howard, Kitty Kroger, Greg Laden, Kathy Ledbetter, John LaSalle, Rick Levine, Erik Lewis, Marge Lewis, Judy Lobel, Sarah McAllister, Hal Medrano, Vera Michelson, Marian Nordle, Laura Nuchow, Robert Nuchow, Rosa Nunez, Marcus Padgett, Ralph Palladino, S. Richardson, Edwin Rivera, Marleen Rivera, Earthie Rivers, Jesse Rivers, Juan Rodriguez, Karl Roy, Mike Salvino, Sadie Sanders, Mildred Santana, Helen Scaracella, Mike Scaracella, Marie Scholl, Richie Scholl, Meir Seeman, Kathy Shimatsu, Yoichi Shimatsu, Guy Smith, Oliver Smith, Jose Soto, Rod Such, Clair Sylvan, Dennis Tatum, Errol Vural, Ann Whitbrod, Lucy White, George Williams, Charlotte Wolff, Nancy Zaratny.

OHIO Robert Auden, Ernest Baker, Leola Blackman, Jim Bramson, Susan Bramson, John Henry Butler, Leslie Calhoun, Patricia Davis, Elizabeth Dinkelaker, Lynn Estomin, Orrin Estomin, Darya Fumagalli, Eleanor Graham, J. B. Hamilton, Jerry Kidd, Andrea Kornblu, John Kornblu, Nick Langdon, Freddy McGhee, Jack Magrisso, Glowdana Moxley, Ethelina Nelson, Bobby Newsome, Judy Pomer, Laura Pruden, Jim Sanders, Bruce Simpson, Jim Squire, Carol Tackett, Debbie Wright, Perry Wright, Michelle Zellers.

WISCONSIN James Albers, Guadalupe Berrios, George Brookshire, Dale Dahlberger, Chris Deisinger, Joann Easterling, Alberta Evans, Rose Henley, Kathy Hinkle, Joann Jacoby, Peter Kent, Drew Lavake, Rose Lavake, Hazel Lewis, Bob Martin, Ben Matthews, Henry Mills, Patricia Moore, Mary Ann Onarato, Frank Shansky, Judy Tapscott, Ron Tapscott, David Thomas, Susan Thomas, Ruby Wenzel.

Mead strike

On May 16th 2013, Interference Archive hosted a screening and discussion of the film "Wildcat at Mead".

Chronicling a successful 1972 wildcat strike at Mead Packaging, an Atlanta, GA cardboard plant, Wildcat at Mead highlights the struggles of the predominantly Black workers on strike, who had been battling racism within their labor union as well as with the plant management. The film includes a significant amount of footage from picket lines, including confrontations with local police and private security; interviews with workers from divers parts of the shop floor; and rallies and press conferences in support of the strike. Featured prominently are Sherman Miller and Wayne Draznin, two workers at Mead and members of the October League, a Marxist-Leninist organization which counted several Mead employees among its membership, whose members made and distributed the film, and which provided “militant leadership” to the strike.

On August 18th, 1972 700 of the plant’s 1,100 workers walked off the job, demanding safer, healthier workplace conditions and an end to racial discrimination at the plant, especially in hiring and promotions. Less than two months later, on October 5, 1972, the strike ended when Mead conceded to several of the workers’ demands. Wildcat at Mead speaks powerfully to the careful planning and collaboration that goes into making a strike successful, and it is also a startling document of a time when people everywhere were making frequent and rapid advances in the struggle for self determination.

Joining the discussion after the movie were Jim Skillman, who helped raise support for the strike as a member of the October League Atlanta District Committee, and Linda Alcoff, who joined the October League after seeing Wildcat at Mead in Florida in the late 70s.

Q: Before we start can you give a brief description of what the October League was?

Jim: The October League was a revolutionary communist organization that came about from a merger with Georgia Communist League and the October League Collective in California. These organizations grew out of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). When SDS split in 1969, it was because a bunch of us were opposing the Progressive Labor Party’s attempt to take over the organization. We split into two groups: The Weathermen, and RYM II (Revolutionary Youth Movement II), based on a paper that was written in opposition to the Weathermen, and there were collectives all over the country that were RYM II collectives. The basic idea was that we have to go to the working class and we have to win the advanced workers to socialism. The October League grew by recruiting individuals and from other collectives all over the country. Eventually it became the Communist Party - (Marxists-Leninist), which was recognized as a fraternal party from the Chinese Communist Party. The party dissolved in the late 80’s, but the people didn’t.

Q1: What was the settlement between the workers and the company when they went back to work- did they actually get what they wanted from it?

Jim: They got a number of things- we didn’t get things that were really very important to us, some of the strike leaders weren’t able to get their jobs back. The white guy you saw with Sherman, Wayne Draznin, he was not able to get his job back at the plant, and in fact he wasn’t able to get a job anywhere in Atlanta after this. He ended up transferring to a different district and he passed away a few years ago. The other things- I had the opportunity to go through the plant a few years ago because I was in that business- not as a political person but to look at a piece of equipment that my company was thinking of buying. And the plant is now air-conditioned, they don’t use solvent alcohol-based things anymore, there’s no dust in the air, there’s a ventilation system that’s one of the most advanced I’ve ever seen. The department that I went to look at- the lead man in that department was black, they had a black supervisor. The other thing about the plant was they had about 20-25% of the workforce they had at the time of the strike. They automated a lot of the equipment and put in palletizers and everything. So they were very effective in getting a lot of the concrete demands answered- and Linda you might want to add to this- but in terms of us building something that was ongoing, and challenging the union, we were not successful. What’s not in the film is the fact that the union basically was controlled by these little white Ku Klux Klan people- there were two different Klan factions that competed with each other for control of the union, and that went on for a number of years after the strike. So, they were not able to do anything in terms of changing the leadership of the union.

Linda: Well, I think what happened from the strike was a lot of increased organization in Atlanta. Betty Bryant, who was prominent- she was sitting between Sherman and Wayne in that last one [interview in the film]- she became a leader in Atlanta, in the struggle. She really came from the ranks, she was not originally a member of the October League, she was a worker at Mead, and she became a leader. She just had that kind of ability- she should have been the mayor of Atlanta! So several people came out of that, the Georgia Communist League, I think, developed, recruited more people. So the movement in Atlanta gained from this, learned the lessons of this struggle, and gained organizational experience from it. And one of the things that strikes me now, because I was recruited on the basis of this film- I’m a little younger than Jim in terms of my membership- this film was used all around the South and I saw it in Tallahassee, Florida when I was a student at Florida State. And, I ended up quitting college, and we ended up moving to Atlanta. One of the things that we did in like ’76- was organizing in the white communities, in the poor white communities; Cabbagetown, where Nanny Washburn was from- the older white woman who was dragged- she was a veteran of civil rights, she was an amazing woman, poor white woman from Cabbagetown. So we tried to do some organizing on campuses, we were brought up to do some student organizing and some organizing in some of the poor white neighborhoods- but what you see here is there was no hesitation to say “soul power,” to say “this is about the liberation of black people,” even though these were communists, right? They didn’t mince words, they didn’t hold back from raising the question of race and talking about national liberation for African American people, we called them Afro-Americans back then (laughs). It wasn’t seen as a contradiction to our overall working class politics, at all.

Q2: I have two questions for you both, and I guess for anyone else in the room: It was very powerful to see in Atlanta, in ’72, a lot of this tremendous organizing from the civil rights movement and the emergence of the black power movement- but the focus not on power at the point of services, in terms of boycotting transportation or boycotting different public places, but very much people’s work being the focus of their power. And I wonder if in Atlanta if there was any way that people really tried to coax and support that shift, from moving from only boycotting and forming actions at different public places for services, and then more towards doing actions at their workplaces? Whether there was a campaign, or political education or anything to encourage that?

And the second one more logistically about wildcatting; so this was a plant of about 1,000 people, I wonder if y’all could speak about how people have those conversations to do a wildcat strike, and if you had even some suggestions for organizing in workplaces even larger than that.

Jim: Well, we didn’t believe in wildcat strikes. The labor movement is different today than it was then, and we didn’t see ourselves as organizing in opposition to the union. If we were in a plant, and they didn’t have a union, we saw it as our job to organize a union, If they had a union at that time, we saw it as our job to try organize a progressive caucus in that union, not to do away with the union or set up a dual union in opposition to the union. Mead was a special case. That plant was a powderkeg, and the workers- that was a special case in a lot of ways. So that’s number one, and number two, we were communists. We thought that if you wanted to be a member of our organization, you had to be willing to go to work in a factory. And it didn’t matter what you believed, or how deeply you thought, or how good your line was- if you wanted to be a member of the October League you had to go get a job in a factory. And if you didn’t want to do that, that’s fine, we can all be friends, but you couldn’t be in our organization, because that’s where we wanted to do our organizing. Now we also organized in the community, we also organized in the anti-war movement and left movement. But our focus, again, was in organizing the workplace. And of the twenty-something places where we had people working in Atlanta, there’s only three of them still left, they’ve all closed down, they don’t exist anymore.

Linda:Gary Washington? No we didn’t see him, we saw Betty though, and Cassandra and Felicia. I would just say on the union stuff though- it was different. Larry [Linda’s husband] was in the GBBA, the Glass Bottle Blowers Association, and they were really racist, just not good at all. So we didn’t have very good relations with them at all. But at Arrow Shirts, where I worked, the union was a little bit better, and so those of us who worked in that union, we worked with the union. We did have one wildcat walkout one day, because one of the young activists was fired, so we walked out- but we walked to the union hall. So it was like 500 women- and she got her job back the next day. So different unions, you could work with them to push them to be more responsive, as they say.

Jim: Well, the person that shot the film was a young manwho came out of the student movement and joined the October League and subsequently got a job working in a factory in Atlanta. And he worked with a couple other people in the October League including Sherman Miller, who was a leader of the strike, Wayne Braslin, another member of the October League, and I think Betty and Gary Washington.

But when it came time to actually edit the thing and put it together he had to come to New York to do that, and he came by himself and basically put it together. In fact, the first attempt he had at putting it together, we felt like it had some problems, and he came back to New York and fixed some of the problems that we felt it had politically. I’ll tell you what they were: the original film was much tougher on Hosea Williams. We didn’t want that in the final film because we wanted to continue to try and work with Hosea in Atlanta, but Hosea was not an easy person to work with, and a lot of the workers that were on the strike committee would be the first ones to tell you that. On the one hand, he brought a lot to the strike, it was very good that he was involved, but on the other hand he was somebody that you had to manage, to keep him from taking it over and dominating it, plus taking all the money that was collected. And so, the first edition of the film I think was actually a little more honest about the role that he played. And I think a lot of the workers saw it and said, ‘We don’t wanna do this,’ so we tempered it. And what you just saw was what we ended up with, obviously.

Q3.1: Did the first cut include the voiceover, or was that part of the re-editing process?

Jim: Yeah. She [narrator] was a member of the October League too. You know, I just don’t know all the technical details of [the filmmaking]- and the guy that made the film- he’s great, he’s still alive and he loves for people to see the film, and I wish he’d come to people to tell them how he did this, especially people like yourselves, who know how to do this-

Q4: I was deliberating over whether I should ask this or not- but my parents also joined the October League basically because of this movie. The question that I wasn’t going to ask, but since you brought it up, was that there was a rumor that I heard that basically as the line of the October League would change, re-edits would circulate. I assume that my parents saw it in Ohio, which is where they lived before they moved to Birmingham. So, the question for you, Jim, is what was the process of getting it out for people to see, and how did you use it once people had seen it, as a tool for organizing what became the CPML? And maybe for Linda is, what about this documentary made you want to leave Florida, and go to Atlanta, like my parents moved to fucking Birmingham of all places-basically on orders- there were lots of other people circulating lots of other material, so what was it about this film, that made you not just want to get involved, in the way we maybe think of it now, but actually commit to party-building, and long-term, total commitment.

JS: Well I was already in, so I’ll guess Linda’s the one to answer that question, but I’ll tell you how we used it: we made a bunch of sound prints and took it around to these different collectives and showed it- this thing showed in France somewhere, and we took it and showed it to the Chinese, we did use to it to help build our organization. And the reason for that is there was a period much like today, where you have a lot of people who are very active, and there are a lot of different ideas floating around about, ‘Well what is it that we should get together and organize to do next week?’ And there were different political theories, and we were promoting a particular political line, which was Marxism, and going to the working class, and we wanted to show that you could be successful. You could go out and organize workers, you can organize white workers, in the South, you can turn them into communists if they’re smart enough and you’re good enough, we wanted to show that it was possible to do that- and I think this film shows that it’s possible to go out and go to work in a factory and organize, and not just organize around day-to-day issues, but to actually win over people to your program. That’s how I think we tried to use it, and [to Linda] what do you think of how we used it?

Linda: Well it was shown in a union in Florida State in Tallahassee, and the October League was not in Tallahassee- it was in Tampa, so it was not October League members who were showing it, it was young people who were fellow travelers showing it. I was already a young revolutionary at the time (laughs). I was a college student, but I had been a high school dropout, I came to this country from Panama, it was kind of a miracle that I was in college. There was a lot going on in that period, the Vietnam War was still going on when I started college. But this was different- because this was, as you can see from the film, working people in struggle, it was not student groups, it wasn’t anti-war struggle, around a particular aim. It was really rooted in a place, where people worked- and also, I think it was very powerful because it was black workers. Because they modeled for us how to think about race and class together, and how to do it, and that was a key thing in the South, certainly- I think throughout the country, but certainly in the South. So the chance of helping in that struggle, it wasn’t a question- that was the most important thing, because the war was winding down, you know, there were things we were winning. This was the long-term, this was being part of something that was really making- and I still believe this is how you do it- you don’t do it from national organizations so much, you do it on the local level, and workers’ struggles, in this kind of way. That was ’76 that I saw it.

Q5: So in the film they mentioned that there had been strikes at Nabisco and Atlanta Hospital, and I think there had also been a strike at Sears in the months preceding this. Was there an Atlanta-wide coordination among workers, or Black workers in particular? Was October League in all those places? How was it that there was so much happening?

Jim: We had people at Nabisco, in the Bakers and Confectioners’ Union. We had people in a lot of different plants. Our people tended to get jobs in the places that were shitholes because that’s the easiest place to get a job. [laughter] That’s why we were able to get people in Mead- we had a harder time getting people at Atlantic Steel, and the Chevrolet plant, because they paid pretty good money and had unions- So it took us a while to get people in those plants, though we eventually did. It wasn’t the October League, it was the times. There were walkouts every week we were chasing, doing strike support work. The unions weren’t doing much, but let’ s say you have a warehouse over in the Fulton Industrial Boulevard area and maybe in that warehouse there are 12 black workers, and a manager, and a secretary, and they’re really being crapped on, their working conditions are terrible, they’ve got a bunch of grievances- and they would get together and they would walk out and maybe they’d call Hosea Williams, and they’d call a TV station, and they’d say, ‘We’re sick of this.’ We’d hear about it and we’d go over, and we’d help them try to organize a picket or something, maybe it would last two weeks, maybe it would last two days, and they would win some things, and they’d go back to work. This was going on constantly. And we couldn’t keep up with it. That was just the times- it wasn’t anything that we did that caused that to happen. And if you didn’t live through it, you can’t imagine what it was like. Max Elbaum wrote a book about those times, and organizations like ours, that were around then, it’s called Revolution in the Air [worldcat]. And it was- revolution was in the air, people were open, people were not afraid. I think that time will come again, but it’s certainly not that way now. It made a big difference in terms of how the average worker, who maybe had never done anything before- what they were willing to do, just on the spur of the moment, just after a little bit of organizing.

Q6: I was hoping you could say more about Mike Klonsky, I’m curious about him. My uncle was a member of the Young Patriots In Chicago. A book has just come out about the Patriots, and a guy about my age has tried to track down members- so my uncle was one of the more cooperative people that talked to him– but what came out of those set of interviews was— my uncle believes strongly that Michael Klonsky was part of the concerted effort to either control SDS or destroy it altogether. And this guy that did the interview with the Young Patriots, he also interviewed Mike Klonsky, and Mike Klonsky said ‘One of the things that I regret about my life is that I played a role in sabotaging different organizations that I was a part of.’ And then this guy decided not to publish that, said ‘That’s not the story- I’m not interested in it.’ Anyway, I don’t know Klonsky for anything– but I find it interesting and important to understand how organizations fail or are sabotaged, just as much as how they succeed.

Jim: Well Mike’s not here to defend himself, but I am very skeptical that he would say something like that about that particular time. I think he felt a lot of pride, and that for all the mistakes he made, I think he still feels pretty good about the work that he did in the period you’re talking about. This was a RYM II initiative, the original Rainbow Coalition before Jesse Jackson ripped the name off and used it for his purposes, in Chicago where SDS was based. The RYM II people there put together a coalition with Fred Hampton from the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots, Cha Cha Jimenez, the Young Lords, and the Brown Berets. This was the original Rainbow Coalition. This was the same time the Weathermen were running down Michigan Avenue with football helmets and baseball bats and doing all that, and we were trying to build something that we thought was real– and I think that holds up pretty well today. I am really skeptical that Mike said that. I don’t know, I can’t say he didn’t say it, I can’t prove a negative, but that’s not my take on those times at all. I was around, and I don’t think that’s his take on it either. I’m sorry.

Linda: I don’t think one person could take down an organization either- certainly not as strong a one as SDS. I think that our group made some errors, like in working sometimes with other groups, like with SCEF (Southern Conference Educational Fund), and we didn’t survive because of the errors that we made. But, the people that I worked with in that group, like Jim, are all organizers today, every last one of them. They’re in unions, in community organizations, some are in electoral work, some of them are in the academy, like me. Nobody turned their back on it, nobody quit, nobody gave up that I know of. Its just that its really hard to make a revolution in the United States, it’s not an easy thing! (laughs) So, I feel, like Jim, proud of the work that this organization did. That’s not to say that we didn’t make mistakes, that’s not to say Klonsky didn’t make mistakes. Anybody would make mistakes. But I do feel like compared to other organizations, there were a lot of really good people and the basic approach was right.

The other thing I wanted to say to [Q5]: It was a moment of ferment in Atlanta. Because the Klan was active- they were active on the campus of Georgia State. Larry got knifed once, or this guy pulled a knife on him- this Klansman from the union he was working in, and Betty Bryant was assaulted by two Klansmen in a field across from her home after she was on local television as one of the militant leaders from the Mead Strike. So all of this was happening. There was a lot at stake and there was a lot to fight for in Atlanta and the South at that time.

Jim: Let me just expand on that briefly. Atlanta at that time was a place where white workers and black workers from the rural areas would migrate to because there were jobs there. There were people that came from as far away as South Carolina and lived in boarding houses over in West End and would work during the week and go home on the weekend. There were Klan chapters at Chevrolet and at the Mead Plant and at Atlantic Steel. Now we had a policy that anytime we had people in a plant, that we would sell our newspapers. That’s how you would know that you had October League members working there, because these people would show up distributing October League literature. At Chevrolet and Atlantic Steel we had to mobilize like 15 people to do that, because we would get in fights with the Klan. They would come and attack us, we had people beat up. And we finally said ‘Well, we’re not gonna back down but we can’t just send 2 people to get slaughtered.’ So we had to mobilize people– when they attacked us, we would counterattack them and everything, and that would calm it down. I had forgotten about that until you mentioned the thing about Betty, but it was like, just to go out and sell 5 newspapers at the Chevrolet plant, Jesus- the resources that we had to bring to bear and the coordination you had to do just to get enough people there so our folks wouldn’t be intimidated.

Q7: I’m curious what worker organizing excites you right now, given your history and what you’ve done. We’re in an interesting moment now with Occupy, and new worker organizing with Walmart, Fast Food workers, others, and a labor movement in general that recognizes that something’s got to change. My feeling is that we are in a beginning of innovation. But I’m curious for you all, what excites you, and what you’re willing to get involved in.

Jim: Well, I’m a member of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism in Atlanta and we work a lot with DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). Do I think it’s a great organization? Well I think it’s got some great people in it. October League was a disciplined cadre organization, and it asked a lot of people to be members. We don’t function that way now, so we invite you to join our organization. If you don’t like our organization, we invite you to find one you do like, and join it and not be a lone ranger, and once you get in that organization you do what we did- work for left unity, because we’re so small now that that’s what we have to do. The organization that I’m a part of, I’m in it because I think that’s where I can be the most effective in terms of bringing abut what I think needs to happen. It’s not because I think it’s the greatest organization, or I think everybody just ought to quit their organization and join ours- I don’t think that. We work with day-to-day struggles, we work with Jobs with Justice, Progressive Democrats of America. We’re involved in the day-to-day struggles and we’re also trying to build left unity among socialists. And I know In Atlanta we work with IWW, we work with DSA, we work sometimes with Solidarity– I never thought we’d be able to work with some of these groups that we’re able to work with. But there’s a feeling among all these groups, inside all these organizations, there’s a lack of sectarianism that used to exist. I know Linda remembers how sectarian all the organizations were, and we were too. I don’t sense that now, among the different organizations, the way it used to be, and that’s encouraging.

Linda; I think the fast food workers organizing is very important and exciting. Justice for Janitors was a brilliant campaign that won real successes. And the thing about it is, both of those campaigns have been financed and organized by the labor movement, like SEIU. The labor movement has changed tremendously from 35, 40 years ago. It is- in terms of immigration, they negotiate contracts so that there’s no discrimination between if you’re documented or undocumented; SEIU has gender and race quotas for conventions, it does transgender training workshops for its shop stewards. It’s light years ahead of what the labor movement was when I was a kid. These unions are not the October League, it’s a different kind of organization and it makes its own errors and has problems. But the labor movement in this country is worth working in and trying to make better; it’s worth struggling in. It was totally critical in Wisconsin, it was unions that did Wisconsin, and Wisconsin was a radicalizing moment in this country– and the unions were all into that. So I think we have to give the unions credit.

Jim: Yeah the labor movement, I’ll give you an example- the Teamster Union is the best union in Atlanta right now in terms of reaching out to the community, in terms of organizing even small shops, trying to organize into unions, in terms of immigration, in terms of supporting the Latino Alliance on Human Rights. They are the best union in the city- they put their money where their mouth is and they bring the rank and file out to demonstrations in the community, not just their staff. In 1973, when I was in the Teamsters in Atlanta, they were the sorriest, worst union in Atlanta. The labor movement has changed. Trumka- what I hear him saying sounds pretty good to me, in terms of what you’re going to get, what you can expect at this point. Things are much better now...

Linda: I mean, there’s class struggle going on all around us, it’s just not covered in the media, or covered badly. I tell my students all the time, ‘Yes there’s class consciousness in this country,’ ‘Yes, there’s class struggle.’ It’s just local struggles. And in these labor struggles, people work across African American, Latino, Asian American, white, and you have this working together, and leadership development- it’s a possibility that you don’t get anywhere else because they work in the same place, so there’s a common base. It’s not people coming to a space, like Zuccotti Park, as wonderful as Zuccotti Park was- you’re all employees- in a hospital, in a nursing home, so it doesn’t mean that it solves all the conflicts that arise, but it is a basis from which- where else is that organizing happening? That kind of cross-race organizing, multiple gender organizing? It’s happening in the labor movement in this country, in a lot of different struggles.

'Yellow Power'

From an article dated Oct 19, 2016 by Eveline Chao at Gothamist titled "How Asian-American Radicals Brought 'Yellow Power' To Chinatown":

"In October 1966—50 years ago—Chinese leader Mao Zedong appeared on Tiananmen Square in Beijing to address an audience of 1.5 million Red Guards, the paramilitary youth he had called upon to tear down the Communist Party hierarchy. "Long live the Red Guards!" he shouted, to roars of approval. "Long live the great Cultural Revolution!"

That spring, Mao first called for a "Cultural Revolution," urging the working class to "struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road" and "criticize and repudiate...the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes."

Tens of millions of Red Guards took up his call. By the revolution's end in 1976, millions of people—especially intellectuals and those with ties to the previous, Nationalist government or the West—had been denounced, tortured, or murdered. Many fled to Hong Kong, and from there to the United States and elsewhere. To this day, the period remains one of the most painful traumas in China's collective memory.

Outside China, the full extent of what happened during the Cultural Revolution remained largely unknown until the late 1970s. What came through were mostly propaganda messages about class struggle, economic empowerment and educational access for the poor—messages that resonated with radical leftists in the United States who were fighting for civil rights and protesting the Vietnam War.

"A lot of us radicals at that time didn't know exactly what was going on. But [ideas like] reforming education were quite relevant to us," said Peter Kwong, a historian at Hunter College who during the late '60s was at Columbia University writing his master's thesis about the Red Guards. "The Chinese, through propaganda, were able to have a significant impact on the way young people were thinking."

People of color were particularly inspired by Mao's call to "serve the people," seeing in it a message that was relevant to poor, marginalized communities. The Black Panther Party formed just five months after the Cultural Revolution began, and it soon became commonplace to see black radicals selling copies of Mao's "Little Red Book" on street corners. The Puerto Rican nationalist Young Lords were also inspired by Maoism.

Less attention has been given to the Asian-American leftist groups that formed, including the Red Guard Party and Kalayaan in San Francisco, and East Wind Collective in Los Angeles. Here in New York, in 1969, a dozen or so young Asian-Americans formed I Wor Kuen (IWK), Cantonese for "Righteous and Harmonious Fists." The name came from a group that tried to expel Westerners from China during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

""We believed U.S. imperialism was a criminal system that conducted a genocidal war in Vietnam and maintained an oppressive racial caste system at home. We believed it was irredeemable and the 'system' had to be overthrown," said former IWK leader Gordon H. Chang, who is now a history professor at Stanford University.

That year, IWK members pooled their money and rented a cheap corner storefront at 24 Market Street in Chinatown, under the Manhattan Bridge, where they resolved to live collectively and "serve the people." Some dropped out of college. Four of the members held jobs, enabling the other eight to be full-time activists. Inspired by the Panthers, they adopted a uniform of berets and sunglasses.

IWK protested poor housing conditions in Chinatown, organized child-care programs and bilingual education and conducted door-to-door testing for tuberculosis, which was endemic in the overcrowded neighborhood. They also organized Chinatowners to join other Lower East Side residents in a fight for a new hospital nearby, then demanded the hospital hire more Chinese speakers.

The group led a successful protest against a Bell Telephone Company plan to tear down a block of housing for a switching station. They also protested the war in Vietnam, and taught young people ways to avoid the draft. Later, IWK would help defend small grocery owners who had been shut down by the Health Department for selling roast ducks and other traditional Chinese food items, eventually leading the agency to change its ordinances.

Former IWK member Karen Low was just 14 when she joined the group. Her mother worked at a garment factory in Chinatown; after school, Low and her siblings helped her do piecework. Poor people in the community, Low recalled, faced "miseducation and ignorance and racism." Moreover, they were often unaware of the many social services they qualified for. "So when IWK came along, it was an opportunity to say, 'Yes, it's about time somebody is speaking for us, somebody's trying to do something for us,'" she said.

Sometimes, the group joined with the Panthers, the Young Lords and other radical groups to protest larger issues, or attend political conventions. The Panthers' Ten Point Program inspired IWK to draw up a Twelve Point Program that called for "an end to racism," better housing and health care, and "community control of our institutions and land." The group even published a bilingual community newspaper called "Getting Together."

"Chinatown is a ghetto to Chinese people like ghettoes are to Black, Spanish and other non-white peoples," IWK wrote in the inaugural issue. "We Asians (Chinese) in Chinatown are living in a colony controlled by foreigners (the rich, outside whites). In fact, Chinatown is not only a ghetto, but a colony of sorts. What we have to do is begin to gain power to run our own community." The article ended with a call to "Yellow Power."

The paper helped publicize the group's work outside of Chinatown, and in 1971 IWK merged with San Francisco's Red Guards to form a national IWK.

Alongside IWK, numerous fellow travelers in Chinatown took up Mao's call. One was Corky Lee, a photographer who in those days had portraits of Mao and Ho Chi Minh on his wall. Inspired by the Young Lords' "liberation" of an X-ray truck to offer free tuberculosis testing in Spanish Harlem, Lee proposed running a free health fair in Chinatown.

He worked with IWK members, social workers and several community groups to organize the fair, which was held in August 1971. For 10 days, a fleet of doctors, nurses and technicians set up shop along Mott Street, and locals could come by to get tested for TB, lead poisoning, diabetes, venereal diseases and other conditions, with assistance from volunteer translators. The event was so popular—2,500 people came—that the organizers decided to rent a garage on Baxter Street and turn it into a full-time clinic staffed by volunteers. They called it the Chinatown Health Clinic.

Chinatown health fair.

Despite their good works, these young leftists were viewed with suspicion by much of the community. In those days, Chinatown was a stronghold of sympathizers for the anti-communist Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang [KMT], which ruled China until the communist takeover in 1949. The KMT, which governed the island nation of Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China, viewed New York as an important base for lobbying the international community and influencing media coverage of China. It poured resources into local institutions like the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which for decades served as the unofficial government of Chinatown. Only the Nationalist flag flew on Mott Street. The neighborhood celebrated the founding date of the Republic of China, October 10, also known as "Double Ten Day." Public support for communist China was not tolerated.

"I was called a Red Guard," said Lee. "Because we were giving out medical care for free. Some of the more conservative people in Chinatown felt this was the Cultural Revolution coming to Chinatown."

Gordon Chang recalled that political differences sometimes became violent. "We had fistfights; the storefront was damaged. I was stabbed by gang youth who worked with the 'reactionaries,'" he said.

Like many radical groups of that era, IWK was also dogged by the police. "The Fifth Precinct was always on top of us, the Seventh Precinct was always on top of us, we were trailed and followed by the FBI," said Low. "I mean things like that happened. In those times it was pretty much a given." The organization also clashed with other leftists, including former members who formed splinter groups.

Caught in the middle of all these politics were ordinary people in Chinatown who were growing weary of the decades-long diplomatic freeze between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China and longed to reconnect with friends and family in the mainland.

IWK tapped into these sentiments through public screenings of propaganda films, which showcased development projects like dam construction, as well as revolutionary operas like "The White-Haired Girl" and "The Red Detachment of Women." Low recalled people angrily pouring down buckets of water and throwing things from neighboring rooftops. And yet, thousands of people attended these screenings.

"A lot of them were older people, so they hadn't seen their homeland in 20 or 30 years. The only information they were getting was what organizations like IWK distributed," said Charlotte Brooks, a historian at Baruch College and author of Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years. "They were hungry for those details."

As the '70s wound on, America's stance towards the People's Republic of China began to shift. In October 1971, the United Nations voted to expel Taiwan and admit the PRC as the acknowledged representative of China. IWK cheered the news and organized a demonstration outside the UN to welcome the arrival of PRC representatives, while conservative Chinatown leaders hung banners on Mott and Pell Streets that read, "Mao's regime does not represent the Chinese people" and "We demand bloodthirsty Mao be punished."

In the Chinese-American community, too, openness toward the People's Republic of China became mainstream. When the U.S. recognized the PRC in 1978, Nationalist sympathizers were bitterly disappointed, but in the broader community, there was largely a sense of relief.

That same year, IWK merged with several other radical groups to become the League of Revolutionary Struggle. But by that point, the revolutionary spirit of the '60s and '70s was fading. The League formally dissolved in 1990.

With time, former radicals became business owners or professionals. They settled down and had families.

Today, some remain active in progressive politics, but "in different form," as Low puts it. She's spent her career as an educator and organizer. Corky Lee worked on a successful campaign to get formal recognition from the U.S. Department of Labor for the key role played by Chinese laborers in building America's railroads.

In Chinatown, the legacy of IWK is still visible. On Canal, Walker and Centre Streets, there stand branches of the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center, a nonprofit that caters to medically underserved New Yorkers, particularly Asian-Americans. There are two more locations in Flushing. The Center grew out of the Chinatown Health Clinic, which in turn grew out of the 1971 health fair organized by IWK, Corky Lee, and many other idealistic young Asian-Americans. Each year, nearly 50,000 patients visit the Charles B. Wang facilities. The mission of those young radicals—to serve the people—lives on.

Eveline Chao is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. She is the author of NIUBI!: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School, a guide to Chinese slang. Chao is currently working on an oral history project about Manhattan Chinatown.

Editor's note: After the publication of this story, Regina Lee, chief development officer at the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center, wrote in to Gothamist to express concern about our description of the origins of the Health Center. Her letter, along with a response from the author, follows:

As a volunteer in the 1971 Chinatown Health Fair and co-founder of the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center, I am writing to correct and clarify some significant misstatements and erroneous conclusions in your article "How Asian American Radicals Brought Yellow Power to Chinatown."

The person responsible for the 1971 Chinatown Health Fair was Thomas Tam. At that time, Tom was an organizer with the Lower East Side Neighborhood Health Council. The Lower East Side, which had a very successful history of community mobilization to make health services more accountable, was the target area for one of the first neighborhood health service programs funded by the national Office of Economic Development. The Health Council served as the community council for this program, which was based at Gouverneur Hospital and sought to make services more accountable to the community and strengthen resident participation in policy making. It was Tom, Marie Lam (social worker at Chinatown Planning Council), and Kai Liu (staff at Two Bridges Neighborhood Health Council) who led the successful campaign to get the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation to hire more bilingual workers at Gouverneur.

Following the tremendous community response to the health fair, Tom and the health fair organizers worked together to establish a free clinic to meet the ongoing health care needs of Chinatown residents. The Church of Our Savior on Henry Street donated free space, and we recruited volunteer doctors, nurses and students to offer 10 hours of basic health care services free of charge to all community members. We also launched patient navigator and health education programs to supplement these basic services. The volunteers who maintained the health center during those early years were mostly college students. Several years ago, the corner of Canal Street and Cortland Alley in Chinatown was named Honorable Thomas Tam Way to honor Tom's role in initiating the health fair and the clinic.

IWK did not play any meaningful role in either the health fair or the health clinic. For those of us who were involved, we found inspiration from the social activism that was occurring in the US during the '60s and early '70s, such as the free clinic movement, which started in Haight Ashbury and Berkeley, and the Johnson Administration’s Great Society programs that gave us Medicaid and Medicare. Our vision for a community-based health clinic was not shaped by the ideology of the Red Guards, but by Dr. Jack Geiger, who founded the first community health centers in the U.S. at Columbia Point in Boston and Mound Bayou in Mississippi.

During the early '70s, several Marxist Leninist groups such as IWK, October League and the Communist Party USA had a small presence in Chinatown. I remember that many people in the community were wary about these groups because of the sharp divisions in Chinatown over US-China relations. The divisions were frequently along generational lines. The health clinic leadership was very careful to steer clear of any organizational relationships/affiliation with IWK and other radical groups out of concern that volunteers and patients would be turned off.

To suggest that the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center is a legacy of IWK is an absurd conclusion. The Health Center published a 308-page history book, From Street Fair to Medical Home, in 2011 to commemorate our 40th anniversary. The book is based on oral histories conducted with Health Center founders and volunteers, as well as our archival records. The book makes no references to IWK as an initiator/influencer in the health fair or the health clinic. No founders or volunteers who participated in the interviews even mentioned IWK.

Author Eveline Chao responds:

Thanks to Regina Lee for the important supplementary information. I would like to reassure her and all the other admirable people who helped bring about the Chinatown Health Clinic and the later Charles B. Wang Community Health Center that at no point during our interviews did any former IWK members ever take credit for creating either entity. What they discussed was helping with the Chinatown Health Fair, the one-off event that preceded those entities. That involvement is corroborated in published accounts of the fair and also came up in conversations with historians, leaving me no reason to doubt the claims. I agree that IWK was not involved in the fair's later transformation into a full-time clinic; for that reason they are not mentioned in the sentence describing the founding of the Chinatown Health Clinic.

I also agree that there was not a large Marxist-Leninist presence in Chinatown; as mentioned in the piece, IWK had just 12 members. As for the concluding paragraph, because the group volunteered at the fair, which became the clinic then center, I consider it fair to paint a symbolic link between the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center and the former "mission" of the group, and to portray their histories as having intersected.

The story of how the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center came to be is a rich and commendable chapter in this city's history, but was not the subject of this piece. For that reason, I did not get into the important work of Thomas Tam, Regina Lee herself, and the many other people, of all political stripes, who brought about the clinic and the center.

My aim in telling the story of one small group of people is certainly not to diminish the achievements of others not mentioned, and I welcome the addition of more voices and more context to this story.