League of Revolutionary Struggle

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League of Revolutionary Struggle dissolved into the Socialist Organizing Network and Unity Organizing Committee in 1990.

History

The League of Revolutionary Struggle was founded in 1978 and was the result of the merging of six Marxist-Leninist organizations: August 29th Movement, I Wor Kuen, Revolutionary Communist League, East Wind Organization, Seize the Time collective, and New York Collective. Those organizations in turn trace their roots to the Congress of Afrikan People, La Raza Unida Party and other oppressed nationality organizations of the 1960’s.

Forward

In the early 1980s Anne Adams, Carl Davidson and Michael Lee were co-editors of Forward, the magazine of the League of Revolutionary Struggle.

Publications

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Getting Together Publications was the publishing company of the League of Revolutionary Struggle.

In addition to Unity /La Unidad newspaper, the publishing company also produced numerous pamphlets, magazines and a journal. Each of the publications had its unique character.

Unity pamphlets were collections of articles that had appeared in Unity/La Unidad on a particular subject. Occasionally, there were pamphlets with writings and artwork created on a special topic.

Forward began as the theoretical journal of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L) in 1979. Several years later, Forward became a journal for socialist thought, and it invited contributed articles from many activists on the left.

The Black Nation, Journal of Afro-American Thought, was a magazine that was published from 1981 to 1986. Edited by members of the LRS and led by Amiri Baraka, The Black Nation also had broad input from thinkers and activists in the Black Liberation Movement.

East Wind: Politics and Culture of Asians in America was a magazine that was published from 1982 to 1989. A diverse editorial board governed the content of the magazine.[1]

"UNITY: Student Supplement", Spring 1987

UNITY published a "Student Supplement" in the Spring 1987. The following is a listing of key articles, especially where a writer's name appears, often with a little "description section of who they are". There is a possibility that not all of these writers/contributors official members of the "League of Revolutionary Struggle" or its youth section, but were outside contributors or "stringers" concerning certain events and/or issues/topics.

Page 2: (History)

Ed Gallegos sits on the United Mexican American Students Board at the University of Colorado Boulder. P.3

[Educational Rights] - Eva Martinez Geron - contributed. "Education is our right!": Third World student networks launch major ongoing offensive" - Sacramento, Calif. Eva Martinez Geron is a member of the MEChA Statewide Task Force for Educational Rights]] P. 6

March on Sacramento for Education - California, April 6, 1987. "The mile-long march and massive rally was initiated and led by three statewide Third World student networks -

"Joining the students in the march and rally were the

P. 5: "Student activists talk about the march"

P. 6 is a continuation of this article. Nothing specific to add here re names.

CONTINUE P. 7-8 here [From Coast to Coast] page 7

Speaker: * Kevin Qhoboshiane, ANC Youth Section (ANC), African National Congress. The meeting at Hunter College met "to form theNortheast Student Coalition Against Apartheid and racism (SCAAR).

Page 8: "UNITY In Motion With the People""

Head photos of student activists with organizational affiliation and quotes.

Supporting Black Self-Determination

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Eric Mann on the LRS

From former LRS member Eric Mann:

The LRS envisioned a socialist revolution in the United States as part of a world revolution in which a black nation in the American South and a Chicano nation in the Southwest would ally with the multinational working class—including white workers—and the peoples and nations of the Third World. The LRS set up a national office and ran a national newspaper, Unity/Unidad. It also had hundreds of cadres working in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Newark, and New York. Taking seriously the Marxist slogan “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” those of us who were well-paid autoworkers—I was a member from 1975 to 1985—made non–tax deductible contributions of $250–400 a month, ensuring that the organization was staffed with comrades who, working long hours, could at least pay their rent and support their families. We set up a childcare service so women could play leading roles in the organization and so children would make friends of all races, growing up in the society we wanted to build. One of our goals was to advance cultural integration as well as economic justice.
Across the country, LRS members got jobs in meatpacking plants, molten foundries, and auto factories. Like the LRBW, the LRS was instrumental in union reform movements that challenged the UAW leadership’s class collaboration. In St. Louis the LRS built a powerful UAW black caucus in a major auto factory, and in East St. Louis, Illinois, it founded the Organization for Black Struggle, which challenged police and slumlords and recruited militant and politically conscious black youth. In Los Angeles, LRS members in UAW Local 645 led an unprecedented campaign to keep GM Van Nuys open. A large and diverse group of workers built a labor/community coalition rooted in the black and Latino communities. We threatened GM with a boycott in L.A. County—the largest new car market in the country—and built a movement so strong that GM backed down and kept the plant open for ten years. I worked on the assembly line at Van Nuys for a decade and was the chair of the campaign, a story told in my book, Taking on General Motors (1987), and in a fine film by Michal Goldman, Tiger by the Tail (1986). In Oakland black LRS cadres worked with the Transit Workers Union and in New York they helped to lead the fight against police brutality.[2]

Supporting the Rainbow

Unity March 23 1984
Unity June 20 1984

The League of Revolutionary Struggle backed Jesse Jackson for President in 1984 and 1988.[3]

Warren Mar, Organizing Upgrade, How Can the Left Participate in Electoral Campaigns? August 31, 2018:

I worked on both the 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson for President Campaigns and was an open member of the LRS during my tenure. There was a big difference between the Jackson campaign in ’84 and ’88. In 1984 Jesse Jackson was less of a serious challenger and more of a messenger for progressives, including the African American community, that had seen the Democratic Party backpedal on all the gains of the civil rights movement won in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The new left organizations of the previous decade were mostly still in place during the 84 campaign, with a mass base in unions and communities of color.
In 1984, many of the struggles Jesse Jackson was involved in that Bill Fletcher mentions in his “Lessons for today from the 1980’s Rainbow,” were the result of the left’s ability at that time to pull Jesse into struggles and in return give him reciprocal support for his electoral aspirations from places we had a base. For the LRS, this meant striking hotel workers, striking cannery workers, support committees for miners, and visits to Chicano barrios and Chinatowns. On college campuses he visited with Asian Students, Chicano Students in MECHA, and the Anti-Apartheid divestment and anti-sweatshop movements.
Jesse Jackson deserves credit for his leadership in embracing racial justice and class inequality, but without the left’s participation, he would not have received the breadth of exposure or the depth of analysis, nor in return receive as broad a reception as he received outside of the Black civil rights movement where he had historic ties. The left, including the LRS, also challenged the lack of proportional delegates Jackson was entitled to at the 1984 Democratic Party Convention held in San Francisco. As luck would have it, the San Francisco Bay Area was the national center of many new left groups including the LRS. As a few of our elected Jackson delegates entered the Moscone Convention Center, thousands rallied outside, demanding an equal voice, based on the votes cast in the 1984 primary. That convention changed the electoral threshold required to gain primary delegates, laying the groundwork for Jesse Jackson to become a serious contender in 1988.

1988: The Demise of the New Left Organizations & LRS

It would seem from the in-roads made in 1984 that the left would have had a bigger impact and made more significant gains in 1988, but while Jesse got more votes, the organized left and mass movements were much weaker after the 1988 elections. There were two trends we underestimated or ignored. First, this country was still moving to the right. Reagan easily trounced Mondale in the general election of 1984 and George Bush, likewise, dispatched of Dukakis in 1988. Worse, the Democratic Party was also moving to the right. I agree with Bill Fletcher on the left’s wishful thinking about the Democratic Party’s consolidation under the Democratic Leadership Council, which would usher in the Clintons and later accept Barack Obama. African American Democrats, elected into local office, would follow this trend. For those of us from San Francisco, Assemblyman, State Legislator, and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown reflects this trend. By the 1980’s, Black mayors and Black municipal elected officials carried out the Democratic Leadership Council’s programs: attacking social safety nets, dismantling affirmative action and implementing the war on drugs, increasing the incarceration rates for Black and Brown people.
But the other crucial trend, which many of us in our left bubble did not realize until too late, was that while the right was on the rise throughout the 80’s, our New Left movement was on the decline. There was a big difference in what remained of the New Left between 1984 and 1988. The LRS lasted longer than most, officially dissolving in 1990. By the 1988 elections and definitely by the debate on the Rainbow’s future in March 1989, most of the New Left groups were gone. I didn’t know it at the time but the LRS was also in critical condition.
In 1984 I was a cook in a hotel in San Francisco, and an elected rank and file officer of Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 2. I pushed for Jesse Jackson’s endorsement in this capacity and as a delegate to the SF Labor Council. Most LRS members worked this way in some capacity or other. Most if not all of us were unpaid volunteers. By 1988 I was on as a full time paid organizer of the same Local. I got release time to go to work on the Jackson campaign as his Northern California Labor coordinator. I also went down to Houston to work on Super Tuesday. I worked as a full-time paid staff member of his campaign.
In 1984, the LRS was not alone in my union local; there were many cadres from various left groups in hotels and some restaurants all over the city. By 1988-89 all those organizations and by extension, their cadres were gone. In 1988, there were more leftist staff in Local 2, including from LRS, but our cadres’ anchoring our base in various workplaces were mostly gone. This was the beginning of the end for the new left organizations, coinciding with the 1988 Jackson campaign, creating the perfect storm.

Without a strong mass movement and base, the left is at a disadvantage in a united front electoral campaign Why is this important? I joined I Wor Kuen (IWK), a predecessor of LRS in 1974. We were growing exponentially and expanding across nationalities and geographical areas. As socialists we believed we should be based in the working class. We targeted industries to go into. I could speak Chinese and this added to my ability to organize the majority immigrant workforce. I went into HERE, because I was asked/told to. I held working class jobs as a Teamster, but working in union warehouses was still better than union restaurant work, which was immigrant based work and I was American born. I had done restaurant work in high school and hated it. I swore I would never do it again – until I became a leftist. Besides strategically placing cadre in union industries, IWK also had the line that we could run for elected union office but not take appointed union staff jobs. We explicitly opposed people who had never worked in an industry taking on union staff jobs.
By the mid-80’s, we were having a harder time recruiting into the LRS. We changed the above policies slowly. First we started taking union staff jobs, but with cadre who had at least worked in the industry. This coincided with one area of recruitment that had not totally dried up: student work, especially in some of the campuses with an active anti-apartheid movement. Many new recruits in the 80’s came from some of the elite universities. Many factory and working class jobs in the 70’s were filled by student radicals who came off the campuses in the 60’s. The LRS student recruits leaving college in the 80’s would not consider going into factories or low level service work. They did however consider going directly into union staff jobs, work as legislative aides or on campaign work with politicians. They also moved directly into municipal government jobs, another position we opposed in the early days of IWK. We felt it was difficult to fight city hall when you work there.
Some members in the national leadership of the LRS, in particular Asians from the IWK, also had ambitions to move on from revolutionary work and their educated backgrounds gave them rapid entre to Jesse Jackson's upper-echelon staff positions. The exceptions they made for the younger cadre of the 80’s on college campuses like Berkeley and Stanford fit in nicely with their own aspirations to move on. Many of the top national and regional staff positions in the ’88 Jackson campaign were occupied by not just members of LRS, but Asian Americans, formerly of IWK. This is one reason we sided with Jackson on the dissolution of the Rainbow into his personal campaign organization in 1989. His top staff members would stay with him, or with his blessing, go into local electoral campaigns of their own. This was not unique to LRS cadre. Many former members of CWP, CPML, LOM, etc. ran and won local offices after the 1988 campaign or got jobs as legislative aids or took positions as municipal bureaucrats.

New Electoral Majority

From Forward, Vol. 9, number 1, Spring 1989, pages 4 and 5.

The Jackson campaign also pointed the way towards a progressive electoral strategy, which the left needs to developas part of its immediate political program. Concretely, this means develop ing strategies to expand and shift the electorate, and breaking the so-called conservative electoral "lock" in the South and Southwest, which has upheld the right-wing edge in the last four presi dential elections.
People of color now approach 30% of the U.S. population. The changing demographics in the U.S. will make oppressed nationalities the majority in California and Texas by the turn of the cen tury, and they will comprise a steadily increasing proportion of the population as a whole.
With increased voter regis tration and participation, Black, Latino, Asian, poor white and other historically disenfranchised voters can constitute a new, progressive electoral majority. This new electoral majority, with its base in the South and Southwest and key Northern industrial areas, can make the critical difference in future elections. It provides the electoral basis for reversing the right-wing direction of American politics.
Electoral work is thus an important aspect of our work to build the mass movement against the right, and for democracy and social progress.

Peak influence

At its height, the League of Revolutionary Struggle had chapters in over a dozen cities with nearly 3,000 cadres and thousands of followers. Its newspaper, Unity/La Unidad, was published bi-monthly in three languages — English, Spanish, and Chinese. The LRS also published Forward, a theoretical journal; The Black Nation; and East Wind: Art and Politics of Asians in America.

Other Unity/La Unidad pamphlets helped invigorate the resistance to the regressive politics of U.S. capitalists led by the reactionary administration of Ronald Reagan.[4]

Slow demise

According to former League of Revolutionary Struggle member David Hungerford.

The League of Revolutionary Struggle continued the work of its constituent organizations through the 1980s. However, ideological and theoretical work was almost completely neglected after 1985 or so. By 1988 the LRS leadership had virtually become an appendage of Jesse Jackson’s presidential aspirations. Amiri resigned from the organization in protest. I didn’t agree with him about Jackson at the time but he proved to be right. But I think it would have been better if he had stayed in and continued the fight.
Gorbachev’s “glasnost” and the following crisis caught the LRS leadership completely unprepared. They refused to respond to demands of cadres to say something about the Soviet breakup. Instead they surrendered to bourgeois ideas and repudiated Marxism-Leninism. An attempt was made to continue the organization on a reformist basis, but without the discipline and sense of purpose that comes with Marxism-Leninism it simply faded away.[5]

Split

In 1990 League of Revolutionary Struggle split, with one group ( including most of the Asian comrades) dropping Maoism, and maintaining control of Unity, becoming the Unity Organizing Committee. The other faction kept a more traditional outlook, becoming the Socialist Organizing Network, which later merged with Freedom Road Socialist Organization .

'Yellow Power'

From an article dated Oct 19, 2016 by Eveline Chao at Gothamist titled "How Asian-American Radicals Brought 'Yellow Power' To Chinatown":[6]

"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.

References

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ Review, Lost Radicals ERIC MANNJanuary 15, 2014
  3. ↑ [2]
  4. ↑ Archive Project, What was the League of Revolutionary Struggle?
  5. ↑ FightBack News, Reflections on Amiri Baraka Oct. 7, 1934 - Jan. 9, 2014 Commentary by David Hungerford | January 12, 2014
  6. ↑ How Asian-American Radicals Brought 'Yellow Power' To Chinatown (Accessed May 5, 2023)
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