October 1999 

The racist terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan have announced that they will rally for "white pride" on Saturday, October 23 near City Hall in downtown Manhattan. This is a direct threat to all minorities and working people in New York City. The hooded nightriders must be stopped in their tracks by a militant mobilization of the power of the working class, blacks, immigrants and all the oppressed to crush the KKK in the egg. 

Now the Giuliani administration threatens to use police power to prevent protesters from expressing loud and clear their determination to sweep the KKK off the streets. Meanwhile, the ACLU’s Norman Siegel defends "free speech" for the lynchers, as Upper West Side liberal Democrat Scott Stringer and black Democrats Al Sharpton and David Paterson are obscenely calling for a rally for "tolerance" by sharing a sound permit with the KKK! But the working people and minorities of New York will not "tolerate" the hooded fascists. 

Liberal politicians and editorial writers say the KKK is just a bunch of kooks, that their "rally" is harmless and should be ignored. This is a dangerous illusion and a lie, as shown by the bombs against abortion clinics and assassinations of abortion providers from Alabama to New York and the massacres by "Aryan" gunmen against Jewish schoolchildren, Asians and blacks in California and Illinois. Others call on the government to "ban the Klan" – the same government that starves welfare moms and kids and whose racist killer cops terrorize minority communities. No, what’s needed is to mobilize the powerful multiracial workers movement to crush the Klan. 

Make no mistake: the KKK are not debaters, they are murderers. Anyone who thinks this is about free speech should recall James Byrd, Jr., dragged to a hideous death by Klansmen in Texas. The Klan is the spearhead of racist reaction. If they get away with this provocation, lynch mobs will go after black and immigrant youth. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have marched to protest the station house torture of Abner Louima, the NYPD death squad murder of Amadou Diallo and the wanton cop killings of so many other minority and immigrant youth. Whether they wear blue uniforms or white sheets, the racist killers must be stopped before they kill again!  

Demonstrate in a labor/black/immigrant mobilization to drive out the Ku Klux Klan. The Internationalist Group urges you to join with us in the united-front protest to stop the KKK called by the Partisan Defense Committee and numerous labor, leftist and minority spokesmen this Saturday, 12 noon, at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan – bring your coworkers, classmates, neighbors and friends. All out to stop the KKK on October 23!

A powerful mobilization of workers power on Saturday, October 23 can strike a real blow against the racist and anti-labor attacks that the capitalist rulers have escalated against the working class and the poor. It can also provide important backing for the urgent life-and-death struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical black journalist on Pennsylvania’s death row. Pennsylvania governor Ridge just signed a death warrant for Jamal, setting an execution date of December 2. The fight to defend minorities and the entire working class against KKK lynchers goes hand in hand with the struggle to abolish the racist death penalty – legal lynching derived from slavery – and to free this heroic fighter for the oppressed.

Why has the KKK targeted New York City – and why now? Throughout the U.S., New York is seen as the capital of blacks, immigrants, Hispanics, Jews, Arab Americans, Asians, gays and lesbians and others on the Klan’s hit list. It is a city of labor struggles going back to the immigrant garment workers who started International Women’s Day 90 years ago, and a historical seedbed of the struggle for black liberation. In the 1920s, in a climate of anti-immigrant and anti-communist hysteria the KKK grew to number in the millions. Today a majority of the NYC population are minorities, with a huge influx of new immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa. New York City symbolizes everything the Klan hates.

The KKK is responding to signals coming from City Hall, the White House and the halls of Congress. The fascists are drawn by Giuliani's stormtrooper tactics, like when he sent an army of cops to occupy Harlem and shut down the "Million Youth March" called by the bigoted demagogue Khallid Muhammad, or the brutal police beating of demonstrators protesting the sadistic murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. They are attracted by the mayor’s police-state methods, turning City Hall into a bunker and even trying to shut down Brooklyn Museum over what he calls "sick art." 

In the 1980s, the KKK and Nazis crawled out from under the rocks at the height of the anti-Soviet offensive begun by Democrat Carter and taken to a fever pitch by Republican Reagan. Today the reactionary climate is set by U.S. imperialist warmonger-in-chief Clinton, who engages in wanton mass murder from Iraq to Yugoslavia while throwing millions of mothers and children off welfare at home. The Klan’s appetites are whetted by migra raids against immigrant workers of the sweatshop districts (recall the KKK "patrols" along the Mexican border). And when they see thousands pushed into union-busting "workfare," the Klan yearns to bring back the slavery days of the lash, the chain and the branding iron.

Giuliani and the Klan seek to intimidate and terrify the oppressed. But those who the fascists want to trample and kill have the strength to defend ourselves. There are hundreds of thousands of city workers, hospital and telephone workers, Teamsters and other unionized workers who make this city run and who can stop it cold in protest over marauding cops or to stop this fascist provocation. Moreover, the struggle against the racist terrorists can contribute to building a working-class offensive against the arrogant parasites of Wall Street who grind the poor into the dirt while amassing vast profits from the labor of the working people. 

In particular, the 33,000-member, integrated Transport Workers Union can shut down New York, as should have been done in response to the torture of Abner Louima and the murder of Amadou Diallo. Today we call for the TWU to mobilize against the KKK and to strike to demand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, following the lead of Brazilian teachers and West Coast U.S. longshoremen last April. This would strengthen transit workers for the necessary strike battle against the arrogant TA and city bosses, which could galvanize the labor movement throughout the city. Such a struggle requires throwing cops out of the union and forging a class-struggle leadership against the TWU bureaucracy and the union-suing out-bureaucrats.

The union bureaucrats want to keep the ranks of labor "in line" for the Democratic Party. Yet it was because of the sellout policies of the pro-capitalist labor leaders that the labor movement lost one crucial struggle after another, from the PATCO air traffic controllers on. Likewise, black Democrat Sharpton channeled the outrage over the cold-blooded cop murder of Amadou Diallo into "civil disobedience" by Democratic politicians. Now he is the buddy of racist former mayor Ed Koch. And don’t forget that it was liberal black Democratic mayor Dinkins who hired thousands of new cops to terrorize the ghettos and barrios. 

The official black and Hispanic leaders are in business to subordinate the oppressed to the racist Democratic and Republican parties of U.S. imperialism. It is the capitalists and their politicians who produce the social decay and destruction that the Klan feeds off. What is urgently required is a revolutionary workers party to lead the fight to put an end to racist oppression and capitalist exploitation through workers revolution here and around the world.

The fight to crush the KKK is a fight to mobilize the power of the working class in its own interests and in defense of all the exploited and oppressed. The Internationalist Group, section of the League for the Fourth International, says: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal – Smash the racist death penalty! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Labor and the oppressed must break from the Democrats and Republicans – Forge a revolutionary workers party! MOBILIZE WORKERS POWER TO CRUSH THE KKK! ALL OUT TO STOP THE KLAN ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23, 12 NOON, AT 100 CENTRE STREET IN MANHATTAN!