My Turn: King exemplified today’s shift toward radical roots

(This article originally appeared in the West Hawaii Today newspaper on January 20, 2020, but it requires a login account to view. I post the full article here.)

The upcoming federal holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an occasion to remember the movement in which he labored so prominently. This particular election year, King and that movement strike an even stronger relevance.

While it is unfortunate the country finds itself divided by political differences, it is encouraging the left has rediscovered its radical roots and is reaching for them with less hesitation. Not only is a socialist heading the pack of presidential candidates, but his place in this campaign has pushed to the left a Democratic Party that has gotten too cozy with Wall Street and too far from the masses of workers and the poor.

King would have understood this shift because in the relatively short time he was engaged in the civil rights movement, before he was assassinated, he exemplified this shift.

The civil rights movement began long before King, going at least as far back as the 1920s and ’30s. It is important while we honor the man that we pay respect to the radical roots of the movement that produced him. In doing so, we better prepare ourselves for the real areas in which we must struggle.

It’s worthwhile to review some of the history. While the two main Democratic and Republican parties were either passively supporting or silently indifferent to the cause of workers and black struggle, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was at the forefront, sending its organizers — black and white — all over the South, to northern industrial cities, the West Coast, and to the territory of Hawaii.

Founding Convention of the SNYC, February 13, 1937

In the South where King was born, the CPUSA organizers faced a barrage of hostility from the racist establishment. Some were murdered. Some, like CPUSA members Dorothy and Louis Burnham, fled. Others, like James and Esther Cooper Jackson, Ed and Augusta Strong, and Sallye Bell Davis stayed — all played a role in founding the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a front group for the CPUSA, where activists like Rosa Parks were trained.

The subsequent Montgomery bus boycott that brought King to prominence was mobilized largely by black women workers like Parks. These black women were not simply tired. They were tired from overwork and underpay but also tired of US apartheid. They were also organizers.

Parks credits CPUSA member, Mildred McAdory, with the bus boycott’s success. In 1941, more than a decade before Parks’ arrest, McAdory was herself arrested in Birmingham for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, which launched a legal fight by the CPUSA against Southern apartheid.

Parks and McAdory were not alone in this struggle. Claudia Jones, Louise Thompson Patterson, Lena Horne, Beah Richards (actress who played Sidney Poitier’s mother in the 1968 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, etc., were all black women and one time party members.

The works of SNYC and the CPUSA are pivotal to understanding King and his own evolving commitments. These works extended to Hawaii where the Honolulu chapter of the NAACP was disbanded because it had attracted members of the Communist Party, like UH chemist Charles Fujimoto, educators John and Aiko Reinecke, and Ewart and Eugenia Guinier (the Guiniers were the parents of legal scholar Lani Guinier).

In the brief years of his activism, King went from supporting a bus boycott, fighting to end Jim Crow, an advocate for civil rights, and then to speaking to broader, working-class solidarity against poverty, war, imperialism, and capitalism. He made this progression with communists at his side. Men like Bayard Rustin, who had joined the Young Communists League and helped conceive the March on Washington in 1941, and Jack O’Dell, another CPUSA member who was also director of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

So, with King we have a man, but we must also appreciate and study the movement.

The contexts that nourished and produced him and all these activists must be celebrated. There’s still much work to be done. As Sallye Bell Davis’ own daughter reminded us: the struggle is not a marathon but a relay race, where we are obliged to take these issues toward promising futures as far as we can, then hand off the batons. Davis’ daughter is, of course, Angela Davis, who joined the CPUSA in 1968.

Let’s mark this day by picking up the baton.

Lowell B. Denny, III is the chair of the Communist Party USA – Hawaii Club in Kailua-Kona

An Open Letter to Austin and the United States

 

Austin, Texas

At this writing, I have been in Austin, TX, for three days, and the least frequent but more consequential question I get is: "What are your impressions?" The most frequent and least consequential question I get is "Why?"

My first impression is more consequential to where we are in 2025, a few days before a second Trump administration. 

That impression coming from the Bergstrom-Austin International Airport was that the landscape looked like St. Louis, MO, my birthplace and where I went to college. It was the barren trees whose dark, emaciated branches stood against a cold, clear sky whose blueness also seemed washed out, next to buildings that looked neglected.

That is to say, my first impression of Austin was of any other Rust Belt city.

I didn't take too much notice of the homeless at first. I know the statistics. We've become used to those statistics around homelessness, and I did this 2021 piece for the Communist Party USA site, "A Case for the Homeless."

But over that day, and the two days that followed, as I scrambled around to pull together my move from Hawaii, ensure my cat-companion had his things, I noticed something that I hadn't seen before. Almost every street corner with a traffic light had homeless encampments of various sizes and/or hobos. Downtown, South Austin, North Austin, I saw them; their encampments built on the edge of residential neighborhoods (like I saw in Honolulu); hobos with their backpacks just walking along with their few possessions, keeping their heads up, so to speak.

I say hobos, and this may offend. That's what my grandmother in Tennessee called them when she talked about the Depression. They just "roam around, catch a train or bus." They'd ask for an odd job just to buy a meal. 

She describes how during the Depression, they'd come to the door asking for a plate of food.

This kind of story kills you. I can still hear her talking about it and how, if she had something, she'd make them a plate.

I thought of Dickens, who would recognize Austin. Two cities, one of the privileged and the other of the precariat. What was clear from what I saw on these streets - it's always been clear but struck deeper - was the pipeline from privilege to hobo - from a low-wage worker to stopping cars at intersections to ask for money or to wash your windows and ask for payment - suggested there aren't two cities at all.

It occurred to me, rather dramatically, that this country was on the verge of a collapse. The privilege that some people, like me, feel, can be taken away so easily, so quickly. And no one would care - no one on an agency or national level. 

More and more populations of people were surplus and being left, literally, in the cold. And it happens so easily.

I have globalized my own situation to make a broader political point. Thirty years ago, I wanted to become an ASL interpreter. With an already existing, unpayable college debt, and a job that sustained me hand-to-mouth, I could see no way to pursue this dream. I could not afford to work part-time hours to allow for classes either.

No one cared.

This country needs ASL interpreters, not only for the Deaf community. Interpreters don't only facilitate communication to the Deaf, but they also facilitate communication from the Deaf. This is a critical function often overlooked because we've forgot the value of living in a society.

Anyway, we need interpreters. And we need a lot of other useful work.

But no one cares.

In what to me would be a civilized country, someone like me would have been given a path, at public expense, to fulfill this critical public function.

But inasmuch as we were ever a civilization, we've ceased that. It's gone now. This is what I see on the streets of Austin, TX, today.

The scammers run the show - as property managers exploit in ways I've never imagined, or in the array of regressive taxes imposed on people here.

They're getting their pound of flesh.

These thrown-away people represent swathes, communities of bodies that can do public goods, if we still believed in public projects for the public good, for public advance. But our market system throws them away to they can inflate their bottom-lines.

It's evil.

The other part of this is not encouraging. Many of the local ads I see on social media are in two areas: personal massage therapists and "handyman"[sic] offering their services. 

Bourgeois would laud this as "industrious." And to me, if it puts a plate of food on their table, I make no qualm. 

Bless them for trying to work.

But anyone governing a country and wanting to see it advance should be troubled by this. I am. I am deeply troubled.

The market system called capitalism, which is said to have ended feudalism and ushered us into the "modern world" has, ironically, put us right back into that feudal dynamic.

The elites of feudal times didn't want to change either. Their system worked fine ... for them. But it destroyed the advancing innovations of the merchants and shopkeepers, to put it simplistically.

Ultimately, those merchants and shopkeepers had to stage bourgeois revolutions to rid the world of feudalism's tycoons, the barons, some lords, some kings - so that their societies could advance.

Now, today, our tycoons are capitalists, and they are securing their money-making system for themselves and their class alone - to the detriment not only those individual homeless but more consequentially to the broader advancement of our society.

We are all in that pipeline. It's too easy to be the next man or woman on that street corner or walking aimlessly to my next hustle.

These are revolutionary times. 

I will make a dangerous prediction: in 50 or 100 years after this inevitable revolution is in motion, social historians will not arbitrarily start the date when Luigi Mangione shot that corporate CEO on the streets of New York City. I'm not saying it started there, as these are complicated processes that are shaping all around us, all the time. But this is how history is written - a creation story. I am saying that assassination was a critical act, and the ruling class response proves that.