BOSTON, JUL 14-20—More than 100 comrades and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated in a week-long summer project in Boston to commemorate the 1975 fight back against the racist anti-integration group ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) and strengthen the 2025 fight against racist and fascist deportations. Summer projects provide opportunities for PLP to fortify our forces in specific areas, develop new leaders, and learn from one another’s struggles in different parts of the world. By the end of the week, at least eight more young people joined the Progressive Labor Party–that’s eight more nails in the bosses’ coffin! In addition, we gathered numerous contacts, sold 500 CHALLENGEs, and distributed 4,000 anti-ICE fliers.

Building on our history of fightback

On the first day of the summer project, several veteran comrades shared their experiences from the 1975 Boston summer project. During that months-long project, the comrades launched a battle against the segregation of Boston’s public schools. The liberal ruling class of Boston was building a racist movement against bussing, and our comrades came to smash that movement. They organized Freedom Schools and provided free summer camp activities and instruction for mostly Black youth, whose schools were in totally dilapidated conditions. They showed up on the first day of school to welcome Black students who were going to predominantly white schools and provided 24/7 security for a Black family who was being threatened by racists. They also went door-to-door in white neighborhoods to canvas and organize white workers in the fight for integration and pointed out that ROAR’s racist pro-segregation propaganda obscured the fact that white public schools were under-resourced too.

Many of the white stay-at-home moms they met held anti-racist ideas but were afraid to speak out because they feared ROAR would retaliate against their children. They were surprised to hear that other women on their block felt the same way. PLP helped connect these workers, who agreed to sign the pro-integration petitions together in house meet-ups.

PLP members in 1975 bravely faced off ROAR’s racist thugs in South Boston on more than one occasion. This included a physical confrontation on Carson Beach, which was previously considered “whites-only.” After six Black Bible salesmen got assaulted by racists on the beach, PLP called for a militant protest. The NAACP essentially told everyone to stay home, but later changed their plan to be a “picnic-in.” PLP, NAACP, a group of Black Nationalists, ROAR, and the cops on horseback all showed up. A fight ensued. The comrades pointed out that this was the day they “broke the back” of ROAR, which despite aspirations to become a national movement, disbanded around a year later. 

Beefing up gutter racists

Throughout the week, we did two full-group marches and nine smaller rallies in working class neighborhoods and near train stations, including a bold march through downtown Boston to protest outside the ICE office. We distributed CHALLENGE and anti-deportation fliers and gave rousing speeches in Creole and Spanish, reaching a multiracial group of workers across Boston. Comrades, new and veteran, gave fiery speeches on the bullhorns about the necessity of building an international communist party to smash capitalism and end fascist deportations. One worker coming out of the train station recognized a comrade from a CHALLENGE sale a few months back and then stuck around and joined us for other summer project events.

We experienced a lot of positive reception to our anti-fascist/anti-capitalist view. In Worcester, the party’s anti-ICE sentiments met with a lot of enthusiasm. Cars passed our picket and continuously honked the entire time we were there. We contacted a local anti-ICE activist who instructed us how to identify ICE and explained how community members in Worcester keep one another safe by alerting one another. 

In Roslindale Square, we encountered a predominantly white and older crowd who were participating in a “Good Trouble” protest in memory of John Lewis. While the liberal leadership of this march was unhappy that we had sharper anti-racist and anti-fascist chants than “No Kings!”, many participants flocked to us to check out our literature and chose to stand by our chanters. One worker lamented when our youthful multiracial crew had a lull in the chanting, “What happened to our cheerleaders?” and again when we left, “Don’t leave! We need you!” A college student who saw a comrade board a bus and hand out CHALLENGE got off, joined our rally, and started chanting “Smash racist deportations, working people have no nations!” with us on the bullhorn.

The interest didn’t stop on the streets: Many workers, from uber drivers to postal workers to baristas and commuters on the train were drawn to our communist literature and conversation wherever we went. 

We also attended a Black history presentation given by a park ranger who focused on abolition and fights for integration throughout Bostonian history. We noted that Fugitive Slave Act kidnappings were eerily like ICE kidnappings today with family separations, needing papers to prove one’s freedom to the court, and crackdowns on those who tried to get in the way. The park ranger’s presentation showed that the fight for abolition required militant struggle. There were also those who engaged in the everyday organizing to create safehouses for the underground railroad system in which workers cared for workers. This legacy of fight-back is one that PLP hopes to extend into the present. Capitalism necessitates brutal repression of workers and we will pick up the weapons of our ancestors to fight for an egalitarian future.  

We also had study groups on imperialism, fascism, and dialectical materialism, and we went to an anti-deportation play that was written by a comrade. We took time to socialize with one another, not only at a beach trip, but with multiple cook-outs and walks around town. We stayed together in houses, where we took turns making meals and cleaning up. Base-building involves not just political work but getting to know one another. It is also through these experiences that we gain glimpses of what it means to collectively run society. The week-long project was an important step forward for the growth of the Party both in New England and in the world.

 This article is a companion piece to Part I of our Boston ’75 series, published in the July 16th issue of CHALLENGE, which chronicled our struggle against the racist, fascist group Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in Boston during the summer of 1975. Here, we examine the virulent expansion of ROAR into New York City, in reaction to Black and Latin families moving into what was then a predominantly white, working-class neighborhood and PLP’s fightback to defeat the racists in the Morris Park section of the Bronx.

In Part I, titled Remember Boston ’75: Reds Busted Racists, we explored the roots of the fascist ROAR movement and decisive role played by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the PLP-led International Committee Against Racism (INCAR), which organized a militant, multiracial movement that ultimately crushed ROAR’s efforts.

When Black workers are under attack, it is the duty of all workers and antiracists to stand up and fight back. Fifty years later, the fight against racist state sponsored violence is not over. Like the Black workers in Cincinnati militantly organizing against Neo-Nazis and multiracial groups of workers standing against ICE in L.A., Chicago, and Newark, to smash racist attacks and any far-right movement, we need Progressive Labor Party (PLP)— a mass internationalist communist party, committed to militant fightback and revolution. 

Racist Plague in Boston emboldens Racists New York City

In 1975, racists in New York were inspired by the racist group “ROAR” (“Restore Our Alienated Rights”) in Boston that opposed busing to end segregation in Boston’s public schools. This was a serious fascist, openly racist movement, and it had somewhat of a mass base. ROAR leaders were on the Boston City Council. The letters “ROAR” were pasted on the windows of the Boston municipal building and one of its organizers was on the Boston School Commission, leading the fight against integrating the public schools. Boston ROAR tried to organize nationwide.

PLP has a long history of fighting racism in the Bronx and Queens, New York City. In 1975 a few Black families had just begun moving into Morris Park, the Bronx, a working-class neighborhood, largely Italian and Irish. They were attacked by racists organized by the “Morris Park Association,” which claimed to represent the white residents of Morris Park. In fact, it was allied with the Mafia, an organized crime group headed by Vincent Basciano, alias “Vinny Gorgeous” after the beauty salon he ran that doubled as his front. (Basciano is now serving a life sentence for murder without possibility of parole in a federal prison).

There was plenty of crime in Morris Park – murder, gambling, racketeering, extortion – but it was largely ignored, either because the crime was committed by “whites” or from fear. The claims by the Morris Park Association that “minorities” were responsible were lies. There was plenty of crime already! As one resident put it, Morris Park “tolerated crime as long as the criminals looked familiar. That’s not community pride. That’s hypocrisy.”

When Black, Yemeni, Indian, and Dominican families started moving into Morris Park, the racist organizing began. One resident remembers: “When I was a kid in the 70s the Morris Park Association used to give out money to teens who would beat up ‘undesirable’ visitors … money was given and Black kids were beaten.”

Racists’ organizing in the Bronx is crushed by multiracial workers’ power

In the summer of 1975 ROAR expanded into New York. The Morris Park Association paid for a racist ad in the Bronx Home News. It opposed busing and claimed that Blacks were getting favored treatment over whites. The Morris Park Association claimed a membership of 400, and between 200 and 300 people attended their meetings. The racists were trying to build a mass base.

PLP organized a march of several hundred in Morris Park starting from Jacobi Hospital, one of the city’s health facilities drastically harmed by cutbacks, and down Morris Park Avenue, a main shopping area. We chanted “No Boston Here,” “Stop the Bosses, Not the Buses,” and “Jobs – Not Racism.”

When we got within a block of the racists’ headquarters, we were met by a crowd of about 100 people, including many teenage boys, some curious, some hostile. Hundreds of residents lined the streets to watch our march. There hadn’t been any communist marches in the Bronx in decades.

Fascists fade away when faced with multiracial unity organized by the Party

At this point the Morris Park Association leaders did not want to reveal their fascist nature by physically attacking us. In addition, our discipline and obvious willingness to defend ourselves made them wonder how well they would do in a fight with us, particularly since they had probably heard from their fellow racists in Boston about how we drove them back in the Battle of Columbia Point.

A member of PLP who lived in Morris Park explained that local residents should resist being drawn into a racist trap, and warned the young people against being used the way Hitler used youth to attack Jews. A leader of the Morris Park Association was heard to say: “Let’s get these kids out of here – they’re eating this up.” We picketed for a while and marched through the neighborhood back to Jacobi. We handed out antiracist flyers, sold CHALLENGE, and talked to many residents.

When school opened in September, the racists tried to organize a boycott by white students of Christopher Columbus High School, where non-white students were being bussed. A multiracial PLP antiracist committee welcomed the bused students. The racist Morris Park Association could not even muster a picket line as hundreds of Black, white, and Latin students poured into the school. The racist boycott flopped.

Sources:

Morris Party march, July 31, 1975, page 5.

“Move Against Fascists” – May 31, 1975 March in Morris Park, Bronx. June 12, 1975, page 5.

“Try Intimidating Communists” and

“Anti-Racist March for Jobs” (Morris Park, Bx), June 31, 1975, page 5.

Editorial: “School Racists = Strike-Breakers,” (Morris Park, Bx), September 18, 1975, page 2.

For PLP’s May Day March and Anti-Racist summer project against “R.O.A.R.” in Boston, 1975, see the following:

“Remember Boston ’75: Reds Busted Racists.” CHALLENGE July 16, 2025, pages 8 and 7. At https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/13667-remember-boston-75-reds-busted-racists

“Fascism and Busing in Boston.” PL Magazine vol. 10, no. 1. August- September, 1975 (also a PLP pamphlet).

“40th Anniversary of Boston ‘75 — PLP Smashed Anti-Busing Racists”, CHALLENGE, April 22, 2015, page 5. At http://www.plp.org/challenge/2015/4/9/40th-anniversary-of-boston-75-plp-smashed-anti-busing-racist.html

”PLP History: Anti-Racism at Forefront of Communist Fightback,” CHALLENGE, July 29, 2015, page 8. At http://www.plp.org/challenge/2015/7/16/plp-history-anti-racism-at-forefront-of-communist-fightback.html

“PLP History: The Summer of Smashing Racists.” CHALLENGE August 5, 2020, page 8. At https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/10958-plp-history-the-summer-of-smashing-racists

Washington D C. July 22—“The Philippines is Not for Sale, Not for Sale, Not for Sale” rang out for three days while President  Ferdinand Marcos, Jr, the fascist dictator and U.S. flunky from the Philippines, was meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Over 100 people joined rallies around the White House, at the WWII Memorial, and Blair House where he was staying. A coalition of Filipino organizations and the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) will continue this activity during his State of the Union address next week in Manila. A Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member who is active with the University of Maryland TerpCHRP(Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines) students joined the White House rally, sharing CHALLENGE with the Bayan and Malayan organizers and reconnected with students from Baltimore and Towson University.

The blood soaked Marcos return to the Philippines was met with thousands of workers protesting his visit. PLP is committed to communist internationalism and urges all workers and students to join our efforts to fight directly for communism to replace all the varieties of capitalism and imperialism that exist around the world. 

Fascism and anti-communism in the Philippines 

Marcos, Jr is continuing the fascist legacy of his father, former president Marcos, Sr, who declared Martial Law in 1972 to combat the new Communist Party of the Philippines. He met with Trump to seek tariff relief and was “rewarded” for his “ironclad” commitment to the U.S. defense strategy in the South China Sea. Trump decreased the tariff on the Philippines from 20 percent to 19 percent! Funding for an ammunition hub in Subic Bay was another “gift” as the U.S. rebuilt its military and especially naval activity in the area to intimidate its Chinese rivals. Protestors demanded that the U.S. military and its private contractors get out of the Philippines along with the recent Fighter jets bought by the government.

Students and alumni of the University of Maryland travelled to the Philippines to observe elections and view the conditions of the workers and small farmers. One student reported back to the group noting several attacks on militant workers fighting for their livelihood. Fishermen, farmers, and workers who organize resistance are “red baited” and many have been forcibly displaced or killed. Meanwhile, clean drinking water on coastal fishing sites is scarce due to privatization as Prime Water Infrastructure Corp., owned by the politically connected Manuel Paolo Villar family, siphons water off to other projects. 

Fighting racist deportations 

Worker groups from the Philippines and and their allies have also fought the deportations of workers from the Philippines residents in the United States, calling on the Embassy and Ambassador Romualdez to protect its citizens. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to deport Phillipine workers including SEIU union members, green card holders and, more  recently, cruise ship workers. These reform campaigns have mobilize immigrants from the Philippines in the U.S. to fight back. They also demand a national government that boots out U.S. imperialism.

The Bayan speaker at the most recent rally called for national liberation and socialism, a misleading strategy for the liberation of the working class. PLP will continue to fight side by side against racist repression and deportation of our  brothers and sisters from the Philippines even as we advance the fight to smash all imperialist states, from the U.S. to China, and build an international revolutionary communist party to build a new world.

Dear CHALLENGE, I was a participant in the 50th anniversary of the Boston Summer Project. My visit to Boston was the second time there. The first time I was privileged to fight against the racist movement to prevent the desegregation of the public schools; this time I was amazed at how the Party has continued to evolve and the many young faces who joined the communist ranks of our Party. Multiracial and multigenerational, we are the fighting force against racist deportations, police murders, and the fascist government movement. I can visualize what Marx said, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” The future is bright for the working class as we struggle to defeat our enemies and build a communist society. Let the bosses tremble at the forces being built to smash their cruel, degenerate, dying system of oppression. Long live the communist working class! 
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Going to the summer project this year was beneficial for many reasons. 1. It is always good to connect with comrades, new and old. Knowing you have people you can rely on in this struggle is primary, because we can’t do anything without each other. 2. As I have started to develop my own politics I have been able to identify disagreements I have with the party line. These disagreements have created new ways in which I engage with the Party. The biggest difference is that I can now play a more active role vs before when my role in the Party was more passive. I have found that other comrades share similar disagreements and through those conversations we are able to synthesize a sharper line. 3. Being at the summer project this year, I have been able to further refine and synthesize my thoughts about the Party line and the disagreements I have with it. I’m looking forward to the continued struggle, within the Party and outside of it, for the correct internationalist line for revolution and communism.
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I want to tell you my experience at the Boston Summer project. The experience that stood out  the most to me was the march to the Federal Building.

We started marching after doing a picket line at Park St. From there, we shouted chants such as “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white, workers of the world unite!” and “Boston PD you better start shaking, today’s pigs are tomorrow’s bacon!” I participated in the picket line while holding a red flag.

I thought this experience was the most valuable (despite the heat) because of the messages it sent and what we are fighting for. If I had the chance to do it again, I would have no problem doing so. 
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One major takeaway for me from the Boston summer project (other than the amazing antiracist history of Boston 75) is the importance of thinking and and acting collectively. During the project, we are often in houses with five to ten other people, and no one comrade has the exact same needs or approach. Because of that, we need to be really upfront and disciplined in how we communicate so we can not only arrive at where we need to be each day, but also so we can keep the places where we are staying functional. 

There is beauty in working together to figure out something like public transit in a new city because even though something like that isn’t world changing, it shows the confidence and communication we must have with each other that is a microcosm of our class running society one day. 
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Attending the summer project in Boston has been a fulfilling experience for my growth as a Party member. It is very exciting to hear the stories of our comrades who attended the summer project in Boston ‘75. They told how the struggle has been strengthened over time and how the working class must continue this legacy, and it is an honor and a pride to share with these people who set a precedent in history in the struggle of the working class.

One of the things that captured my attention the most was interacting with different comrades from many places and how we all share the same interest to fight against the fascist capitalist system and strengthen our communist struggle.

In the study groups we touched on topics of great importance such as violent deportations of migrants, overexploitation of labor, as well as how there is conflict between small and big fascists for world control.To overcome this imperialist deception the working class needs to know in a proper way and understand the Party’s policy in order to transmit it, so it is important to continue with these study groups to strengthen what we have learned. The class struggle has no racist borders.
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This week marked my first time on a bullhorn, getting donations, and getting contacts. I was not confident in my ability to get loud or project my voice, fearful that I would mess up or get confused, but eventually a comrade asked me to read off a piece from our flyers that were passed out at rallies. I was extremely hesitant to try something new, as I never would’ve imagined doing something that seemed so bold before this project. I remembered making a joke that I blacked out when I was talking but it felt natural. The words were on the paper for me already but the way I spoke was completely new and unexpected. The next day was even better; we started a march on the federal building moving towards those both receptive and unwilling to listen. As we started to circle around the front of the building, I was asked to get on the bullhorn again and chant. That was initially a hard no, but I remember being motivated to get on after getting told that everyone that was chanting was tired and losing their voices. I think that this culmination of experiences is what made me join the Party on the last day. Even though I was already in agreement with the Party, this year’s summer project brought me more positive and extroverted experiences than I’ve had in my whole life. I don’t think that next year’s project could come soon enough.
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I am a comrade who flew from Raleigh, North Carolina  to participate  in the 50th anniversary  of the Boston Summer Project of 1975. This anniversary  is politically important  to learn from and be inspired by PLP’s revolutionary  commitment  to  defeat ruling class tactics that were a trial balloon in how to use fascism to attack the working  class,  particularly Black workers during the boss instigated 1975 busing crisis. The lesson for 2025 is to use the sharp Party politics of 1975 to fight racist ICE raids on immigrant workers. We had CHALLENGE and leafleting in multiracial Cambridge. 

I absolutely  loved visiting Boston and being an active participant in the Summer Project. It was great meeting my Comrades of many years and new ones. The fight against racist ICE  is one of the important antiracist struggles of our day. On one of the days we visited a Haitian working class neighborhood. Two comrades came across the street wanting to know ‘Anyone speak French?’ I said I can speak some. They needed to explain CHALLENGE to a Haitian  worker! One of the reasons PLP will win the workers to communist revolution is that in our Party, workers have many talents that can be called on in a moment’s time. 

We visited Worcester to protest ICE, and Thursday was a free day, so I went to see Harvard Square, Harvard Bookstore,  and Harvard University. On the way downtown, I met a young Black university student. We chatted,  and I told him I was a former teacher in  town for the Boston Summer Project. I didn’t  have a CHALLENGE newspaper on me, but I directed him to a Party website. Bottom line, it’s those human connections with working class people is why we are going to have a successful communist revolution against our oppressors.
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