This event marked a milestone in a more than two-year effort by the communist movement to reach deeper into the Southeast, noted Dennis Richter, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Participants came from Charlotte and Greensboro, North Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; and Atlanta.

Richter read a list of struggles that the socialist movement has participated in over the past two years that led the way toward the successful opening of the Pathfinder bookstore. They include the fight against the frame-up of the Charleston Five; a picket by garment workers in Tignall, Georgia; a march in Washington in support of the Palestinians' right to return to their land; a conference of coal miners fighting for black lung benefits in West Virginia; events around the victory won by Blacks in Stanly County; the fight against linking the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday with a holiday to celebrate Robert E. Lee; and many more. The SWP and Young Socialists "will be using this office and bookstore as a springboard to do more of these things," Richter emphasized.

The featured speaker was James Harris, a textile worker and National Committee member of the SWP. "More is to come," commented Harris, who read a passage from Víctor Dreke's book. "When I was young my father used to tell me 'Don't get involved in anything,'" and "fortunately I didn't listen."

Harris commented, "How many of us have heard the same common sense advice? He [Dreke] avoided the common sense advice and went for the truth. He did not see his fellow fighters as futile, but as revolutionary, able to change the world and his life is proof of that."

Mike Ellis, a Young Socialists member and a Concord High School student, explained, "The bookstore will deepen our roots in the working class." One goal of the YS is to deepen our proletarianization. YSers in North Carolina have been driving toward this goal by staffing communist literature tables, selling the Militant at factory plant gates, and participating in door-to-door sales in working-class neighborhoods, as well as having one of our members as part of a fraction of socialist workers in UNITE, Ellis reported.

Ellis reported the YS recently helped organize a tour for Michael Italie. In doing so they met several youth interested in carrying out common activity with socialists.

Diane Shur, a Pathfinder digitization volunteer, pointed to the need for books containing the history and continuity of working-class struggle and reported that 66 percent of Pathfinder titles have been digitized--240 books in total--with the goal of having 75 percent ready for print by June.

"We have sold two books in the textile mills in the past weeks," Richter reported, "and we're about to sell two others--one to a co-worker who promised to pay for a book and another who is waiting for a copy of Farmers Face the Crisis of the 1990s, a shipment of which just arrived yesterday."

Three copies of From the Escambray to the Congo were sold at the meeting and $750 was collected toward fixing up the bookstore.  
 
 
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