July 29, 1977
NEW YORK--"They ripped us off every day. People here just thought they’d get a little even," explained a young Puerto Rican couple, pointing to the remains of a supermarket on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx.

A Black man who was passing by overheard their conversation with Catarino Garza, Socialist Workers candidate for mayor of New York City, and stopped.

"We’re pushed around by the cops, ripped off at the stores and can’t find no jobs," he said. "I’ve been unemployed for three years.

"All it took was for the lights to go out this time. What next time?"

Just five days earlier, hundreds of thousands of people--mostly Blacks and Puerto Ricans--had taken to the streets when the city’s lights went out.

For twenty-five hours they opened steel shuttered shops--grocery stores, clothing stores, shoe stores, furniture, and appliance stores, jewelers--and entered by the thousands, as one participant put it, to "shop for free."

Cops swept through the ghettos rounding up close to 4,500 prisoners--mostly on charges of "looting." Jail cells were overcrowded, sometimes filled to many times their capacity, with lack of food, water, and medical attention the norm.

Having branded the thousands who participated in the explosion as "animals," the city administration proceeded to treat them as such.  
 
July 28, 1952
NEW YORK--Farrell Dobbs, National Chairman of the Socialist Workers Party, was named as the party’s candidate for President of the United States at its four-day 15th National Convention, which concluded its sessions here late this afternoon.

The convention also nominated Mrs. Myra Tanner Weiss, Los Angeles party organizer, as the SWP candidate for U.S. Vice-President.

A series of national television and radio broadcasts of their acceptance speeches and other talks by the candidates highlighted the convention events.

The candidates both pledged a vigorous fighting campaign to bring the emancipating program of socialism to the American people who are hounded by fear of war, insecurity and destruction of civil rights.

The two SWP banner-bearers called on the working people, racial minorities and all exploited layers of the population to join with the Socialist Workers Party in its militant struggle to break the grip of the capitalist political monopoly and to place a party of the American workers and farmers in office in Washington.

In the face of the terrible witch-hunt and repressions which have been growing in this country over the past years of capitalist war preparations, the convention gave a remarkable demonstration of high party morale, enthusiasm and revolutionary optimism.  
 
 
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