Vol.63/No.36 October 18, 1999
25 and 50 years ago
October 18, 1974
BOSTON, Oct. 9 — The white racists have been mobilizing ever since the opening of school Sept. 12. They are trying to prevent Black students from entering the predominantly white schools, which were ordered desegregated by federal judge Arthur Garrity on June 21. The ruling was in response to a suit by the NAACP.But it was on Monday, Oct. 7, that a genuine lynch mob was formed and a Black man nearly lost his life. Jean-Louis Andre Yvon, Black immigrant from Haiti, was driving his car, en route to pick up his wife at work, when he ran afoul of the racist mob in South Boston.
Somehow Yvon managed to escape for a moment. The mob was in hot pursuit. A cop fired some shots into the air, and the mob pulled back for a while, hesitating. But the lynch cries soon resounded again. "Offer him up! Offer him up!" By then, however, a few more cops arrived on the scene, and Yvon was led to safety.
One hundred seventy-five Black students held a meeting at Boston University Oct. 9 and called a protest rally for Oct. 11 in front of the student union. A broadly sponsored rally against the racist offensive has been called for the same day by Ujima, the Black student organization at the University of Massachusetts. Coupled with the increasing sentiment for mass action has been the widespread feeling in the Black community that federal troops are needed to protect the rights and safety of the Black students.
October 17, 1949
Right after Truman announced an "atomic explosion" in the Soviet Union, the Sept. 25 "Worker," Sunday paper of the Communist Party, proclaimed editorially that "the fight for peace has received a new impetus." But what really has received a new impetus is the deceptive propaganda that it is possible to maintain peace under capitalism through "international control" of atomic weapons and "disarmament."This slogan of "disarmament" — one of the most tarnished and shopworn in the propaganda arsenal of imperialism — is now the main stock-in-trade of the Stalinists.
The cause for war — the cause which the Stalinist "disarmament" slogan ignores — is modern capitalism itself. [Lenin's] Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, irrefutably proves that the capitalist profit system, decades before the first world war, had developed into a system of gigantic monopolies and "financial oligarchies," that their struggle for profitable outlets for accumulated capital, for control of world markets and sources of cheap labor and raw materials, for domination of the globe were the breeding ground for continuous warfare.
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