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Vol. 78/No. 4      February 3, 2014

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago  

February 3, 1989

The interests of all working people were set back when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Richmond, Virginia, ordinance setting aside 30 percent of public construction contracts for minority contractors was unconstitutional.

The battle for affirmative action to overcome racist, sexist and other divisions in our class is a key part of uniting our class to fight effectively for other advances.

Overcoming these divisions and uniting workers can only be achieved through struggles that in-clude the battle against discrimination. The union movement should be at the center of mobilizations demanding the establishment and enforcement of affirmative action quotas to assure preferential hiring and upgrading of workers who are Black, Latino and women.

February 3, 1964

JAN. 28 — The drive of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to cut through the hypocrisy of tokenism and make Atlanta, Georgia, an open city for Negroes is gaining momentum.

The campaign took a new turn Saturday, Jan. 25, when 400 students rallied on Morehouse Col-lege campus and then walked to the downtown area, divided up into flying squads, and tried to enter restaurants and hotels which had not desegregated.

About 250 of the Negroes were met downtown by 125 white-robed Ku Klux Klansmen who had been picketing those hotels which had desegregated. The Negroes chanted: “The KKK ain’t what it used to be” and “KKK must go.” Some Negroes “integrated” KKK lines, walking between the Klansmen and singing freedom songs.

February 4, 1939

Why was Barcelona abandoned without a fight? Why is the Loyalist army fleeing, disorganized and demoralized? Why is Franco winning? Every anti-fascist must know the answer, if we are to defeat fascism elsewhere.

The social democrats, the Stalinists and the anarchists answer by blaming the “great de-mocracies” for not providing the Loyalists with food and ammunition. But this answer explains nothing.

The salvation of Spain lay, first of all, in following a policy of class struggle in Spain, and it was abandoned for the fatal perspective of currying favor with the “great democracies.”

The unutterable tragedy of the Spanish workers is that the criminal policy of their Stalinist-socialist-anarchist leadership prevailed to the bitter end.
 
 
 
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