WASHINGTON — Omari Musa, a longtime member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, died here Feb. 22 after a fight to overcome complications from medical conditions he faced in recent years. Musa, a member of the SWP branch here, was 80 years old. His life was devoted to working-class struggle and internationalism — to building a proletarian party capable of organizing and leading tens of millions in the revolutionary fight for workers power.
Musa joined the communist movement in 1968 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and moved to the Bay Area in 1969 where he joined the Socialist Workers Party. He was a lifetime veteran of the national struggle for the rights of African Americans. He understood and acted on its political weight in the class struggle, explaining that only the working-class conquest of state power will open the decisive battle for Black liberation. Recognizing Malcolm X’s central place as a leader of workers and the oppressed, Musa spoke and educated widely about that revolutionary course here and abroad.
Musa was a national leader of the SWP’s work to explain the political lessons for working people of the Cuban Revolution and the revolutionary internationalist leadership forged by Fidel Castro. Musa helped lead the SWP’s work in united actions to defend Cuba against the U.S. rulers’ unceasing efforts to crush the socialist revolution and Cuban toilers who made it.
An effective popularizer of the SWP’s program, Musa ran for public office from Oakland to Miami to Washington, D.C. For half a century, he worked to strengthen the unions, in every kind of job from rail and oil, to an ice cream factory, to Walmart. Wherever he lived and worked, he explained the necessity, and opportunities in the class struggle today, for the working class to break from the Democrats, Republicans and other imperialist parties; to build a party of labor; and to fight to conquer state power from the exploiters and war makers and build a new world, a socialist world.
A meeting to celebrate more than half a century of Musa’s political work and the party he helped build will be held in Washington, D.C., the weekend of March 22-23. The Militant will feature information about the meeting.