Presented by Dom Shannon on behalf of the African American Equality Commission to the CPUSA National Committee meeting, January 31, 2026.

Comrades, a lot has developed for Black folks since the last time we reported to the National Committee. In fact, much of this has escalated just in the past week or so. ICE terror in Minneapolis and the emergent mass demonstrations demanding “ICE OUT” have mobilized broad swaths of U.S., society, including the African American community.

Trump’s decades long record of anti-Black racism makes his response to the mobilization of the African American community unsurprising but disturbing nonetheless. We first saw the arrests of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney, former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP and founder of the Target Boycott, along with other Black activists. Attorney General Pam Bondi claims they violated the FACE Act. And just yesterday, we saw the arrests of Black journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon, with the claim from the Trump administration that they violated conspiracy against civil rights laws.

There are two points we want to make on these unjust arrests.

First, they were a continuation of Trump’s usage of terroristic crackdowns on our First Amendment right to protest, in combination with egregious and blatant lawfare — i.e. the bending, twisting, and turning of legal language in legislation that is totally unrelated to the matter at hand. The main purpose of the FACE Act was to protect those seeking reproductive care at healthcare clinics. And the origins of conspiracy against rights laws are from the post-Civil War era, designed to crack down on Ku Klux Klan vigilante terrorism against freed Black Southerners exercising the rights they won in the Reconstruction Amendments. The usage of these laws are not a coincidence. They were chosen specifically to signal that the original intent of these laws, and the rights these laws were designed to protect, do not matter to the Trump regime. And they will use them cynically to crack down on other rights even more.

Second, these arrests in particular are also not a coincidence. The work of activists like Levy Armstrong and Trahern Crews, who was also arrested yesterday, is wholly contradictory to the MAGA agenda. Their work of unifying and mobilizing the Black community with the immigrant community against ICE directly confronts Trump’s fascist reign of terror. So these arrests are not only designed to stop this organizing and unity, but also to scare other Black American activists and organizers into ignoring ICE’s actions. It is designed to ”water” the “seeds” of the notion, small but growing in the Black community, “that this is not our fight” or that “we did our part by voting in 2024.”

We know that these ideas are incorrect. Trump will not and has never spared Black Americans merely for being American. Just this month, Trump himself said that Civil Rights era policies lead to white people being “very badly treated.” And just last week, Trump’s National Parks Service removed a slavery exhibit on federal land in Philadelphia. We know the idea that civil rights hurts white Americans only serves to strengthen the capitalist class while dividing the working class. And therefore we know, as our program says, “The only way to defeat this extreme right domination lies in building the broadest, most inclusive unity among our multiracial, multinational, multigender, multigenerational working class, along with the major progressive forces that are its allies.”

To help build the necessary multiracial and multinational unity necessary to defeat MAGA extremism, the African American Equality Commission is revisiting the triple concentration approach introduced by Henry Winston. We are urging coordination on the national, district and club levels to expand and grow the Target Boycott campaign as a party initiative. Our party’s work in this movement has already proven to be of great value, as more attention is being given to Target for their cooperation with ICE. We encourage clubs and districts to build coalitions of faith, labor, and community organizations in their cities and neighborhoods, to build deep relationships and strengthen the fight on the ground against the corporate backers of MAGA. Washington, D.C., is a case study for how to start.

There is not only growing resistance to Trump’s agenda but also discontent with “business as usual” politics. At the AFL-CIO’s MLK Jr. Civil and Human Rights Conference, Black union leaders pointed to increasing fascist attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with growing privatization of public resources, as tools advancing the growing power of the “1%” and as barriers to a democratically and economically equal future. There were calls for greater unity in struggle between faith, civil rights, and labor movements. Historically, that unity has led to monumental gains for working and oppressed peoples. The participants rejected a return to the pre-Trump neoliberal status quo, calling on workers and oppressed peoples to march boldly into a future made by and for the multiracial, multinational working class.

The party does have a role to play in the construction of this future, but we must act. We cannot merely acknowledge and discuss amongst ourselves the worsening conditions of Black, other oppressed peoples, and working class communities due to MAGA fascism, capitalist exploitation, and racist oppression. We must organize — and not superficially, but deeply, paying close attention to the contribution of our Communist Plus to the existing progressive movements in Black, oppressed and working class communities. Forward together comrades, not one step back!

Image: Target Boycott in Washington, D.C., at the Columbia Heights Target location on Nov. 29. Bill Lee Photography.