“Not strikebreaking” says WW chairman, but “exercise of right of self-determination”
Workers World, Vol. 9, No. 19, September 14, 1967
New York, September 14 – Sam Marcy, Chairman of Workers World Party, today upheld “the right of the Black people to seize the schools in their own community, put in their own teachers, principals and administrative staff and carry out all other measures pertaining thereto, even during the teachers’ strike.”
Marcy applauded the efforts of the Afro-American people to take over I.S. 201, schools in Bedford Stuyvesant and other areas. He denounced those who called it “strikebreaking” and declared that “it was merely a legitimate form of the exercise of the right to self-determination.
“The right to do this,” he emphasized, flows logically as an indispensable part of the right of Black people to achieve liberation in their own way.
“They have the right, not only to seize the schools, but all other facilities and properties in their community. They have the right to do this without any restriction whatsoever.”
Marcy continued:
“The exercise of this revolutionary right is part of the political struggle for liberation. In these circumstances it takes precedence over the economic demands of white employees in the Black communities, whether they be teachers, janitors or other employees.”
He urged “the white working class and all progressives to defend this position as an elementary right in the struggle for self-determination and liberation from imperialist enslavement.”
The WWP chairman charged that:
“The capitalist press was deliberately trying to confuse the issue of the rights of the teachers in the white communities with the rights of the Black people to take charge of their communities, which includes, first and foremost, control over the educational facilities which are completely dominated, under the present system, by the white ruling class and their agents.
“Every worker,” he stressed, “must understand that a teachers’ strike in the white community is one thing. But it is something else again to denounce as ‘strikebreaking’ the efforts of the Black people to take over their own schools, which are run by white teachers and white principals, just because this is done during a strike.
“No,” said Marcy, “they have a right to do this before a strike, during a strike and after a strike. The issue is not the strike but the right of the Afro-American people to run their own affairs.
“The efforts of the Black people for self-determination must be distinguished from the genuine and outrageous strikebreaking tactics of the Lindsay Administration – a mere tool of the bosses.
“Of course,” he emphasized, “we are 100 percent in support of the teachers’ strike insofar as it concerns the white community and is a struggle against the boss-controlled Board of Education, which is an arm of the capitalist class.
“But the white teachers and other whites in the Black community must subordinate their demands to the elementary right of human dignity of the Black people. Only on this basis,” he concluded, “can there ever be genuine working class solidarity against the capitalist class.”
Last updated: 11 May 2026