From the People s World archives: W E B DuBois joins the Communist Party – People s World peoplesworld.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from peoplesworld.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
New York, New York
On this First day of October, 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in the Communist Party of the United States. I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion, but at last my mind is settled.
In college, I heard the name of Karl Marx, but read none of his works, nor heard them explained. At the University of Berlin, I heard much of those thinkers who had definitively answered the theories of Marx, but again we did not study what Marx himself had said. Nevertheless, I attended meetings of the Socialist Party and considered myself a Socialist.
“A proposal to revise or eliminate an existing personal commemorative name will usually be disapproved unless the proponent presents a compelling justification.”
There is no such compelling justification to change the McCarran name; only some cherry-picked politically correct excuses.
“A proposal to commemorate an individual should include evidence of local support for the proposed name and its application. Such evidence may be in the form of letters from the appropriate governing authorities and local residents, as well as, where appropriate, from historical societies, service organizations, etc.”
“The staff also encourages proponents to solicit support from neighbors, property owners, local businesses, and others who are familiar with the feature and the name proposal. This process may occasionally generate a counterproposal to the original proposal.”
Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture that for nearly a quarter century chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements beginning in the early 1960s, started in 1961, a year that was a kind of transitional one for the civil rights movement. The sit-ins that had begun in early 1960, and the continuing demonstrations and emerging fervor, had made national headlines, but the movement hadn’t yet achieved the national stature that it would a couple of years later. Nevertheless, the civil rights movement was still a significant, if not yet overwhelming, news media story. The 1961 Freedom Rides, in which Black and white movement volunteers tested a recent Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on interstate bus travel by sitting together on trips through the South, brought headlines, photographs and television news footage of racist mobs, burning buses and bloodied civil rights activists.
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On November 30, the Spanish government announced that it would step in to save the tomb of a longtime
Nation journalist, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who worked as one of the magazine’s editors from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s.
Vayo, as he was generally known, was a socialist politician and diplomat who served as Spain’s foreign minister during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). After Francisco Franco’s victory, he lived in exile in France, the United States where he became a close friend of