We are publishing the vision statement for the Saturday Free School’s conference celebrating Anthony Monteiro’s 80th birthday in Philadelphia on October 31 and November 1, 2025. The full event recordings are available here.
We acknowledge one whose life is an example of revolutionary consciousness, moral courage, and a generosity of spirit. He emerges from a world historic people, whose struggle for true democracy and peace transformed the very fabric of the American nation. We celebrate Anthony Monteiro as a revolutionary, a social scientist, and a teacher. We lift up a life spent in the struggle for freedom, as exemplary of the Black proletariat’s contribution to civilization, and the remaking of the American people. Scorned by universities and other institutions of the ruling elite, the Saturday Free School became the product of his commitment to knowledge and liberation, and to young people. Anthony Monteiro has defended the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and the Black Revolutionary Tradition and interpreted them for the 21st century, making them an option for all humanity.
We commemorate Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s commitment to the ideological struggle of this time. In this time of crisis of the American empire, and with the unraveling of the white supremacist social system. We commemorate one who has fought for ideological clarity, intellectual competence and presented the values of the Black social system as an alternative to white supremacy. In celebrating Anthony Monteiro, the Saturday Free School celebrates the lifeworld, the beloved community that has produced revolutionaries like him: human beings who have committed their hearts and minds to what King said was “the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.”
The Contribution of Dr. Anthony Monteiro to a New Movement of World Thought
The American people are suffering under the crushing weight of decades of deindustrialization, poverty, imprisonment, and immiseration. One-third of the American people live as stranded populations in a nation which has abandoned them and their children. They are crying out for a way out for freedom from this inhuman system. Through failing schools, homelessness, and hunger, alongside a profit-driven and corrupt entertainment and music industry, children are being cognitively, morally, and culturally manipulated. Through it all, youth and children strive to change the world, although they have not yet found their way to the revolutionary and democratic leadership which is their natural inheritance.
Dr. Monteiro has defended and advanced the ideas of the Black Freedom Struggle and the Black Revolutionary Tradition. Like Paul Robeson, his pedagogy stands upon the assumption that knowledge and civilization are created by and belong to the people. His contributions establish the possibility of a revolutionary democratic and emancipatory transformation in American society.
Dr. Monteiro has said, “Philosophy is politics by other means,” and that we must uncover the assumptions behind our worldviews to advance political struggle. His work calls us to understand the foundations of modernity—from the heights of Enlightenment philosophy to the shameful depths of the color line. Using Du Bois, he has put forth a new revolutionary chronology for the democratic struggle in this country, which sees the revolution of 1776 as the first, Civil War and Reconstruction as the second, and the Civil Rights Movement as the Third American Revolution. Out of this he has theorized a Fourth American Revolution to complete what has been left unfulfilled from the Third American Revolution.This chronology establishes the Black Proletariat, as Du Bois has shown, as an agent of world history—central to the modern world system and the struggle for a democratic modernity.
His rediscovering Du Bois as the originator of a new world movement of thought and the father of modern scientific sociology, has opened up possibilities of new and creative deployments of the social sciences. The importance of art and the Black Proletarian Imaginary to social scientific knowledge continues the Saturday Free School’s inventive engagement with the body of Du Bois’s work. Dr. Monteiro highlights, as well, the Black social system, forged after the defeat of Reconstruction and existing in battle against the dominant white supremacist social system as also important to understanding the revolutionary process in the United States.
Amid the great crisis of American empire on the world stage, the rediscovery of Du Bois allows us to envision a human future in new ways. This allows for a recognition, as part of the world revolutionary process, of the unity of civilizations, including the centrality of Pan Africa and Pan Asia. This means the realization of intercivilizational unity against the Zionists, the neocons, warmakers, and the billionaire class who make up the Western ruling elite. This means a new revolutionary and emancipatory democracy on a world scale, freed from the triple evils of war, poverty, and racism. Central to achieving this is the struggle for world peace.
A Revolutionary Life
Dr. Monteiro’s lifelong commitment to taking forward the revolutionary, democratic, and emancipatory struggle for all humanity is rooted in his dedication to Black people, their courage and beauty, and their unconquered striving for freedom. He was born in 1945 in North Philadelphia and raised in North Philadelphia. His mother, Almena Monteiro, was a garment worker and his father, John Monteiro, a longshoreman; they were both union members. He and his brother, Michael, were raised with their loving parents and extended family. Dr. Monteiro’s father’s family came from Cape Verde, a colony of Portugal in West Africa, which would later see an anti-colonial struggle led by freedom fighter Amilcar Cabral. His maternal grandparents came to Philadelphia as part of the great migration from Greenwood, South Carolina; a state where a Second Civil War was fought to defend Reconstruction. He was raised in Zion Baptist Church and baptized by Rev. Leon Sullivan, the architect of economic civil rights in Philadelphia.
He double majored in philosophy and political science at Lincoln University and was part of an intellectual renaissance of Black youth who turned their gaze to anti-colonial liberation struggles, especially in Africa. As a student he embraced Black nationalism and Pan Africanism. His first direct engagement with the Southern Civil Rights Movement came as SNCC workers visited Lincoln. Young Dr. Monteiro was elected student body president with the combined support of African American and African students, especially those from colonized nations. He has remained an advocate of HBCUs, and in 2006, he received an honorary doctorate from Lincoln.
In his youth, he was won to the side of armed urban warfare and joined the Revolutionary Action Movement. In 1967, under an FBI sponsored operation, he was framed up and arrested on bogus charges of terrorism. In a campaign supported by family, his church, Rev. Leon Sullivan, the students of Lincoln University, his mentor at Lincoln Dr. Charles Hamilton, as well as Philadelphia civil rights figures like Cecil B. Moore, he was finally acquitted. In Chicago he was part of a Black Marxist study group that included Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.
In 1970, Dr. Monteiro joined the Young Workers Liberation League (the youth wing of the Communist Party) and the Communist Party USA. He was mentored throughout his time in the CPUSA by Henry Winston and other veteran Black activists including William L. and Louise Patterson, Ishmael Flory, James and Esther Jackson, Elsie Dickerson, and others. He led a delegation of the Young Workers Liberation League to a congress of the Young Communist League of the Soviet Union. He addressed a general session of the congress, where leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were present. He traveled from there to North Vietnam as a member of a solidarity delegation.
He ran for U.S. Congress from Philadelphia on a Communist Party ticket. Unable to find work as a teacher, he joined his father as a longshoreman on the Philadelphia waterfront. After a year of working as a longshoreman alongside his father, he was invited by Henry Winston to lead NAIMSAL (the National Anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity with African Liberation). He served as its executive secretary for 15 years. He traveled widely in Africa, including as a delegate to the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania; he also visited Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Algeria, Cuba, and Afghanistan throughout the 1970s. He was deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement, and was part of a campaign that collected 100,000 signatures on a petition to expel apartheid-South Africa from the United Nations, which he presented to the UN headquarters in 1975.
In the late 1980s, Dr. Monteiro entered Temple University for graduate studies in sociology, writing and defending a dissertation which critiqued Analytical Marxism, an anti-revolutionary iteration of Marxism popular in the academy.
Dr. Monteiro was an integral part of the world peace movement, the Afro-Asian Solidarity movement, and the world communist communist at this time. His work with NAIMSAL brought him close to leaders such as Fidel Castro, Oliver Tambo of the ANC, Madame Jeanne Martin Cissé, UN representative of the nation of Guinea, and other leaders; as well as the Indian revolutionaries and peace fighter E.S. Reddy, the Secretary of the UN special committee on apartheid, and Romesh Chandra, the secretary general of the World Peace Council. The fall of the USSR precipitated a crisis within the CPUSA and the world communist movement, with members leaving the party, declaring that existing socialism had failed. Dr. Monteiro strove to uphold the vision and revolutionary spirit of Henry Winston, fighting for principled unity against factionalists and decriers of the failure of socialism. However, he broke with the party over their refusal to support the Million Man March. He saw the party’s indifference to this great mobilization of Black men, groaning under the weight of deindustrialization and an intensifying campaign of criminalization and mass incarceration, as indifference to the suffering and oppression of Black folk.
He returned to Philadelphia from the march to help organize the African American Freedom and Reconstruction League, and later the Brother’s Network; each organization brought together Black men and women across sexual identities rooted in the Black social system and the Black liberation struggle.
In the ideological vacuum following the fall of the world communist movement and the weakening of the forces for Black liberation, Dr. Monteiro fought to defend the ideological struggle from attacks by anti-revolutionary theories like Afrocentrism, postmodernism, and identity politics. He concluded, furthermore, that Marxism-Leninism had to be radically revised if it were to meet the challenges of a new stage of African American oppression, working class dislocation, and neocolonialism. Philosophically reviewing the foundations of Enlightenment philosophy and Marxism, he came to the conclusion that all of it had to be reconsidered from the standpoint of W.E.B. Du Bois’s work. He rediscovered W.E.B. Du Bois. He organized conferences of scholars and activists on W.E.B. Du Bois. Moving to the African American Studies Department at Temple University in 2003, he became one of the most popular professors at the university. He was best known for his class and seminars on W.E.B. Du Bois and African American political and social thought.
In 2014 he was fired from his position in the African American Studies Department, called for by Molefi Asante and acquiesced to by the Temple administration. This precipitated a community and student campaign for his reinstatement. He vowed to fight on despite great personal sacrifice, connecting his campaign to the struggle against Temple’s gentrification of North Philadelphia. Though he was not reinstated, the movement that coalesced around his firing eventually led to the unraveling of the department, ousting the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and prevented Temple from building a football stadium in the heart of North Philly.
In 2012, while still at Temple, Dr. Monteiro started the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation to bring together students and the Black community in the struggle for new ideas and revolutionary politics. He has dedicated the last 14 years to leading the Saturday Free School. The Free School has carried out citywide campaigns such as the Year of W.E.B. Du Bois in 2018, the Year of Mahatma Gandhi in 2019, and the Year of James Baldwin in 2024. The people of Philadelphia were involved in symposiums, lectures, and a Cuban-style literacy campaign. In 2021 the Free School commemorated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. In 2016 he organized a three-day conference entitled “Reclaiming Our Future: The Black Radical Tradition in Our Time,” which brought together several thousand people including Angela Davis, Cornel West, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Vijay Prashad, and Robin D.G. Kelley among others. In 2023, the Saturday Free School launched Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science. In 2023, the Free School also commemorated the 125th anniversary of the births of Paul Robeson and the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
This has included an entire Year of W.E.B. Du Bois, taking the great scholar’s works to the people of Philadelphia via symposiums and a literacy campaign. It also included the Year of Gandhi, which was capped with a visit to Philadelphia by Civil Rights legend, Rev. James Lawson, a senior aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and the architect of the nonviolent movement in America. The Year of James Baldwin was dedicated to the Immortal Palestinian Children of Gaza and spoke in a new language to the American people.
Dr. Monteiro’s is a life dedicated to the freedom of Black folk as part of the freedom of humanity and unity of civilizations. He has paid the price for his commitment, but has stayed on post at the frontlines of the ideological struggle.
To Inherit the Future
More than anything, Dr. Monteiro is a teacher of teachers, one who has dedicated his life to the struggle for truth and to the task of political education in service of freedom. Rejecting the elitism of university trained academics, he chooses to be close to ordinary people. There would be no Philadelphia without its Black proletariat, and Dr. Monteiro has committed himself to the passionate defense of Black folk as a world historic people and as the principal agents of change who constitute the vanguard of this nation’s revolutionary possibility. Dr. Monteiro has guided youth to mount a historic revolutionary struggle which meets the demands of this time—calling for new thought and more and better theory.
This event celebrates the future. We, who take the responsibility for our world. We seek to save civilization from war and the ravages of imperialism. In celebrating Dr. Monteiro’s life, we celebrate all of those who have influenced him. Among them Henry Winston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King. We celebrate the ordinary Black working men and women who made this city and country an inhabitable place. We celebrate the youth and children for whom we fight and proclaim to them, “There is a sky.” We celebrate all working people. Together, they make possible the dream of a new nation, and a new world, where all people can live lives of dignity.
We are aware of the fierce urgency of the moment. If we are to mature and achieve our completeness, we must act decisively, to save civilization. We embrace our creativity and intelligence as keys to realizing our full potential. We strive to create art and music. We seek a world where the Immortal Child has a future. Like Martin Luther King insisted, our consciousness seeks to transcend the colony of time and enter the empire of eternity, where the potentiality of every human being is realizable. We seek a world where beauty inspires every human action, blossoming in every heart and mind of the world’s people. On his 80th birthday, we express our eternal love for Dr. Monteiro—his children, Erik, Nicole, and Inonge, his grandchildren, and his family—and wish him a long life dedicated to struggle.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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