Today, the American people face an all-encompassing and unprecedented crisis. The questions of war, poverty, violence, and mental illness are pervasive in our lives. At the center of it all are our children and young people, who are told there is no meaningful future for them. However, they are searching for answers — and asking in their hearts, “Is the world inevitably immoral and unjust? Is there a way to true freedom and equality? Can I do anything to change our nation and the world for the better?” 

In the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation, we believe that the revolutionary traditions of this country can shed light on the paths to revolutionary change for the future. This inheritance is deliberately hidden from the young generation. The ideologies, culture, and activism that are promoted today produce pessimism and confusion, separating children and youth from the task our generation must take up: peace, democracy, and intercivilizational unity. 

Over the course of multiple days in October of 2025, we conducted an interview with Dr. Anthony Monteiro, founder of the Free School and a native son of Philadelphia. In exploring his life and experience, we seek to understand the urgent theoretical and political questions of this time. The early consciousness of Dr. Monteiro, or Tony as many know him, was forged in the tidal wave of ideas that sprang from the era of the Black Freedom Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests. The excerpts presented here have been selected to illuminate his maturation through the politics of revolutionary Black nationalism, the international communist and peace movements under the mentorship of Henry Winston, and the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. His grounding in the American people and world movements has taken him to a very different place, politically and theoretically, than today’s anemic American Left. Dr. Monteiro’s journey culminates in his reevaluation of Henry Winston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr. as central revolutionary figures for America’s future and his belief that a philosophical and ideological leap forward is possible. The full interview is available to watch on the Saturday Free School’s YouTube page.

Throughout his life, Dr. Monteiro has remained true to the revolutionary imperative, which is the moral imperative that all human beings must answer. Despite setbacks and retreats, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, he stayed a revolutionary. When others quit the battlefield of struggle and saw no way forward, he discovered in new ways the essence of the thinking and works of Du Bois and King — that within the bowels of the Black Freedom and democratic movements in the U.S., remains the kernel for the revolutionary transformation of our nation. This is the message that young people and children must hear today.

Dr. Monteiro’s life stands as a living example of what is possible; a testament to the civilization built by Black folk which contains the possibility for a movement that reflects the shared needs of humanity for peace and unity. We offer this interview as a salvo in the battle of ideas that must be waged on the present stage of world history.

Interview by Purba Chatterjee, Alice Li, Nuri Yi, Serafina Harris.

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Interview

Knowledge for Black Liberation 

Purba: You identified the centrality of knowledge, philosophy, and ideas very early on [in your life]. Could you tell us about this early period of your consciousness, the role that philosophy and ideas played in solidifying moral commitment, and what it meant ultimately for you to assume the stage of history? 

Anthony Monteiro: The backdrop was the Civil Rights Movement — of course, the murder of Emmett Till, which impacted all of us, the whole nation, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley — and the rise of the Montgomery movement. It was the spirit of the time for Black people. We all knew that we were legally unfree. Even in a city like Philadelphia, there were places we couldn’t go, even when the schools were integrated, and all of them weren’t. Most of them weren’t. 

Even like the high school that I went to [Central High School], you always knew that you really weren’t wanted there. They were trying to convince you that you were taking up the seat of a more qualified white person. I knew we needed to be educated, but then what was happening in the school, especially when we got to Central, was so distant from what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement, what was happening in our community. And the message was that your experience in your community was trivial, that you all were the problem. You can imagine. So in a lot of ways at Central, I felt I was being put down constantly. Constantly. 

It’s not until I got to Lincoln [University] — you know, the countryside — that I could breathe. For the first time, the school was not humiliating me. We didn’t want to be too comfortable. At least I didn’t, because I felt it would separate us from our people. We wanted to be tough. We wanted to be the smartest people. We wanted to be the most revolutionary students. Not all of us, but enough of us. And this is when I got excited about education and knowledge. 

We felt that Lincoln was a Black university. It was ours, and it was a place for learning. I committed myself even more to learning, to knowledge, to, in fact, creating an intellectual renaissance at Lincoln. It was easy to connect with other students like myself. And then we had this huge population of students from Africa. I gravitated to the students from Southern Africa — who were far more radical than the students from Nigeria or Sierra Leone, certainly from Liberia — and stories of the armed struggle of the liberation movements. 

Every year there would be elections for student council president. One of the other fraternities would usually win. But I decided to run and I ran on a Black Power ticket. I won because I established an alliance between the more progressive and radical students, and the Africans. At this time, I had also decided to major in political science, focusing upon African independence and philosophy. 

We were very interested in not just the Black Power Movement, but the Black Arts Movement. We invited to campus representatives of that from New York. We invited Amiri Baraka, and Langston Hughes came to our campus. The imprint of Black Power and revolutionary thinking was all around us. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria had graduated from Lincoln. There were writers and poets and people who would become activists who were birthed in this atmosphere of student ideas and culture and activism. There was a rich cultural, intellectual, and political life that we created and those were the terms of the political struggle at our campus. 

I think all of us to tell you the truth, even those who were more frivolous about life and about education, were taken in by the spirit of struggle. We believed that education was for the purpose of giving back and of joining the struggle. Even though we were at Lincoln, we were anticipating a life of struggle, the next stage of struggle. I was either going to become a minister or a lawyer, the two major occupations or professions in the Civil Rights Movement. That’s why I did a lot of philosophy and studied some theologians. Not yet, of course, Howard Thurman. Mainly European theologians like Paul Tillich. I felt that philosophy was superior knowledge and that political science, sociology, anthropology, and even literature were more empirical, more narrative. But philosophy dealt with ideas that shaped other ideas. 

Nuri: The science of sciences!

Anthony Monteiro: Definitely, even though I didn’t know that phrase then, but that’s the way I saw it. 

Revolutionary Nationalism and Black Power

Nuri: I didn’t know that you had been thinking of becoming a minister when you first came to college.

Anthony Monteiro: That was the influence of my pastor and all of the ministers that were in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Nuri: Like Leon Sullivan in Philly. 

Anthony Monteiro: And Martin Luther King. Leon Sullivan, Martin Luther King.

Nuri: Did you believe in God at that point? 

Anthony Monteiro: Yes. 

Nuri: But then ultimately you decide that you don’t want to be a minister. 

Anthony Monteiro: All my growing up, I was very religious. Not religious in dogmatic terms, but I believed I wanted to live like a Christian. I wanted to be moral. The Civil Rights Movement was so influenced by the language of Christianity, and I believed in all of that.

Leon Sullivan said, “Don’t buy where you can’t work.” Simple but deep, and uniting 400 Black churches to break down the discriminatory walls of corporate Philadelphia. Such a campaign had the support of the community. These figures sacrificed everything for the cause of justice. In our experience, the church is a foundational institution of resistance, and that’s why King is so effective. But to see it is a whole different thing, especially if you were a kid. To see your elders, your people, and your leaders standing up creates a zeitgeist. 

But then when I get to Lincoln and by the time I’m a junior, we’re looking at the Cuban Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, and we had arrived at the position that it would be armed struggle. That’s why in the spring of the same year that the Black Panther Party was formed, Ericka and John Huggins announced to a few of us out on the lawn at Lincoln that they were going to go to California to join them. They were going to drive to California in what was then called a Volkswagen Beetle Bug, one of the old kind of Volkswagens, and we said, “Right on.” 

By the time I’m a senior in college, I was a Black nationalist, a revolutionary Black nationalist. I ceased being a Christian, and I literally left the church. I felt the belief in God would be an impediment to the revolutionary struggle. 

I was not yet a Marxist. We were anti-white, deeply anti-white. And it was the Black nationalism and the anti-whiteness of young people who suddenly realized the magnitude of injustice done to your people.

Purba: The Black nationalism you’re talking about is different from the way it’s seen or most easily interpreted right now, right? 

Anthony Monteiro: No, it’s not Afrocentrism. See, it was revolutionary nationalism. It was different than cultural nationalism, which you would get with Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, and that whole school of Egyptologists. In fact, we saw them as counter-revolutionaries. We were nationalists of the type of the freedom fighters in Southern Africa. We were nationalists who believed in many ways that our struggle was here to topple the American government. And no, we were not cultural: we identified with Africa, but not in a narrow cultural sense.

Purba: The 1960s was the decade of assassinations: JFK, Medgar Evers in ‘63, then Malcolm ‘65. And then the assassination of King and after that, RFK. There’s an evolving picture of the state. How did it shape how you see the American state?

Anthony Monteiro: It was the time when the cities were going up in flames every summer. These were huge uprisings. The famous ones are Watts, 1965. Philadelphia, 1964. Newark. Detroit. That industrial Midwest. That Black proletariat. They threw down. And then when King was assassinated, over 160 cities went up in flames, you know what I’m saying? Oh, God. That was the level of intensity. And, you know, I’m living through all this. 

These were serious battles every summer up until 1970. And each side, the Blacks and the police, it would seem, would be preparing for the long, hot summers. These young Black men and women, especially young Black men, would arm themselves in preparation for an urban uprising. This further convinced me and others that we could win the cities. We could take the cities back by force of arms and transform them into Black liberated areas. That’s the way we thought. Now, it was a possibility. 

And I think that’s why you have to call this period a Third American Revolution. The Black Power Movement, the urban uprisings, the Civil Rights Movement, they’re all a part of a single cause.

Nuri: As you were finishing up your time in Lincoln, what were your next steps, and how are you thinking about what was to come? 

Anthony Monteiro: Well, graduating from Lincoln, I get a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study political science at the University of Chicago. 

But the summers before that, I was involved as the Freedom Movement moved North. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee set up an office around 16th and Lombard. We would all go there often and would see these very famous Civil Rights activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee like Stokely Carmichael, James Foreman, and Rap Brown. It was in this period of those summers that I became familiar with and connected to members of the Revolutionary Action Movement and began to think about the possibility of insurrectionary violence. And it was in this period that we became aware of Father Paul Washington, who merges the Church of the Advocate with the Black Power Movement. It becomes a sanctuary for young revolutionaries, quite different from what it is today. All of this, and so much of it ultimately is centered in North Philadelphia. But that’s where I become aware of these other possibilities. 

I’m back in Philly the summer that I graduate from Lincoln. I had some kind of job which didn’t require a lot, so my evenings were spent hanging around revolutionaries. And the FBI was monitoring us from the elementary school across the street from where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee office was.

When I get to Chicago, I get this little studio apartment, and I was very excited to begin this new academic journey. One evening, while I was at Mosque #2 of the Nation of Islam, my older cousin, who we called Junior, comes and says, “Hey, Tony, the police are looking for you.” Now I’m twenty-one. Man, I was really a kid, you know, bright eyed, bushy tailed. In jail for conspiring to create a riot and poison 1,500 Philadelphia police. Now that could only come from the demented mind of the FBI. It was me and four others. So I’m arraigned and charged and given bail. I think $30,000. The church, my family, and my Lincoln friends and colleagues got behind me. I had an advantage over the other three because of this, and I made bail. 

When I go back to the University of Chicago. I’m not welcomed back to the university in the academic department. It’s all white people. I didn’t know how I would navigate and negotiate my way back to the academy. 

Purba: You lost your fellowship because of this? 

Anthony Monteiro: I would ultimately lose the fellowship. But then at the same time, I meet Robert Rhodes, a political scientist who is 15 years older than me. He’s a committed Marxist and a follower of the Soviet Academy of Social Science. He had begun a Marxist study group in his apartment, and we were reading Das Kapital. All Black people, because again, we didn’t like white people and frankly, it is not until I joined the Communist Party that I began to reconcile and see a possibility of a unity with white people. That study group attracted members of the Black Panther Party, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Fred Hampton was a special person, an intellectual. We were the same age and he seemed to be a grown man, you know what I’m saying? A real leader. 

Race and Class in the Communist Party 

Anthony Monteiro: Eventually I have to come back to Philadelphia and stand trial. My lawyer was not Cecil B. Moore directly, but one of his partners. And it was almost a no-brainer that the state did not have a case. It was complete nonsense. I’m allowed to then go free. But then, what do I do with my life? I can’t get a job. So I spend my time teaching other people. 

One of my good friends, Tony Ulin, lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This is ‘69. And I set up a study group up there on Marxism. I also joined a group of brothers here in Philly in the Brotherhood House. And I’m teaching political economy, philosophy, and 20th century history. Ultimately the brothers at the Brotherhood House asked me to leave, because they said their mission was to help the community. And I think they felt I was bringing bad publicity to them. I didn’t take it personal, and then I set up another study group here in Philadelphia. This is all ultimately leading to the Communist Party. This would be in 1970. 

Winnie [Henry Winston] invites a group of young Black people to meet with him over a two-day period in Chicago. That was the first time I met him and the first time I met Black communists. If there were people like Winston — and then Ishmael Flory and others — who could enforce a principled relationship with white people, it was practical. And then of course, the lure of the great Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was supporting the African independence movements.

Nuri: Ultimately, why did you dedicate yourself to the Communist Party and to Winston in particular? What was your relationship to him like? And how did you see him?

Anthony Monteiro: Yeah, that’s very important. Here I am in the presence of someone who was experienced in revolutionary struggle. He was not learning on the job, as it were, was not making it up as he went along, but had been through this — through the Harlem Renaissance, through the Great Depression, through McCarthyism — and was part of a world movement. 

He spoke with dignity, but you could tell he was a very gentle person, very polite. A Southern man because he’s from Mississippi, and he spoke with a kind of a Southern accent. The thing that was impressive was he listened to us. And the idea that so many of us had in our youthful exuberance is that to be a revolutionary was to be cold. I’m preparing to kill and to die, you know, that kind of thing. That was a kind of a stereotype of a revolutionary. And here I meet these people that are all the opposite of that. 

Purba: You’re the opposite of that image, too. 

Anthony Monteiro: Well, I guess I was kind of the opposite of that. I mean, I could never get away from my church, my mother and family, and the way I was brought up. 

All of this coming together then at this point — an established revolutionary organization with experienced revolutionaries that had all of the things that a revolutionary movement needs. And then these Black people. It meant everything. 

Nuri: Why did the World Communist Movement resonate with you? Because in some ways, you’re seeing the Communist Party as a vehicle to push forward political struggle. But that political struggle is, in your conception, not just the class struggle or Marx, but part of a world movement connected to Africa and to North Vietnam. So how is that shaping you?

Anthony Monteiro: See, it’s Winston. But then I meet Ishmael Flory. I meet Margaret Burroughs and her husband, Charlie Burroughs, who I learned had fought in the Soviet Army during World War II. So I’m meeting all of these interesting Black people, you know, and then, of course, people from the Harlem Renaissance, like William L. Patterson, like Louise Thompson Patterson, people who knew Du Bois in real life and in real time. And so, I’m saying, “Wait a minute, now.”

And then I went to the Soviet Union. I’m young, skinny, as you say, with this big Afro. I went to the Congress of the Soviet Komsomol, what we would call the Young Communist League of the Soviet Union. I led a delegation and I spoke. And the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is in attendance and they give me a standing ovation for this speech I give. It’s the 25th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism. This is huge in the Soviet Union. I learned then they had estimated that 20 million people had died. But now we know it’s upwards of 27 million. No nation has ever sacrificed so much for humanity as they had. I don’t care how you talk about it. And this sacrifice and this solidarity was given towards the Asian, the Vietnamese, and the African independence movements. The Soviet Union constituted the vanguard of the struggle against American warmaking and American imperialism. 

And then from there we were invited to go to Vietnam, in the throes of a great battle. I don’t know that we saw everything, but just to be there was an act of solidarity — it was illegal to be there. Many people, including Diane Nash and Jane Fonda, had gone to defy the U.S. government. And I have to say, I didn’t have any fear of anything, you know, no fear. 

As the war in Vietnam is shifting towards victory for the Vietnamese in 1973, rather than pause and look at what had been achieved, Winston says, now we must shift to the national liberation movement in southern Africa. And this is when he comes up with the formation of a National Anti-imperialist Movement in Solidarity with Southern Africa (NAIMSAL). So then I become a part of this organizing collective, and Winnie theorized that it would be, as he said, “Nationally informed — that is, Black — but anti-imperialist in content,” which meant that it was not anti-white. In fact, it sought alliances with white labor, with white peace activists, etc.

Winston had wanted the headquarters of NAIMSAL to be in New York. He wasn’t going to let it be in no California where they could do what they wanted to do with it. He knew they were not ideologically reliable. So Winston asked me to be its Executive Secretary. Now, Winston, by this time, and this is just a small matter, had begun calling me the Prodigal, like the prodigal son. So I began, but I was working alone. Without saying it, and I’ve only now come to understand it, there was a certain boycott of NAIMSAL.

Purba: You mean within the Party? 

Anthony Monteiro: Oh, yes. And they would then begin to wage a struggle against me, the likes of which I’d never seen and never could understand. Too young. But I could always talk to Winston. I never wanted to talk to him about the difficulties I was having, because I didn’t want to burden him with all that. But many of the Black people supported it, especially in Chicago. 

We had committed ourselves to struggle to get a million signatures calling for the expulsion of South Africa from the U.N. We ended up getting 100,000. This is in 1974. And then in 1975, I made connections to the U.N. Special Committee against Apartheid, where I meet E.S. Reddy, this tall Indian — beautiful cat. He was the Executive Organizer of the Special Committee Against Apartheid. In 1975, South Africa would not be independent for another 20 years. And so the ideological struggle for African solidarity had to be waged. As the head of NAIMSAL, I also became connected to the world anti-imperialist peace forces. That’s how I would end up in places like Afghanistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Angola, Algeria, Cuba, and Guyana. 

I met Romesh [Chandra] at many of these conferences, and Romesh was a very close friend of Henry Winston. And the beauty of the whole thing, the symmetry of it, was that Coretta Scott King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery and others, began to move towards the World Peace Movement. Romesh understood it. And the Black churches, the Black newspapers, the Black civil rights organizations embraced him. Romesh was part of a world movement against neo-colonialism. Indira [Gandhi] was very important in the Indian government financing the World Peace Council along with the Soviet Union. 

Nuri: Well, it seems like Henry Winston was very obviously influential, and also invested in your ideological development. But then at the same time there’s not total ideological consolidation or cohesion within the Party. 

Anthony Monteiro: There were differences, as I started to understand, even at the level of the leadership. I’m talking about the leadership, not just in New York, but across the country. If you were to ask me, I would have to say that one of the big issues was the question of race and class, the centrality of Black liberation. A lot of people say, “Well, that is not Marxist-Leninist, because you’re not saying the centrality of the working class.” There were all kinds of ideas, some ideas where you would have to call them sectarian ideas, dogmatic ideas about the working class. But that, in my mind, was a default to white people. What they would prefer is the subordination of Black workers to their line. 

All of these Black people, I don’t care whether it was Winston, Jim and Esther Jackson, or Margaret Burroughs and Ishmael Flory out in Chicago, were followers of Du Bois. Most of them had been mentored directly or knew Du Bois as young men and women. So they ain’t going to bend. Winston saw Pan-Africanism as solidarity between Africa, Afro-America, and the working class. But people wanted to hold onto a dogmatic position. The dogmatic position supported a white-centric or white supremacist position. Not a vicious white supremacy, but white supremacist assumptions. 

Nuri: How did the Party deal with the color line and what progress was made in trying to at least reckon with it? Previously, you had said that Henry Winston would ask people if they could support Black leadership — it’s a question, right? 

Anthony Monteiro: He wouldn’t ask if you could. He would say, “If you’re in the Communist Party, you must support Black leadership. Accept Black leadership as one test of your fidelity to the fight against white supremacy.” He tried to build into the leadership cadre at every level of the Party Black leadership. So you might have a district which was 80 percent white and Winston would make sure there was a Black district leader. Black leadership was a principle of the Communist Party. When Winston dies [in 1986], I think most of this is undone.

Purba: I was remembering when you described the struggle to free Angela Davis.

Anthony Monteiro: Herbert Aptheker said, “We will defend Angela Davis as a communist, so the fight becomes a fight against anti-communism.” But Winston said, “No, we will not. We will defend her as a Black woman communist.” And see, this fits into his theory of the unbreakable link between racism and anti-communism. He said, “She is not being persecuted only because she’s a communist. She is being persecuted that way because she’s a Black woman.” And if you didn’t see that, you couldn’t understand what American history was about. Once we did that, then Aretha Franklin offers to put up her bail. The whole nation, especially Black people, are then animated to defend this Black woman and her right to be a communist. 

That’s that Winston, man. That’s Winston. He always centralized the Black struggle. Always. When he spoke of Black people, he was speaking of people that he knew. Wasn’t no, “the working class, this and that, from my shop.” None of that nickel and dime espionage, you know. He spoke of a living people who were thriving and fighting. And he was very much about the Black church and that whatever Black people created was to be defended. He would speak of the Black press, many of whom were members of the Communist Party or allies. 

Collapse of the Soviet Union and World Communist Movement

Purba: Could you talk about the events leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, especially the period after Winston’s death? What happened to the Communist Party here? 

Anthony Monteiro: Winston dies in 1986. And so when he’s gone, it’s just Gus [Hall] – he’s trying to hold on, but he’s not the leader Winston is. My first inclination is to defend him, his leadership, in the ways that I saw Winston defend his leadership as defending the unity of the Party. Those forces against Winston and Hall make a move to bring Hall down and to replace him with their people, and they didn’t have to worry about being charged with racism or any of that, because Gus is white.

1985 is the year that Gorbachev comes to power. A lot of issues start arising in the world movement and in the Soviet Union. No one could have ever thought, as I believe now, that Western intelligence had penetrated to the top of the Soviet Communist Party. And I believe that definitely that Gorbachev was an agent of Western intelligence. Gorbachev comes out with this book, which is obviously edited, published, and maybe even written by Western intelligence, called Perestroika. It’s on the New York Times bestseller. It’s everywhere. And Gorbachev is being celebrated in the West as the first communist leader, Soviet leader, that is really liberal and open. Many people felt that the overtures for peace that Gorbachev was making — we didn’t see surrender, many of us saw peace — was worth it if we could get denuclearization and if the West were prepared to back away from the Cold War. But then it raised other questions as this went forward, “Well, was Marx wrong? Was Lenin wrong?” The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is openly saying, and the corporate media is repeating it every day to the world, that communism has failed, that the Soviet Union never was anything but Stalinist, that Leninism again was a failure, and that he would be a liberalizing and reformist General Secretary. They tried to disguise the question of Lenin by saying Stalin. If this was wrong, then we were wrong. You know what I’m saying? 

And so again, factions began to form. You had some elder statesmen of the Party who, rather than take a stance and stand up, became politically ambiguous. You had others who didn’t say anything. Then you had an aggressive faction, which wanted to undo the Party and take power. If you look at the leadership of the Communist Party today, what you have are elements that did very little to fight in that moment of crisis. I thought of it as betrayal. But still my predisposition is to go to the front of the struggle, and I wasn’t afraid. 

All of that leads to this ideological conference in 1989. Now, as I recall it, I’m feeling a certain way because I’m saying, “We have to uphold Winston’s spirit, Winston’s line.” I’m feeling that the struggle to hold on to the Party was a struggle for the ideology of the Party, but not in the way that Gus and some of his followers were putting it. Although I was aligned with him, I was not into this, “Now we’re back to the class struggle.” What were we in all the rest of this time? In other words, we had been “diverted” from it. And I’m asking, “Did you mean, by Winston?”

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapses — Yeltsin by this time said, “Well, the Soviet Union is over.” It all crumbled at once. The world movement collapses. And of course, Yeltsin, who succeeds Gorbachev, is an agent of Western intelligence. There’s no question; he’s a drunk, he’s a madman. Gorbachev tried to be a little more slick and sophisticated.

That same year, the Party here has its last convention as a unified Party. The people who are pro-Gorbachev, pro-Joe Slovo and that type of pro-social democracy, leave the Party in the name of, “We want democracy.” And that’s Angela — that was the end of Angela as a revolutionary. Herbert Aptheker, Charlene Mitchell, the whole West Coast, they go. I felt that after that 1991 convention, we at least did not dissolve the Party. So my sense was, let’s move forward. Of course, and I’m not exaggerating this, I see the Party in the mold that Winston was developing, but everybody didn’t. I knew it had to be worked out. I just didn’t know how we would go forward.

Nuri: Looking back, it seems like that time in 1995, the Million Man March — which is having its 30th anniversary right now — was basically a bright spot in all of that darkness. 

Anthony Monteiro: I couldn’t agree with you more. And I felt like that. 

Philadelphia sends the largest contingent. It is based upon the mobilization by two major unions, 1199C led by Henry Nicholas and the American Federation of State County Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 33 here. It was also not just these two unions, but also the International Longshoremen’s Association 1291, which is “Deep Water,” and Lucien Blackwell’s union, what we called “Car Gang.” Whenever Black people move, it is the proletariat. So in every respect, Black leaders of trade unions came together and it was a celebratory feeling as we boarded buses and proceeded to Washington, D.C. Buses left from every part of Black Philadelphia. There were even men who walked there from Philly. And I’m certain this was the same in places like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and New York. I viewed the Million Man March as, “We can fight.”

It was an unstoppable force. The spirit of it remains up to this day. It is an example. And this is the way I would articulate it — as the mobilization of a Black proletariat. No two ways about it. The Million Man March established [Louis] Farrakhan as a special kind of leader. You cannot take this away. You would not have had the Million Man March were it not for his sacrifice and his family’s — of him going all around the country, speaking at rallies, speaking to officials, speaking to trade union leaders. And he had and still has a lot of prestige in the Black community. I think he is, of all Black leaders, the most highly accepted. 

Of course, the Zionists attacked it. And, you know, Zionists always want to say, “Oh, you being anti-Jewish.” Ain’t nobody being anti-Jewish. There are Zionist organizations that are politically and financially powerful. They came at the Million Man March by going after Farrakhan: “Farrakhan is anti-semitic. Farrakhan is a misogynist. Farrakhan is homophobic.”

And of course, and that relates to me, that is where I ended my relationship with the Communist Party. And I was right. I am right up to this day. A million, two million Black men march on Washington. What does that say about them and what does that say about you? And there’s no way in the world that I could have remained in an organization like that. But it was in the making. 

Purba: The Party’s criticism of the Million Man March was on the grounds of Louis Farrakhan being anti-semitic and sexist. 

Anthony Monteiro: I think it is true that most of the Jews in the Communist Party were anti-Zionist. But that didn’t mean that all of them were. And here you have Louis Farrakhan, the target of the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist lobby, Mossad and all of that. 

The subtext was that you can’t support the Million Man March because it would upset the so-called Black-Jewish Alliance. “Oh, since the Zionists don’t like Farrakhan, then we have to not like Farrakhan.” It was even present then, but that affected the internal life of the Party — not spoken loudly. With the collapse of the World Communist Movement, all of this comes to the fore. Two million Black men show up, and the Communist Party is boycotting it. There are many people in the leadership of the Communist Party, or associated in one or another way with the Communist Party, who took that position. 

I felt in a lot of ways, very frankly, it was a capitulation to white supremacy. If you don’t like Farrakhan, separate him from two million Black men. Without Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, who had been a part of that group at Fisk University with James Lawson, the March could not have happened. And here in Philadelphia, Joe Certaine, who was the managing director of the city, worked tirelessly to help mobilize Black men to go there. All of these Black women and Black leaders were on the stage. I mean, the great Rosa Parks. Oh, what, she doesn’t know what she’s doing? Or Maya Angelou. 

Now, Angela Davis and the people in the Committees of Correspondence, which had broken with the Party in 1991, were united in the attack upon the Million Man March. They’re bending to white feminism and white folk. I love her to death. But shit, baby, you wrong. She’s never been the same, by the way. You go to social democracy, liberals, and the Democratic Party — every time you retreat on a question of principle, you decide your fate in history. And they blew it. 

People criticize the Million Man March because it did not come forward with a program of struggle. But the conditions then were not as positive as the conditions as of the 1963 March on Washington. How do you go forward? It was not clear, and the country and the world was in a counter-revolutionary moment. China was weak, trying to rebuild from the Cultural Revolution. There had been coups, assassinations, and Western-sponsored, so-called ethnic civil wars in Africa. By 1994, South Africa had won against apartheid, but then the victory was very hollow because the African National Congress (ANC) abandoned its basic program of nationalizing the wealth of the country. So you have a Black government and growing poverty and growing violence in South Africa. We see this growing criminalization [in the United States]. So it was difficult to see how we would move forward. But the Million Man March showed the strengths and weaknesses of the Nation of Islam. It had this leader who could mobilize the people and the Nation of Islam, but it did not yet have the political education to know how to build a movement, and even up to this day, they don’t. But it was a great stance as a statement — we’re still here, we can still mobilize, and we will fight.

Since the death of Winston, the Party’s commitment to Black people began to be weakened. It’s not that there’s no class differences and class conflict. The question is, “Where is the center of the struggle for democracy?” And we had said all the time in the Party that the Black liberation struggle was the central struggle for democracy. We felt, especially Winston, that while defending the Soviet Union, we had to defend the struggle for freedom in this country in the first place. The Black liberation struggle was the key to democracy. There could not be democracy for the working class, for the trade union movement, for women, for any other groups, unless there was freedom and democracy for Black people. And here they dropped the ball. I said, “I can’t go with this.”

The Return to Martin Luther King Jr.

Nuri: Once the Soviet Union has fallen and the World Communist Movement has collapsed, you can’t take any of it for granted anymore. How are you thinking about the path forward? 

Anthony Monteiro: First, one thing on Martin Luther King, and this is the Black Civil Rights Movement — this is key to the future of the Communist Party. Winston elevated it to the center of the struggle of the American people. Others didn’t see it that way, and those who did not see it that way could not sustain even a Party based upon Marxism-Leninism in this country. You see, once I joined the Communist Party, many things came together, many dots were connected. Then I had strong mentorship — all the difference in the world. 

Winston’s trilogy was Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, and those are the iconic figures from the anti-slavery to the anti-imperialist struggle. There were — mainly white people, but also many Black people in the Left and in the Party — that had this paternalism about the Civil Rights Movement; that Martin Luther King was a nice man, a good man, a peaceful man, but they didn’t see him as a revolutionary. They had no alternative, and there was no objective alternative to the Black movement. By being weak in their understanding of the Black movement, they could not fight for white people and white workers to have an understanding of it and of the leadership of Black people. 

Purba: What were the consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union for building a coalition? 

Anthony Monteiro: King was assassinated in 1968, the fall of the Soviet Union was in 1991, but actually 1989. So you get a 20 year period. And in this period, Winston is thinking about the revolutionary process in this country in ways that few others were. There were communists and probably others who understood what Winston was saying. He was also saying that we as a Communist Party could not be an ideological extension of the Soviet Union. And therefore he locates the revolutionary logic after the downfall of the slave system — so it’s more or less from Reconstruction to that present moment that he was writing in [for Strategy for a Black Agenda]. It was a rethinking of the ideas and theories that come out of the European 18th and 19th centuries.

Winston saw the [Black Proletariat as] canonical representatives of the various stages of the revolutionary process in this country. As a package, it was like the nucleus of an atom with all of this potential energy, if unleashed, to transform the people and the movement. 

The March on Washington in 1963 established Martin Luther King as the unquestioned ideological leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Winston saw what we see — the beauty and quality of those women and men that led the Third American Revolution. He saw them in all of their achievements and all of their potential. And if they could do it, then how many more others? That’s the way he thought. 

The collapse of the World Communist Movement, at a moment when Black folk and their leadership were rejecting the whole American narrative based upon anti-Sovietism, was indeed a blow. 

Nuri: In your youth, you came to believe that armed struggle was how revolution would take place in America. When is it that you returned to Martin Luther King as so central to the American revolutionary process? 

Anthony Monteiro: For a long time, I felt that King was not real. How could he be? This poet, this eloquent person, this Civil Rights leader. I rejected him because I felt that I didn’t have the ability to assess who this person was. 

And even as a kid, I’m hearing all around me opposition to King. King, of course, is in the South. He speaks in the language of Christianity of the New Testament. But then the Nation of Islam and other Black nationalists are very present. Malcolm had launched an attack upon King, literally saying that only a coward would accept the path of nonviolence, and a real man — and of course, we wanted to be real men — would not let somebody hit them without striking back. 

By the time I get to college, I’m hearing this more, but it’s also contextualized by the Chinese revolution and the ideas of Mao Zedong that “power comes out of the barrel of the gun” and Frantz Fanon on the role of violence, the consciousness of the oppressed. At least when I was a sophomore in college, I rejected the nonviolent approach. So gradually I became convinced of the need for insurrectionary violence. How it would be done, the tactics, I had no idea. But we had this idea of making the cities — and especially where Black people live, for instance, North Philly — a liberated zone. We said, if our struggle is an anti-colonial freedom struggle — and the only way we understood freedom is as anti-colonial — it would have to be an armed uprising to establish liberated zones, such as they had done in Cuba and certain of the African nations. That’s what I believed. It makes sense for a young person. And it’s not bad thinking, but that’s the way you think without mentorship, without guidance. So when I joined the Communist Party, it’s Winston, it’s William L. Patterson, it’s James Jackson, it’s Ishmael Flory — a whole number of elder Black people — who explain Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement to me. They had the revolutionary integrity and authority to convince me. 

It would take a couple of decades to realize that I had not properly grieved the assassination of King. And I still feel that he died on the battlefield of the struggle for peace and for economic justice. I would say certainly by the 1990s, I saw King — and I didn’t quite understand it all — as a figure decisive and essential to any revolutionary process in this country. 

Purba: The Free School did the Year of Gandhi. In the first event, you established King and Gandhi as two Mahatmas. You said that if Gandhi is the father of the Indian nation, then Martin Luther King must be seen as the father of a new American nation.

My question is two parts. First, does the door to the remaking of the American people have to go through King? Second, why has it been so difficult for his centrality to be identified in the revolutionary process? 

Anthony Monteiro: You know, it was a very edifying thing to do the Year of Gandhi — because James Lawson came, which was unbelievable. Diane Nash had agreed to come, but Covid hit. Doing Gandhi was very edifying, although it presented to us ideological challenges that we did not see coming. And, you know, I always try to trace a lot of things back to the deep state. Suddenly, you had all of these very impressive websites that were anti-Gandhi, from Indians. Then you had a Ghanaian in Brooklyn who has since disappeared, who was putting forward all this stuff about Gandhi being a racist. We saw this and said, “Oh God, well, how do we fight this?” And that’s when we said, “King is the weapon against this.” And it makes all the sense in the world from Gandhi’s testimony to the Thurmans [Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman], that “it will be through your people that my message is known.” As a kid coming up, I knew Gandhi more than I knew most Civil Rights leaders. I mean, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it? 

Just like with everything else, to understand King, you have to understand the larger ideological, political context. Because King as King, Du Bois as Du Bois, Robeson as Robeson — are not compatible with 19th century or early 20th century revolutionary theory. You can’t fit them into that logic. You really can’t, because they are talking about something that is all-humanity — and that to defeat imperialism and to fight for peace requires an all-humanity struggle. You know, King remains the most unifying figure among Black people. 

From Internationalism to Intercivilizational Unity: A New Stage

Purba: This conception of an all-humanity struggle, could you clarify how you see that as being different from class struggle, or even what the broadest vision of the World Communist Movement was?

Anthony Monteiro: Yeah, see, it’s the difference between internationalism and intercivilizationalism. You know, it’s almost like — Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese, “Y’all do your thing. We here, we do our thing. Cuba, they do their thing, and we all come together and express international solidarity.” Intercivilizationalism says that civilizations, as they struggle, will fuse, will become qualitatively united in ways that are unexpected. That’s why when John and Alice Coltrane gravitate towards Hinduism, they’re saying our civilizations are one.

The higher level of struggle, which is already upon us, is to seek the unity of civilizations, as Paul Robeson was attempting. Part of the role of imperialism is to keep civilizations separated. I think that Afro-American civilization is so pivotal to the unity of civilizations. That’s what King was advocating; and in the practice of Muhammad Ali, you saw it. 

Purba: We are moving from a position of solidarity among civilizations and struggles to a framework of complete identification of all civilizations that will struggle for peace. 

Anthony Monteiro: That’s the way I see it. And it’s new to most people. That’s why the Free School — the way we work out problems in the Free School — shows the possibility of the joining of civilizations in a common struggle for humanity. This is what is upon us at this stage. This is the task that we must choose. And it’s more than doable. 

Nuri: I think Free School has been operating in an intercivilizational framework for years now. What you’re saying about the Year of Gandhi is that it’s not just about studying India, but about the Indian freedom struggle and nonviolence as it relates to King, the Third American Revolution, and our country and our people. That’s what you get from King and Gandhi, Lawson and Gandhi. There’s something very profound about it becoming more of a possibility, a broader phenomenon, that can actually then be expanded to maybe the whole American people — who are Black people, white people, but also increasingly immigrants. And maybe there is a way to actually resolve the complex problems that are in this country. 

Purba: You said that when you started Free School, you did not know what it would become. What is Free School now? What does an organization like this, composed mainly of young people and people from all different civilizations represent for the future of the Black struggle and for the remaking of this country?

Anthony Monteiro: As an organization, we draw from the World Communist Movement and from Leninism with the idea of the centrality of the ideological struggle. The Free School takes from the modern notion of parties — that parties are groupings of people with common ideas. 

But that is not sufficient. We are also, and I think more definitely and more profoundly, rooted in and connected to the Black Freedom Movement. We are more like the Diane Nashes, the James Lawsons, and the Martin Luther Kings, than we are like the Leninists. Because we inherit from the Civil Rights Movement the worldview that transcends the nation and looks at ourselves and the world through civilization and humanity. The civilization question is not a Leftist question. I don’t think it ever has been. It is not just an economic or social crisis. It is a civilizational crisis, which raises the question of Black folk and their civilization.

Part of the rejoinder is that every people must find its path to revolutionary change. What is our history, and what are the canons or moments in our revolutionary history, must be embraced. And so, we’re seeking a total understanding of modernity, and the revolutionary history of modernity, and how we go forward. And it is not based upon the principles of the Russian Revolution, but it is more based upon — and Winston got this right — from the anti-slavery to the anti-imperial struggle. Black liberation, as we have talked about it, is now woven into the fabric of humanity itself. You cannot separate Black people and Black liberation from humanity. And this is a direct product of the Third American Revolution. Now, whether the Free School existed or not, there are revolutionary processes in the world. The question is whether the United States will catch up to world humanity and how that would be done.