by Trevor Loudon
Amidst a fierce and violent mob in downtown Minneapolis, following the police-involved death of George Floyd, city leaders ordered Minneapolis police at the city’s Third Precinct to abandon their posts. Not too long after vacating the premises and boarding-up the doors and windows, protesters converged on the abandoned precinct. Protesters set it ablaze. As the building lay engulfed in a raging fire, protesters triumphantly waved clenched fists in the air.
Jess Sundin, who took part in the Minneapolis chaos that night, explained her role in a June 18 interview with the radical Green Flame podcast. Sundin began by making her ideological position very clear: “Myself, I am a revolutionary. I’ve been a communist for more than 20 years.” Sundin further confirms that she was a key player in the “uprising” and fully approved of the resulting violence and looting; emphatically stating:
The first two weeks after George Floyd was killed saw an intensely high level of organizing all day and all night every day. During the day we would have marches and rallies, and at night the focus was often at the Third Precinct, which is the police station where George Floyd’s killers were working out of…. I can’t tell you the joy it brought all of us to see the Third Precinct destroyed.
Speaking to a crowd in Milwaukee two days before Jacob Blake was gravely wounded by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin a prominent left-wing extremist activist Ryan Hamann openly praised the criminality in Minneapolis:
On May 28, 2020, thousands more in that city organized and marched and forced the police into a full retreat from the Third Precinct police station and it was righteously burned.
The morning after the first Kenosha riots, FRSO’s FightBackNews.org described the previous night’s chaos as an “Uprising,” further reporting:
Riot police assembled at the scene of the shooting as the crowd began to gather, including members of the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Those assembled quickly grew restless in their anger. Squad cars were smashed and Molotovs thrown. The people chased the cops away and then set off on a march to the Kenosha Police Department (KPD) downtown.
While most Americans regard the wave of protests currently engulfing the United States as a spontaneous phenomenon – nothing could be further from the truth. These riots were organized and long planned. The activists who instigated the riots in Kenosha, are members of the same organization that “sparked” the riots in Minneapolis and have also instigated violent protests in several other states. The group is Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). And both activists Jess Sundin and Ryan Hamann are prominent FRSO leaders in Minnesota and Wisconsin, respectively. In fact, Sundin is the wife of FRSO Political Secretary Steff Yorek.
Speaking on the same day as President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, Steff Yorek stated, “We need to stay in the streets the entire four years opposing Trump and making the country ungovernable.” George Floyd’s killing was merely a “spark,” a pretext for revolution, nothing more. If it had not started in Minneapolis, riots would have erupted in Chicago the next week or in Seattle a week after.
NAARPR
Both Jess Sundin and fellow FRSO comrade Loretta VanPelt head the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar. Founded in 2015 to agitate after the police-involved shooting of a black teenager named Jamar Clark, the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar belongs to a network of other FRSO front groups known as the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR).
More than 1,200 people joined together on the weekend of November 22 – 24, 2019, at the Chicago Teachers Union hall, to refound the NAARPR. According to their website, NAARPR.org: “The newly refounded Alliance will concentrate its efforts on building the fight against police crimes and for community control of the police, and it will campaign for the release of political prisoners and the wrongfully convicted.”
The organization was modeled on the 1970s group of the same name established by the Communist Party USA to defend its iconic comrade Angela Davis from murder charges over the killing of a California judge.
The new organization is an FRSO project and is headed by Freedom Road Central Committee member Frank Chapman. A former St. Louis man, Frank Chapman was sentenced in the early 1960s to “life plus fifty” for his part in a robbery-killing. Chapman became a jail-house lawyer and a Marxist-Leninist. His cause was championed by the Communist Party USA, which was able to both secure his release and recruit him to the party.
Chapman became a leader of the NAARPR nationally, before taking leadership of the still-existing Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression as the rest of the national organization withered away. Circa 2010 Chapman left the Communist Party USA and moved over to the FRSO.
In short order the NAARPR established a network of affiliated organizations across the nation including the Dallas AARPR, the Milwaukee AARPR, the Centro Community Service Organization (CSO) in Los Angeles, and the aforementioned Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar.
Frank Chapman and fellow FRSO leader Joe Iosbaker have both claimed that Twin Cities Justice 4 Jamar members were the “rebels that gave us the spark that has inflamed the world.”
Film of the speeches that were given before the marchers descended on Kenosha clearly show the rally leaders holding up three banners: those of FRSO, the Milwaukee AARPR, and the FRSO’s youth wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). FRSO’s Fight Back! news declared: “Members of the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Freedom Road Socialist Organization are participating in the protests.”
FRSO comrades didn’t just participate. They instigated and they led. However, none were arrested. Instead, only four SDS members – Danica Gagliano-Deltgen of Wauwatosa, Oscar Walton of Milwaukee, Adelana Akindes of Kenosha, and Victor Garcia of Kenosha – were arrested. As of September 1, 2020, not one FRSO leader has been held accountable.
History
In 1985, two small organizations, Proletarian Unity League (PUL) and the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (RWH) – both of which came out of the 1960s Maoist movement, collectively known as the “New Communist Movement” or NCM – merged to form FRSO.
The name “Freedom Road” was chosen for its historical association. According to the history section of the website for Liberation Road, an FRSO splinter group, “The Congress voted to become the Freedom Road, borrowing another name for the Underground Railroad, so as to put the struggle of the Black Nation, and by implication all oppressed nationalities, at the center of our politics, even if the new organization was still uncomfortably white.” After merging with several more Maoist groups, the FRSO emerged into the 1990s as the country’s largest pro-Chinese communist group.
However, by the late 1990s, tensions were building inside FRSO. One faction – based in Chicago and Minneapolis – wanted to follow a more traditional Maoist insurrectionist line. These comrades wanted to organize “communities of color” into a revolutionary force. They wanted to march in the streets and throw rocks at the cops. They were true old-fashioned Maoist communists.
The larger faction – with strongholds in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York – wanted to take a more “moderate” stance, working more on propaganda to agitate against “white privilege” and to change the culture to bring about revolution. This faction was much more willing to work with and inside the Democratic Party on electoral projects.
In 1999, the factions formally split into two distinct groups – both keeping the FRSO name!
The traditional Maoist insurrectionist Chicago and Minneapolis-based FRSO, often identified with their propaganda newspaper Fight Back!, expanded into Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, northern Florida and Miami, Utah, and Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, the larger “moderate” FRSO eventually redubbed themselves as Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino Para La Libertad (FRSO/OSCL). They expanded from their California and New York base into Oregon and Washington. FRSO/OSCL later made a major effort to penetrate Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida — all states with significant minority populations. Their goal was to both radicalize and mobilize these minorities to destroy the Republican Party by flipping its Southern base. In fact, FRSO/OSCL can rightly claim credit for turning Virginia from red to blue and for the fact that Republican-leaning Kentucky and North Carolina now have Democratic governors.
In 2013, three young FRSO/OSCL-aligned activists – Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors – founded Black Lives Matter. This was something the Fight Back! comrades in the more revolutionary Maoist FRSO could relate to, and the two groups have cooperated in this movement.
In fact, it would be fair to say that when George Floyd was killed in May 2020, those riots that were not started by FRSO/Fight Back! were mostly instigated by Black Lives Matter/FRSO/OSCL.
In April 2019 the FRSO/OSCL formally changed its name to “Liberation Road.” All future references to FRSO refer to the revolutionary Maoist Fight Back! faction — now the one and only FRSO. Today, FRSO is probably around 300 members strong. With another 200 or so aspiring comrades in about 10 of its SDS branches in college campuses across the country.
China Connection
Since the 1970s, when delegations of young American Maoists would make regular pilgrimages to the People’s Republic of China, FRSO and its preceding groups have followed the Beijing “line.” In a 1999 statement FRSO wrote:
FRSO realizes that the task of building communist organization is by no means easy or simple. We have much work in front of us. That being said, we have every confidence in the future. In one of his poems, the leader of the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong, noted, “The world cries out for things to be done.” We will continue to advance the ranks of the doers and shakers.
On August 25, 2020, the Wisconsin FRSO Facebook page posted a photo of protesters in Kenosha. The post caption included the following encouraging quote:
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history
– Mao Zedong
In recent times FRSO has praised China for its handling of the COVID-19 epidemic, while heavily criticizing the U.S. response. On April 7, 2020, FightBackNews.org published a report from an anonymous FRSO comrade then in Shenzen, praising the Communist Party of China:
Instead of worrying what a massive quarantine would do to the bottom line of its corporations, the socialist Chinese government took a bold stance to put the lives of its people over profits.
This is in stark contrast to the United States. […] As the world watched China take decisive action to close down the country and protect its people, the Trump administration chose to do nothing.
FRSO takes a similar pro-China/anti-U.S. line on virtually every issue from culture to foreign policy, domestic racism to social progress. To FRSO, Communist China can do no wrong.
Terrorist Ties
FRSO’s Fight Back! frequently features stories of comrade’s trips to foreign lands, or meetings with representatives of foreign communist groups. Some of the meetings are with State Department designated terrorist organizations, such Colombia’s FARC, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Examples include:
• In 2017, Mick Kelly interviewed Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison in home-in-exile in the Netherlands.
• In 2016, Joe Iosbaker travelled to the Philippines and reported back that “the Communist Party members there are our comrades.”
• In 2009, Fight Back! editor Mick Kelly was in Lebanon, where he met with former airplane hijacker and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine comrade Leila Khaled.
• In 2006, FRSO comrades Kosta Harlan and Erika Zurawski traveled to the rebel-held territory in Colombia to meet with commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
• In July 2000, Jess Sundin, of the Colombia Action Network and FRSO, led a small delegation of American activists to Bogota to attend a “conference responding to U.S. military aid.” The delegation also traveled to the area in southern Colombia controlled by FARC, where Sundin met with terrorist leader Raul Reyes.
In the early morning of September 24, 2010, FBI agents raided homes in Chicago, Minneapolis, North Carolina, and California, and more than 20 subpoenas were issued — all to leading FRSO comrades and supporters.
According to search warrants, the FBI was looking for evidence of “material support” for Colombian and Palestinian groups designated by the U.S. State Department as terrorist organizations. The FBI has been interested in links between the FRSO and the FARC, the PFLP, and the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah. All 23 of the activists questioned invoked their right not to testify before a grand jury.
FRSO quickly formed the Committee to Stop FBI Repression and “organized phone banks to flood then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s office and the Obama White House with protest calls, solicited letters from labor unions and faith-based groups and sent delegations to Capitol Hill to gin up support from lawmakers.” In the end no indictments were issued, and the case fizzled to nothing.
Wedded to destruction
FRSO’s encouragement of the burning of Minneapolis and Kenosha should be no surprise. FRSO has a violent past, multiple foreign and terrorist connections, and is totally committed to a communist America.
Fight Back! editor Mick Kelly recently posted a meme on the FRSO Facebook page summing up the group’s philosophy, stating:
Above all else, Leninism is revolution. It looks to destroy, to demolish the existing order of things, and replace it with socialism. That is the core. The core message of Lenin is to be a revolutionary.
Recent events in Minneapolis, Kenosha, and a dozen other cities around America demonstrate that FRSO takes Lenin’s ideas very seriously. Likewise, our nation’s law enforcement should also take FRSO and its subversive Leninist activities seriously.