Report from the Carl Dix Campus Tour "From Buffalo Soldier to Revolutionary Communist"

Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University (TSU) in Houston. This was the second stop of his campus tour "From Buffalo Soldier to Revolutionary Communist."

We received the following correspondence from Houston:

On Wednesday, November 11, Carl Dix spoke at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University (TSU) in Houston. This was the second stop of his campus tour "From Buffalo Soldier to Revolutionary Communist." Around 85 people came out to the event, with the majority being students and professors from TSU. It was a very exciting evening and the audience really got into what Carl was saying and came back with very serious and thoughtful questions.

Building for the tour came in the midst of an escalation of repression and stifling of critical thinking on campus led by the new president of TSU. Under the guise of "security," president Rudley and his events committee have instituted bureaucratic polices that make it almost impossible for students to have access to radical ideas and non-campus groups. Professors were being hit with excessive fees and fines to bring speakers on campus. Any flyer passed out, poster put up, or student organization formed, has to be personally approved by this new president. Getting a venue for the event became a real battle. One of the professors who was key in organizing the event recounted what the president said to him in the midst of all this. Rudley told this law professor that it is a dangerous situation where professors are bringing in outside speakers who are trying to influence students to their points of view. So this professor had to remind Rudley that is in fact the responsibility of professors at an institution of higher learning to introduce students to points of view they normally would not have access to, is it not? The administration backed down and approved the event. But the policies still remain, and bringing this tour to TSU was both a nodal point and helped open up this battle for critical thinking and dissent on campus.

On the night of Carl's speech, people milled around the lobby of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law in and out of engaging conversations. The entire event was quite exciting. It opened up with some heavy words about the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund and the special issue of Revolution on prisons and prisoners. This included speaking to how much it means to get the message of revolution and the leadership of Bob Avakian out to prisoners crushed under the weight of ideological and physical lockdown and how this enables them, in turn, to play an important role in the revolution. Following this introduction, Carl Dix came forward to share some real talk with people, on the oppression of Black people, the current wars for empire being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and why people should not live and die in a way that keeps all of this madness going, but instead, should dedicate their lives to the emancipation of all humanity.

Carl's presentation elicited a wide range of lofty questions: how to reach out to the cynics and the youth, to let them know this system is wrong, and how do communist principles relate to revolution. What is the revolution going to do about the drug problem? How to develop relationships between parents and children that keep them out of "the life." What about getting inside the system in order to take it down, like in the book "The Spook Who Sat by the Door." Who do you think Obama has to answer to? What other solution do you have for students who want to go to college and want to be debt-free, seeing their only option as the military? One young Black man said, I'm harassed constantly by the police, how do I fight back against oppression and discrimination and how can I help young Black males so they don't have to go through this? Other questions included, how do we pull troops out of Afghanistan without making it a safe haven for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? One person asked, "theoretically communism is perfect but how do we stop it from becoming corrupted?"

Unfortunately, no one responded to Carl's challenge for anyone to come out and argue for the position that Afghanistan is a good war. We had invited the people from the national Buffalo Soldier Museum which is here in Houston, to come, but they didn't show up. However, several people who were in, or are still in the military came out to the event and got challenged, including a young Black man in fatigues, who came up after the presentation and said that after hearing Carl speak, he doesn't want to be a Buffalo soldier, and he wanted to know what to do.

Overall, this was a successful leg of this sorely needed tour, which aims to unleash strategic sections of the youth and students to resist the crimes of this system and to join up with the revolution under the leadership of Bob Avakian to fight for a whole new world.

From a youth in Houston

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.