25 years ago: Bruce Springsteen song condemns police killing of immigrant worker Amadou Diallo

On June 4, 2000, rock musician Bruce Springsteen first performed the song “American Skin” at the Phillips Arena in Atlanta, Georgia. The inspiration for the song was the NYC police killing of an unarmed immigrant worker Amadou Diallo and then their manufactured acquittal. The plainclothes officers fired a total of 41 bullets, 19 of which riddled Diallo’s body, when he had reached for his wallet to show identification. Springsteen would perform this song at many of his concerts in the following decades after the killings of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor.

The song’s poetic lyrics express evocative themes of police brutality, racism and the daily struggle of working class families living under the constant threat of police intimidation and violence: “Is it a gun?/Is it a knife?/Is it a wallet?/This is your life/It ain’t no secret/The secret my friend/You can get killed just for living in your American skin/41 shots/41 shots/41 shots.” In another verse, the lyrics say, “Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight.” 

The right-wing political establishment vociferously denounced the song and Springsteen in the most reactionary and crude manner. The head of New York’s Fraternal Order of Police, Bob Lucente, called Springsteen a “dirtbag” and a “floating fag.” The president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, said it was “an outrage that [Springsteen] would be trying to fatten his wallet by reopening the wounds of this tragic case at a time when police officers and community members are in a healing period.”

Lynch then organized a rally in Manhattan against Springsteen’s appearance at Madison Square Garden (MSG), saying, “We don’t need a millionaire coming down here and making money off our backs ... on a terrible, terrible tragedy.” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani held a press conference flanked by Police Chief Howard Safir to demand Springsteen drop his song “American Skin” at MSG, adding, “Despite the fact that they were acquitted ... there’s still people trying to create the impression that the police officers are guilty.”

The Democratic party establishment remained silent or attempted to alter the essence of “American Skin” to bolster the police and law-and-order politics. Democratic Senate candidate Hillary Clinton said nothing about the song nor issued any defense of Springsteen from the attacks by police organizations and Republican politicians. The New York Times editorial board refused to take a position. Instead, its writers asserted that the song was “no anti-cop diatribe” or sought to present the cops as working class fighters ensnared in a giant frameup by a bloodthirsty mob demanding their heads. 

50 years ago: Suez Canal officially reopens under Egyptian control

On June 5, 1975, the Suez Canal, a vital artery of global trade, officially reopened after its eight-year closure due to the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula during the 1967 war. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat held a “Day of Joy” ceremony at Port Said to mark the historic occasion of the first ships to pass through the canal as they navigated from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

At the ceremony, Sadat signed a document transferring the Canal from military to civilian control, declaring it “one of the happiest moments of my life when we started transiting the canal again after eight years.” He then led a seven-ship flotilla aboard the Egyptian destroyer “October 6” (named in honor of the 1973 Yom Kippur War) through ceremonial gates, marking the official resumption of traffic.

When it was originally constructed in 1869, the Suez Canal was owned by a joint British-French enterprise. But on July 26, 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, bringing it under the full control of the Egyptian government. The immediate response of British and French imperialism was a joint invasion, backed by Israel. But the United States, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, refused to back the attack and forced the European powers to pull back, effectively establishing the US as the dominant imperialist power in the region. 

During the Six-Day War, Israel invaded Egypt on June 6, 1967 and occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula, including the east bank of the Suez Canal. This transformed the Canal into a military front line, forcing Egyptian leaders to close the waterway. Mines were left in the waters from the conflict, preventing any ships from passing.

The Canal remained closed for eight years, a period that severely disrupted international shipping, forcing vessels to embark on lengthy detours around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 8,000 to 10,000 kilometers to voyages. The economic toll was substantial: Egypt alone lost an estimated $250 million annually in transit fees, and the global cost in lost trade and higher shipping expenses amounted to approximately $1.7 billion.

It would not be until the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, when Egypt launched a surprise attack that initially drove back the Israeli military, that Egypt regained some territory on the east bank of the Canal. This successful offensive was possible only due to Soviet military aid, but the Nixon administration massively reinforced Israel, allowing it to launch its own attack across the Canal into Egypt and regain the military edge it had lost.

While Sadat had achieved a limited military advance and a significant political success, this marked the last gasp of Arab bourgeois nationalism as a force capable of mounting a serious challenge to imperialism. Following the war, Sadat began to pivot Egypt away from its principal ally, the Soviet Union, and instead maneuvered to forge new relationships with the US and Israel. 

Rather than oppose US influence in the Middle East, Sadat began actively welcoming it, seeking ways to make deals with US capital for the benefit of the Egyptian elite and abandoning pledges to support other Arab nations engaged in conflicts with imperialism. This policy enabled the Egyptian regime to secure agreements to reopen the Canal, and eventually, three years later, the full return of the Sinai as part of the 1978 Camp David Accords.

Essentially, in return for control over the Suez Canal, Sadat dropped efforts to unify the Arab nations in a political bloc against imperialism and Zionism, severed its relationship with the Soviet Union, and abandoned any serious attempt to restore displaced Palestinians to their homeland.

75 years ago: Two US Supreme Court decisions challenge segregation laws

On June 5, 1950, two rulings by the United States Supreme Court challenged the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal” in higher education institutions.

The first of these cases was Sweatt v. Painter. The plaintiff was Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission in 1946 to the University of Texas School of Law solely due to the fact that he was black. The school’s president Theophilus Painter argued that the Texas state constitution prohibited racially integrated education. 

After unsuccessfully appealing this decision in the Texas State Supreme Court, Sweatt and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the case to the federal courts, where it reached the US Supreme Court in April 1950. 

In 1948, George W. McLaurin was similarly denied admission to the University of Oklahoma to pursue a Doctorate in Education on the same grounds: Oklahoma state law prohibited racially integrated education. After challenging the policy in federal district court, McLaurin was allowed entry to the university, but as the only black student, was provided with separate facilities and forced to study with his desk outside the classroom or in the classroom closet.

McLaurin’s petition to the district court for removal of the separate facilities was denied, thus leading to the Supreme Court case McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. 

In both of these cases, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the defendants, on the grounds that segregated education deprives students of the Fourteenth Amendment right of equal protection under the law.

They were the first significant legal challenges to segregation, which had been legitimized in the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Under that ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed that “separate but equal” clauses in state laws did not defy the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, established in 1868 as one of the Civil War amendments.

100 years ago: Mass strikes and protests against imperialism in Shanghai

On June 3, 1925, Shanghai, the largest city in China, was overwhelmed by mass protests of workers, students and poor people demanding that the inhabitants of the foreign settlements (enclaves controlled by the various imperialist powers) leave the city. At least 50,000 factory workers, led by the Communist Party, were on strike. They were joined by the staff of most newspapers. 

On May 30, the Chinese Communist Party organized a mass protest after sentences were passed on Chinese strikers by a court made up of Chinese and foreign judges, widely seen as a symbol of foreign infringement on Chinese sovereignty. As protesters approached a police station, foreign and Chinese police fired on them, killing nine and wounding at least 15.

In what has come to be known as the May Thirtieth Movement, by the next day, protesters, largely students, sought to cut off food supplies to the international settlements and called for a general strike. Groups of students were patrolling the streets near the foreign settlements to enforce the boycott.

Italian, British and American marines had landed in the city to help repress the uprising and Japanese and American ships were on their way with fresh troops. Martial law was declared in the foreign settlements and Chinese were banned from those areas. Newspaper reports noted that imperialist troops had used machinegun fire to clear streets of protesters, and that at least two more Chinese had been killed, although more recent research indicates that in the days of the uprising, between 30 and 200 may have been killed.

On June 4 a heavily biased article appeared in the New York Times that read, in part:

“The time has arrived when the powers must consider adopting a policy designed to arrest the forces of disintegration here or else stand aside and watch China lapse into complete chaos. This outbreak is symptomatic of the nationwide movement swelling from underlying forces which unless checked must develop into a serious anti foreign uprising.”

But far from blaming the brutally oppressed conditions of Chinese workers and peasants under foreign domination for the uprising, the article saw the origins of the events in “Japan’s pan Asian propaganda … later worked into activity by Russian Soviet propaganda and diplomacy in the Far East …” The Times called for further American intervention in China.

One of the outcomes of the May Thirtieth Movement was the rapid growth of the membership of the Chinese Communist Party.