The following report from the CPUSA African American Equality Commission was given to the party’s National Committee on July 13, 2025. More NC reports here.

African Americans in the United States continue to face a deep assault on their fundamental rights from the Trump administration and from far right actors of the MAGA movement. Rollbacks of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies have led to both the cultural erasure of Black historical figures, such as the removal of government web pages honoring Jackie Robinson, and the erasure of workplace protections for Black people in the rescinding of Executive Order 11246, which prohibited discrimination based on race for government contractors.

Trump’s tone and stance on DEI has signaled to the capitalist class to take the same approach. In the months following Trump’s inauguration several major companies have dropped their DEI initiatives in favor of the false “merit-based” practices pushed by MAGA of today and conservatives from the past. Most notably, Target terminated their three-year DEI goals, which has led to massive backlash and spurred a nationwide boycott within the Black community.

The call to boycott was supported and formally endorsed by the CPUSA with some clubs joining coalition efforts to expand and deepen its reach — in Washington, D.C. and in Queens, N.Y. The AAEC Commission is encouraging club and district leaders to take up this effort and encourage regular informational pickets at your local Target stores. It’s worth mentioning that Black labor leaders at this year’s Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) Convention discussed these attacks on DEI and passed a resolution vowing to use the power of organized labor to protect these policies. CBTU was also the first labor-affiliated organization to call on the labor movement to hold a mass rally and march on Washington against the MAGA assault on democracy.

Public education, birthright citizenship, and voting rights are all traceable to the first Reconstruction.

The assault on the Black community does not stop at DEI rollbacks, of course. In fact, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 scheme is largely an attempt to rollback the gains of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Public education, birthright citizenship, and voting rights are all traceable to the first Reconstruction. This agenda extends to cultural institutions as well, with the Trump administration having issued an executive order aimed at the Smithsonian Institution to “remove improper ideology” and “divisive, race-centered ideology” from its museums. This move directly targets institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with critics viewing it as an attempt to sanitize American history and downplay the role of race and racism. A little known part of this attack is the likely closure of the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum in a historically Black neighborhood east of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. And so, the AAEC has recently launched a study group on W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic text Black Reconstruction to sharpen our understanding of the period and what we may be at risk of losing under Trump 2.0.

Beyond these direct policy and cultural assaults, a significant new threat targets the very infrastructure of government itself: the federal workforce. Just last week, the Supreme Court delivered a major blow to federal employee unions, overriding lower court injunctions and allowing the Trump administration to proceed with mass reduction-in-force (RIF) layoffs and a sweeping reorganization of federal agencies, as widely reported. This decision all-but-guarantees the administration’s plan to replace career federal employees with politically appointed loyalists, undermining decades of civil service protections. These attacks on the federal workforce disproportionately affect Black workers, who make up 18% of the federal workforce while making up just under 15% of the U.S. population overall.

A growing concern has also emerged in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk’s xAI company is releasing severe pollution from its massive data center into the city’s predominantly Black communities. These communities, already burdened by decades of industrial pollution, now face significantly heightened health risks, including cancer rates multiple times the national average and alarmingly lower life expectancies. Despite community protests and legal action initiated by groups like the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center challenging xAI for Clean Air Act violations and lack of transparency, the Shelby County Health Department recently granted xAI an air permit for a limited number of turbines, further fueling outrage from residents who accuse local leaders of prioritizing corporate profit over public health.

The attacks on the immigrant community also affect African Americans as well. The Trump government recently stripped temporary protected status (TPS) protections for Haitian immigrants, putting not only Haitians and other Afro-descendant immigrants at risk for ICE detention, but also African Americans due to the racist profiling of the immigration raids and traffic stops. Trump also reinstituted his old travel ban which includes several African countries, and may put many African and African American families in limbo. This fascist attack on immigrants has also primarily fallen on cities led by Black mayors like Karen Bass of Los Angeles and Brandon Johnson of Chicago. Mayor Bass recently won a lawsuit blocking ICE and the Trump administration from unlawfully detaining immigrants based on their skin color.

Although the Trump Administration is dead set on dismantling the first and second Reconstruction gains, the AAEC of the CPUSA unwaveringly marches on towards a third Reconstruction and for socialism.

Images: African American Policy Forum leads a march to the National Museum of African American Art to defend Black history, art, and culture by African American Policy Forum (Facebook); AFGE members protest DOGE cuts by AFGE (Facebook)