Consumer and community-led boycotts have long been a tradition in the fight against racism in the United States. The “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the 1930s, which took hold across the country, were led by African American organizations fighting against workplace discrimination and segregation. Organizations like the New Negro Alliance in Washington, D.C., picketed retail and drug stores that refused to hire Black clerks along with shops that did not allow Black people to sit at the lunch counter. These boycotts against retail giants led to Supreme Court victories for the right to boycott and picket in front of stores with discriminatory practices.
In the 1940s, organizations like the National Negro Congress, initiated by the Communist Party USA, took up the fight against transportation companies who refused to hire Black workers. In 1941, alongside Rev. Adam Clayton Powell and the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, a boycott was launched against two private bus companies for their refusal to hire nearly any Black workers and to demand better jobs for those Black workers who were hired. The boycott led to one of the first affirmative action policies at a private bus company, calling for 17% of the workforce to be African American. This effort led to Rev. Powell eventually being elected to New York City Council and to Congress shortly thereafter.
In the 1950s, the more widely-known Montgomery Bus Boycott took place after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white patron. A long campaign ensued. Led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the campaign lasted 381 days. Community organizations along with the Black church coordinated the different facets of the campaign. Carpools were organized to get people, Black taxi drivers lowered their fares to match the buses, and more. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional, dealing a major blow to racism and Jim Crow.
On the international level, the Free South Africa movement against the fascist South African apartheid government organized an international movement to boycott South African products. This also included cultural boycotts led by stalwarts like Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, and others. Furthermore, students urged their universities to divest from businesses investing in the apartheid government. Over 200 U.S. companies cut ties with South Africa, and the U.S. government eventually imposed sanctions on the regime. The movement in the United States was largely African American-led, as Black people had long experience with Jim Crow, which functioned like an apartheid-like system. The apartheid South African government was eventually defeated in the early 1990s.
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH in the 1970s and ’80s also played a valuable role in getting affirmative action programs instated throughout private industry in the country. Jackson led boycotts against private corporations like CBS, demanding the media giant hire more Black writers and producers, as well as against Coca-Cola for it discriminatory hiring practices. These efforts by PUSH largely led to goals being established in private industry to hire more Black workers in jobs and sectors that historically had been denied to them.
In terms of labor-led boycotts, the Filipino- and Latino-led United Farm Workers (UFW) launched a boycott of California grapes in 1965 in tandem with their strike against the grape vineyards in Delano, Calif. Picket lines were organized in front of grocery stores in major cities asking shoppers not to buy grapes. Over 14 million people in the U.S. stopped purchasing grapes, sending sales plummeting 30-40% by 1969. This strike and boycott eventually forced the growers to the bargaining table in 1970 to meet the farm workers’ demands of better wages and working conditions.
Following this effort were the lettuce strike and boycott led by UFW during the “Salad Bowl” dispute with the Teamsters. This labor dispute, along with a second boycott against grapes, led to the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975 and won wide public support for migrant workers. The UFW recently launched their first vegetable boycott in over two decades, targeting mushrooms grown by Windmill Farms in Washington State.
Fast forward to 2025, billionaires and the big businesses that dominate the U.S. economy are attempting to assert full control over social and political life by backing the presidency of Donald Trump. Major corporations like Target donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund, hoping to receive favors from the new administration. Additionally, these private corporations bent the knee and began rolling back their diversity initiatives to join in on the MAGA racist chorus.
African Americans, who in large part felt betrayed by the election result, decided to boycott Target, a company headquartered in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered in 2020. This was a strategic move by the community to block the fascist drive of the administration.
The boycott, initiated by local Black women-led grassroots coalitions out of Minneapolis and national leaders like Sen. Nina Turner, Tamika Mallory, and Rev. Jamal Bryant, has had major success in hurting the retail giant’s bottom line. The most successful component of the struggle came out of the Black church, with its 40-day “Target fast” from Ash Wednesday through Easter Sunday.
Since the start of the campaign, Target’s stock price dropped by 57%, its valuation sank by $2 billion, and foot traffic and online engagement have been on a steady downward trend. On the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in May 2025, hundreds of churches and organizations around the country gathered in front of local Target stores for a prayer vigil and called for Target to meet the movement’s demands of a $2 billion commitment to Black business, investing $250 million into Black banks, partnering with HBCU business programs to build more Black entrepreneurs, and restoring its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments. Target CEO Brian Cornell resigned in August 2025.
In Washington, D.C., a coalition of Black clergy, community members, and organizations, including the Communist Party, have been picketing the busiest Target store in the Columbia Heights neighborhood for over eight months and engaging the community directly, encouraging consumers not to spend a dime at Target. This led to the Target store in Cleveland Park, in a predominantly white neighborhood, to close its doors over the summer. Target also recently announced that it will be laying off 1,800 workers, likely due to the boycott and the lack of the executives’ response to the community’s demands.
The struggle against the attacks on D.C.’s Home Rule is also connected to the boycott struggle. After the murder of George Floyd, D.C.’s city council, after pressure from the community, passed police accountability laws, including a ban on chokeholds and mandatory use of body cameras. MAGA Republicans in Congress, joined by several moderate Democrats, have introduced and passed a set of bills to repeal these laws, which followed the George Floyd Rebellion, in addition to reinstating cash bail, which has been outlawed in D.C. since 1992, and the death penalty.
The falsehood of a “crime crisis” in the nation’s capital has also been used to justify a military occupation of the city and intensified presence of federal law enforcement, who have persistently targeted Black and brown youth. Earlier in the year, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser bulldozed the first Black Lives Matter Plaza and mural in the country—installed after the rebellion of summer 2020—in an act of appeasement to Trump and his anti-DEI crusade. Trump has largely targeted Black mayors in major metropolitan cities throughout the country with ICE terror and military deployments.
Additionally, the labor movement has become attentive to this issue. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which counts 1.8 million members across the country, passed a resolution endorsing the boycott, becoming the first major labor union to do so. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) recently passed a similar resolution at its national conference. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) has also signed on to the “We Ain’t Buying It” holiday shopping freeze, with Target as one of its concentrated boycott targets.
Is the historic African American and labor alliance beginning to re-emerge thanks to the Target boycott?
One could argue that the MAGA-led anti-DEI drive largely targeted Black workers and aimed to remove them from the workforce while destroying civil rights protections along the way, starting with those in the federal government. The latter has historically been the largest employer of African Americans in the country, providing stable jobs and an avenue to higher incomes for the Black community. That’s why the highest per capita wealth rates for African Americans nationally are found in the D.C. suburbs, particularly in Prince George’s County.
Since the start of Trump 2.0, though, African Americans have been driven out of the government and the private sector, thanks in large part to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-led attacks on DEI and federal workers. This has led to over 300,000 Black women being removed from the workforce and over 300,000 white men replacing them on the federal payroll. Some are calling this an affirmative action period for white men, symbolized most clearly by Department of Justice dedicating itself to the mission of rooting out supposed “anti-white bias” in private industry.
Meanwhile, national unemployment numbers are reaching close to eight million, with over 800,000 Black women comprising a significant portion of that total. As for white men who may think they benefit from Trump’s policies, overall they are actualy still suffering from slow job growth under the Trump administration. Over 1.3 million federal workers have also had their collective bargaining contracts illegally cancelled by the Trump administration in a major union-busting operation. This dismantling of the federal government and the purging of Black workers is akin to the early 20th century under Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, when federal agencies and buildings became re-segregated, consolidating Jim Crow across the country.
Trump has also illegally fired or attempted to fire Black women in high positions in the government like Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve Board. He has even gone after Black women in high office like New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Congresswoman LaMonica McIver from New Jersey. Black history in Smithsonian museums is also under assault, with Vice President J.D. Vance leading the charge in rooting out alleged “illegal DEI” ideology from the museums. Republican budget cuts have also threatened potential closure of these institutions, including the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum in the historic district east of the river in Washington, D.C.
Local universities, like George Mason University, are also being threatened with sanctions by the Trump administration for maintaining their DEI policies. The local economy in the District of Columbia and surrounding metropolitan areas is suffering from an unemployment crisis that is nearly ten times worse than the rest of the country due to the mass layoffs, budget cuts, and military occupation imposed by the Trump administration. The CBTU, in response to the attacks on government workers and the full throttle assault on civil rights, has called for a national day of action led by the AFL-CIO, similar to the Solidarity Day that took place in the 1980s in response to the PATCO strike and union-busting of the Reagan administration against air traffic controllers.
As if the basic attack on Black workers we’ve witnessed so far isn’t enough, the ultimate agenda of Trump and MAGA appears to be the complete rollback of the democratic gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Assaults on the 14th Amendment and the dismantling of the Department of Education (hint: public education started during Reconstruction) are proof enough of the Trump government’s determination to bring the Confederacy back from the grave.
Whole civil rights offices in the federal government have been shuttered, leaving little to no recourse for discrimination cases to be brought forth, whether it be on grounds of environmental racism, medical neglect of Black women, or fair housing protections. The abolition of civil rights offices means the dismantling of protections for all those who have been historically oppressed: the disabled, the undocumented, women, LGBTQ+, Asian Americans, Latinos, etc. The campaign against DEI is serving as the extreme right’s wedge, a smokescreen to fully overthrow bourgeois democracy in the country and impose a fascist dictatorship. Black workers in the first place, but all workers—women, LGBTQ+, immigrants, etc.—are under assault, and we ultimately have the responsibility to ensure this fascist advance does not go any further.
While there have been some large demonstrations across the country, like No Kings led by 50501 Movement in partnership with some labor unions like the AFT, they have been isolated from the Black freedom movement, broadly speaking. Is the lack of any concrete demands around racism the issue? Or might it be the lack of interrogating the DEI issue among their own ranks in favor of an economistic or liberal back-to-normal approach? Rev. Al Sharpton of National Action Network attempted a March on Wall Street centered around the issue of DEI which attracted thousands to the capital of Wall Street in New York City, but was it enough? Will the CBTU’s attempt at a Solidarity Day be the key ingredient to bring all of these democratic movements together and draw millions to Washington?
The March on Washington Movement of the 1940s led by A. Philip Randolph was formed to demand the FDR administration to desegregate war industries and government jobs. Randolph threatened the president that he would assemble over 200,000 Black workers in the nation’s capital. Roosevelt eventually caved to the movement’s demands and signed an executive order banning discrimination in the federal government and war industries.
The march was called off, but it inspired and laid the groundwork for the later March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Randolph in coalition with others like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the United Auto Workers (UAW). When 250,000 marched on Washington in 1963, King and others laid out a list of demands to the U.S. government and won key advances in the struggle for democracy, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. What the CBTU is attempting today thus recalls a long historic tradition in the Black freedom struggle.
Additionally, the struggle around the new march needs to include key demands like reinstating DEI programs across the federal government and private industry, restoring union contracts, expanding protections for government workers, an end to the ICE terror in communities and attacks on immigrants, and the expulsion of military troops from our cities. These demands broaden the movement while situating the fight for equality as a central struggle in the bigger fight against MAGA fascism.
The centrality of the struggle against racism is becoming clearer in these fights, with Black organized labor and the Black church leading the class struggle to advance key demands around advancing DEI and workers’ rights. The Target boycott, for instance, is in the forefront. Going into 2026 and the midterms, it is important for more labor union locals to adopt resolutions in support of the Target boycott, the strengthening of DEI, and for support of the Union Day of Solidarity in Washington. We must advance toward a Third Reconstruction, a multiracial democracy with a working-class stamp.
This article is a collective analysis developed by the members of the African American Equality Commission of the Communist Party USA.
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