More than 20 North Carolina school districts canceled classes Friday as teachers participated in "Kids Over Corporations" protests, organized by the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE).
The protest, held at Halifax Mall in downtown Raleigh, drew thousands. Protesters are demanding more funding for public education.
At least 11 school districts announced last-minute schedule changes, leaving parents scrambling to make childcare arrangements, The News & Observer reported.
"Nearly 20 school districts across the state have made the powerful choice to support their workers," the NCAE wrote in a Facebook post. "It’s a strong reminder of what’s possible when we unite in support of our colleagues and students!"
The head of a major Los Angeles labor union took to the streets on Friday claiming America's "democracy is under attack," using an annual workers' rights march to slam immigration enforcement and demand unity.
Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, tied the traditional labor movement to the cause of immigrants.
Wheeler told Fox News Digital the march, while recognizing the historical 140-year fight for the 8-hour workday, was largely in solidarity with immigrant communities who she claimed have been "under attack" by the Trump administration.
"People are afraid to go to work, people are afraid to go the doctor, people [are] afraid to go to school," Wheeler said.
The union leader alleged that while enforcement initially targeted criminal illegal immigrants, it has since expanded inappropriately.
"It expanded beyond that, to those who were brown," Wheeler said. "When you see your brown sisters and brothers under attack, that's a problem."
She added the labor union has "wrapped our arms around our immigrant community," to stand with them during what she described as a difficult time.
"Today, we're talking about unity," Wheeler said, noting that while protesters fight for respect and dignity on the job daily, the march was focused on a "unified mission about immigrants' rights, workers' right and everybody's rights."
Fox News Digital's Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
Demonstrators gathered outside Trump Tower in New York City on Friday as May Day events were planned across the U.S.
Protesters could be heard chanting "no hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here."
There was also a call-and-response style chant where someone would say, "Tell me what democracy looks like" and others would reply, "This is what democracy looks like."
Fox News' Jennifer Johnson contributed to this report.
{{#rendered}}Outside George Washington University, Farid Razavi, an Iranian American volunteer with the Iranian American Community of Virginia, did not realize he had set up his table next to activists who support the regime that runs the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Just after 11 a.m., after canvassing the socialist activists for a while to sign his petition for regime change with little luck, he told Fox News Digital, “I have nothing to do with them.”
Razavi said he wants the Iranian regime deposed and recoiled learning the socialist activists support them.
"Unfortunately, some people support the regime, they are funded by the regime, and they claim that the regime should stay," Razavi said. "The regime of Iran should be toppled. The Iranian regime is very brutal. During the last 47 years, they have executed more than 150,000 Iranian people. ... In the last election, only about 8% of the people voted for this regime."
Fox News Digital's Asra Nomani contributed to this report.
Fox News Digital's Asra Nomani is reporting from outside a left-wing group's headquarters in Washington, D.C., ahead of May Day protests on Friday. Standing on the corner of 4th and 8th Streets in the nation's capital, Nomani details posters seen at the D.C. Liberation Center, a socialist hub that was making posters Thursday night for May Day demonstrations.
"What is a liberation center? There are about 30 of them across the country. And they are headquarters for the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Which is a little bit misleading in its name because in fact, they are self-declared communists," Nomani says, detailing posters promoting anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rhetoric and May Day.
On the fliers, Nomani notes, are the logos for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union, the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations], the Washington Teachers Union and others.
"What do they have as images there? 'Educators are workers,' so these are the teachers' unions that are letting kids out of school today in Chicago and in Madison, Wisconsin and other places. Why does it matter to look at the fine print? Because it's there that you can then see the network," Nomani said. "Then what you have in here is the Far Left Socialist Groups, the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America, and that's their logo."
"So what you see then in just this one poster is this ecosystem of the far left organizations that you're gonna see unfold later today," she added. "We're gonna keep teaching you about what is happening in America. These concepts like malign foreign influence, agitation propaganda, and the cognitive warfare that is happening in America."
It's showtime in Washington, D.C.
At 10:35 a.m., activists from the Party for Socialism and Liberation arrived at the corner of 23rd Street Northwest and I Street Northwest on the campus of George Washington University, unloading protest materials from a black Subaru Outback hatchback.
They operated like well-trained foot soldiers, moving efficiently as they set up, reflecting the experience they have built organizing protest after protest, particularly since the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas in Israel, when they mobilized alongside a coalition of anti-Israel organizations.
The signs this time included recycled messaging, including pro-Islamic Republic of Iran themes such as “STOP WAR ON IRAN!”
Alongside those were familiar political messages like “WORKERS HAVE TRUMP!”—echoing anti-Trump themes they have emphasized since the first Trump administration and continuing into the second.
As outlined in their organizing strategy, a book titled “Socialism Reconstructed,” the group promotes a broader agenda that includes dismantling the United States free enterprise system, the stock market, U.S. military bases at home and abroad and police agencies, as well as freeing prisoners from jails.
They are part of a network financed by a tech tycoon Neville. Roy Singham, an American born self-declared Marxist living in Shanghai. Congressional lawmakers are investigating the network for alleged malign foreign influence, parroting the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party.
Their leaders refused to answer questions. They wear shirts that say, “Socialism is the future.”
{{#rendered}}Several major unions are promoting May Day demonstrations across the United States on social media meant to protest what leftists condemn as the capitalist billionaire class.
One group posting about May Day festivities is the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which had an annual revenue for 2024 of about $131 million, according to its latest tax filing.
In a post Thursday, the AFL-CIO, which is a federation of 65 labor unions, said, "Working people are living on the edge and struggling to make ends meet. We work harder while our wages don’t budge and the rich get richer."
"It’s time to show billionaires CEOs the power of our solidarity," it added.
"We’re coming together at events across the country this May Day to celebrate our solidarity and show that we won’t back down when it comes to our union siblings and all working people," AFL-CIO wrote in another post on X Friday, promoting pro-socialist events.
It shared a link for people looking for events in their communities.
While May Day began as an effort to protect worker rights, the big-money political operations of labor unions today give the protest a partisan bias that is focused very much today on anti-President Donald Trump rhetoric, critics say.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Farm Workers are more unions also promoting May Day events on social media this week.
"It's #MayDay! Today is about all of us coming together, across race and background, to stand in solidarity for what’s long overdue: Money. Power. Respect," SEIU wrote on X Friday.
“#MayDay is a reminder for workers to stand together. If you’re going to a May Day event, you can download this graphic and use it as a sign,” UFW also wrote, sharing the graphic.
Fox News Digital's Asra Q. Nomani contributed to this report
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., celebrated May Day in a post on X Friday as leftist groups plan hundreds of pro-socialist demonstrations across the country.
"Illinois holds a special place in union history. From the Haymarket Riot to the Pullman Strike, workers in our state have given their lives to protect employees’ basic dignities," Durbin wrote on X.
"On May Day, we recognize their contributions to a more equal, prosperous, and democratic America," he added.
Here in the good old United States of America, we have a lovely holiday each September called Labor Day, on which we celebrate the contributions of the nation’s workers. We do not celebrate the communist holiday of May Day, as most of the globe does, at least not until recently.
Today, hundreds of leftist organizations and Damoractic Party adjuncts around the nation will rally, protest and cheer on May Day in an act of radical Marxist globalization. It should make Americans who are not fans of Mao’s little red book very nervous.
As usual, progressives want to destroy the wholesome homegrown aspects of our culture and replace them with cold, ugly, almost Soviet-style international slop, even though our American ancestors firmly rejected it.
This is an excerpt from an opinion piece by Fox News Digital columnist David Marcus
{{#rendered}}The Madison Metropolitan School District is closed on Friday as left-wing activists mobilize for May Day.
“Our Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) partners recently shared that they received 70% of staff signatures supporting participation in 'A Day without Immigrants' as part of the May Day Strong national day of action,” the district noted in a message on its website about the school cancellation.
MTI is a teachers' union.
"I'm in shock," Wisconsin Moms for Liberty activist Scarlett Johnson said during a Friday morning appearance on the Fox & Friends. "Although maybe I shouldn't be considering the history of the Madison Metropolitan School District."
"They are not just indoctrinating the kids in the classroom. They are encouraging actively for students to leave the classroom and go march in the streets with teachers, with administrators," she claimed.
"And make no mistake about it: This entire rally, this May Day, Friday May 1st ... this is an anti-capitalist, anti-Trump movement, and they're using our kids as political pawns," she said.
FIRST AT FOX: Some 600 groups, including hard-line communists and groups affiliated with the Democratic Party, are mobilizing all over the country today to demonstrate for May Day, socialism's high holy day.
A Fox News Digital investigation has identified a sprawling "red-blue" network with combined annual revenue of about $2 billion organizing some 3,000 protests and events and advancing what critics describe as an anti-American agenda. They have called for Americans to skip work, school and shopping.
At the center of the May Day mobilization, which has expanded from earlier indications, is a network of communist, socialist, Marxist and other far-left organizations, led by chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America and a network of groups – including the People’s Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, ANSWER Coalition and Code Pink – funded by an American-born tech tycoon, Neville Roy Singham, based in Shanghai, promoting the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party.
This is an excerpt from reporting by Fox News Digital's Asra Q. Nomani, Michael Dorgan and Preston Mizell.
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