It was at a college event my group hosted, we had dinner with Baraka beforehand and we got the pleasure to hear about his start in organizing and about him being a black draftee. He was stationed in Germany and helped organize a strike at his base. The experience radicalized him, iirc.

But he gave a talk afterwards, small university so maybe to 30 or so people. The Libertarian group on campus (Young Americans for Liberty) arrived in full force and peppered him with bad faith questions after his speech about the necessity for socialism and an end to war. One of the kids asked him “but how you can say Socialism needs to come to America when Stalin killed tens of millions of his own people?”

I turned to a comrade and said “picturing Stalin in the back of a pickup just absolutely mowing people down on the street for shits and giggles”. Baraka had a much more dignified way of shutting it down, something like “I’m not talking about Georgia, I’m not talking about Russia, I’m talking about here and now. With climate catastrophe coming, we adopt socialism or we die.” Little dork might well have melted into his seat.