FIST: 22.01.07

1.22.2007

WW speaks to Willie 'JR' Fleming

'Hip hop: a platform to unite the people'

By Eric Struch
Chicago

Published Jan 17, 2007 12:25 AM

Workers World newspaper recently interviewed Willie “JR” Fleming, a member of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and chair of the Hip Hop Congress Community Development Chapters.

The Hip Hop Congress has 29 chapters nationwide. In Chicago, they have chapters at Columbia College, Loyola University, Morgan Park High School and University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Cabrini Green community.

Its Web site, www.hiphopcongress.com, describes the congress as “a 501(c3) non-profit corporation that uses hip hop culture to inspire social and civic action, and cultural diversity amongst young people.”

JR told WW: “Predominantly before, the Congress was basically set up in institutions like universities, affluent neighborhoods and certain high schools. Our vision was to change that, and put it in more local colleges, community-based colleges, communities where there’s a lot of African-American or urban population.

“The element of the Congress that we represent is activism, knowledge—I guess another word for that would be advancement of the Congress itself, or Hip Hop itself. By using Hip Hop as a platform or a bridge to get not only artists to be accountable and socially conscious to what’s going on, but also the community.”

He explained: “Music has always been a platform to unite the people, so we use Hip Hop as one of them tools to unite the people, educate them, and also at the same time, entertain them, or as some people would call, edutain, our people. There has always been a plight in various communities, a lot of social ills exist, a lack of social services, social injustices. So Hip Hop has become a platform to unite these people. We utilize that to the utmost. “

Fighting police brutality

JR led the Cabrini Green chapter of the HHC in an activist, struggle oriented direction. That was evident in the militant protests at Cabrini Green, organized under the leadership of the Hip Hop Congress, after the Aug. 7 shooting last year of Ellis Woodland, Jr., a 13-year-old African-American.

Woodland was shot three times by police. The killing took place in the North Side Cabrini-Green public housing development.

JR said: “I mean, make no mistake about it, he was shot three times, shot at four, he was hit three times by large caliber firearms. So their intention wasn’t to wound him, disarm him, or anything of that nature. Their intention was to take him out.”

First, police claimed the youth had a gun. Then, it became a BB gun. His father, Ellis Woodland Sr., publicly stated that neither he nor his mother ever purchased a BB gun for his son.

The shooting outraged the Cabrini Green community. Several days after the shooting, HHC organized a demonstration against police brutality in front of the police station at 1160 N. Larabee in the heart of Cabrini Green.

“We went around with the bullhorn of course to hype the people,” he said. “Word travels fast in this community, you know. Hip Hop Alliance played a role, Coalition to Protect Public Housing played a role.

“A lot of residents over here already know what’s going on. You know, this police shooting had more or less something to do with community development more than anything.”

There is a rising wave of gentrification of Cabrini Green. It is built on some of the most valuable land in Chicago and borders on one of its most expensive neighborhoods—the “Gold Coast.”

The police response was more racism and violence. Cops at the protest were heard taunting a 17-year-old Cabrini Green resident, Maurice Taylor. After he verbally confronted an officer, Taylor reported that cops threatened him. On Aug. 13, Taylor was stopped and viciously beaten by the cops.

“It’s just the nature of the treatment of the people” by the cops, JR said. “They feel that the people have been displaced out this community, population is dwindling, and they don’t have too many rights, where the people don’t really care about what’s going on around them. We say we beg to differ.

“We saw the results of the marches. After the shooting occurred, a lot of people, when they got out there, they wasn’t just really angry at the police, they was angry at politicians. They was angry at the mayor. They was angry at the Housing Authority. For a lot of people already know the reason behind that shooting stems from the gentrification of this neighborhood, or the urban cleansing of this community.

“So the people have realized that these are just tactics and ploys to make people want to leave this community, quicker than they need be.

“You know, everybody have a right to adequate housing,” HR concluded. “[T]he basic cutting of the budget for the housing problem is a crime against humanity. It’s plain and simple. That’s creating an atrocity. So until the people wake up, we’re going to have these problems.”

True peoples' commemoration denounces police brutality

Published Jan 18, 2007 1:12 AM

On Martin Luther King Day, the temperature in Denver was forecasted to be in the teens. Early in the morning, when people were gathering to remember the great slain fighter who fought against war and racist repression, the temperature was in single digits and the ground was covered in snow, in what has been a near record of snowfall in the Denver metro area.

Communities United Against Police Brutality, a coalition of leftists from the Black, Mexican, Latin@, Arab and Asian communities, had called for a separate commemoration and feeder march to the city’s benign rally and parade, that has for the last several years been sponsored by none other than State Farm Insurance—an insurance company being sued for millions of dollars for refusing to pay out damages after hurricane Katrina.

The rally before the “Marade” drew nearly fifty people, while the city’s rally drew hundreds more. The CUAPB event attracted a lot of attention and many community members dropped by to use the open mike. Many people followed behind the CUAPB banner, and when the rally got to its destination, at one point more than 100 people stopped to rally with the true peoples’ commemoration and to condemn the rampant police brutality in the Metro area, the closing of schools and the building of a half-billion-dollar jail.

—Larry Hales

Protesters demand: close Guantánamo

By David Hoskins

Published Jan 18, 2007 11:45 PM

On Jan. 11 prominent anti-war mom turned activist Cindy Sheehan and others marched in Cuba to demand that the U.S. torture center at Guantánamo Bay be permanently closed. The mothers of a prisoner held at Guantánamo and of a New York City firefighter killed on 9/11 were among the protestors.

At a conference on the eve of the protest Sheehan identified “George Bush and his administration” as “enemies of humanity.” She also referred to the crimes at Guantánamo as “horrific” and “unspeakable.”

The event was given front-page coverage in the Cuban Communist Party’s daily newspaper, Granma. The Guantánamo facility is unlawfully located on a part of Cuban territory occupied by a U.S. naval base. Cuban authorities have previously referred to the U.S. center as a “concentration camp.”

The protests coincided with similar events held in Washington and London. The new U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, has also called upon U.S. officials to shut down the infamous detention center.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and Amnesty International co-sponsored the demonstrations in Washington. The aptly named Witness Against Torture Protest began at Upper Senate Park and marched to the Supreme Court and then to the U.S. Federal Court. Approximately 100 dissidents were arrested inside the federal courthouse for protesting conditions at Guantánamo.

On the steps of the Supreme Court, organizers demanded that those held at Guantánamo not be sent to other detention facilities, secret “black sites” or to third-party countries for torture by proxy. CCR President Michael Ratner pointed out, “Five years ago, the Bush administration brought the first detainees to Guantánamo hooded and shackled in an attempt to create an offshore penal colony free from the rule of law and hidden from the eyes of the world.”

More than 750 men have been imprisoned at Guantánamo. All detainees have been denied access to a court of law and an AI report issued in summer 2005 detailed a pattern of systematic torture at the Guantánamo facilities.

Extra-judicial intimidation

Senior Pentagon official Charles D. Stimson said in a recent radio interview that he was unhappy with the fact that lawyers at several of the nation’s top firms were representing the Guantánamo prisoners, and called on the firms’ corporate clients to end their business ties with the firms.

New York University law professor Stephen Gillers has called Stimson’s comments “prejudicial to the administration of justice.” Reports in the New York Times identified an immediate backlash from lawyers, legal experts and bar association officials.

The U.S. government’s use of intimidation tactics to pervert the legal process for justice was echoed by Bush administration allies at the Wall Street Journal in an editorial by Robert L. Pollock. In a move eerily reminiscent of the McCarthy era anti-communist witch hunts, Pollock’s editorial provided a list of law firms, alongside a quote from an anonymous government official demanding that “corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

Reflections on the Duke Lacrosse rape case

Published Jan 13, 2007 7:33 AM

Following are excerpts.

On Dec. 22, Durham County, N.C., District Attorney Michael B. Nifong dropped the first degree rape charges against all three Duke lacrosse players. As of this writing, the kidnapping and sexual abuse charges against Dave Evans, Colin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann are still pending. According to the corporate media—including a recent editorial in the Washington Post—the remaining charges should also be dropped.

Meanwhile, the needs of the survivor are completely invisibilized and ignored.

Rape is a crime against humanity that violates and dehumanizes a person in the most invasive way imaginable. But rape is also a tool of sociopolitical dominance, and it is a main weapon in the arsenal of white male capitalist supremacy. Rape was and still remains a key component of genocidal imperialist campaigns across the globe. Imperialists understand very well the old dictum that once you have destroyed a nation’s women, you have subjugated that nation.

The concept of criminal law in the United States is based on capitalist property rights. This property concept includes interactions between individuals; in fact, all relations between people in U.S. society are commodified. Traditionally, women under capitalist law were defined as a man’s property, and the property rights over a woman were passed from her father to her husband upon marriage. Therefore, any injury upon the body of a woman was seen not as a violation of the woman’s bodily integrity, but as a breach of the man’s property rights. Even as women have fought for and won basic citizenship rights over the past two centuries, this basic ideological concept of rape as a breach of men’s property rights still stands.

This property concept forms the very basis of white supremacy in this country. Slavery as a system held Black bodies to be the property of white men, to be used for whatever purposes those men deemed fit. Male and female slaves were purposefully used as sexual and reproductive tools by slave-owners, in order to perpetuate and maintain white male wealth. Female slaves in particular were raped to ensure their total compliance to the master’s domination and will, and the children who were fathered as a result of these rapes legally assumed the class status of the slave mother, ensuring yet another generation of productive slave laborers. In short, it was a win-win situation for the slave-master.

From the beginning of the [Duke] case in March 2006, the corporate-owned media has sensationalized every detail of this case, while making no pretense at reporting the facts or informing the public.

Supporters of the three defendants profess an unerring faith in the criminal justice system, especially the supposed American principle of “innocent until proven guilty.”

When we are discussing sexual violence, or any issue of systemic power in society, it is imperative that we examine and question the conventional narratives that we have all been taught throughout our lives.

Yolanda Carrington
Raleigh, N.C.

The writer is a member of Raleigh FIST-Fight Imperialism, Stand Together-youth group.

King Day activities will evoke struggle, fightback

By LeiLani Dowell

Published Jan 10, 2007 12:10 AM

Over the Jan. 15 weekend, cities across the United States will be holding parades and marches to honor the life of civil-rights, labor and anti-war leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Each year, many of these events attempt to downplay King’s legacy of struggle, with anti-worker corporate sponsors and even military processions. However, the spirit of Dr. King lives on, and will be reflected in resistance events:

DENVER

In Denver a rally will distinguish itself from the city’s official MLK “Marade,” which is sponsored by State Farm insurance and several other companies. Although these companies have huge advertising banners, the city tells the people to not bring banners and signs.

Speaking at the people’s rally will be Larry Hales, FIST leader and contributing editor of Workers World newspaper, on King’s legacy to the global struggle against oppression; Tizoc Martinez from the Mexican National Liberation Movement, on attacks against immigrant workers in Greeley, Colo.; and Loree McCormick-Rice, victim of police brutality, on police repression. Rock Em Sock Em, a youth-of-color spoken-word group, will perform. A feeder march with anti-war, anti-oppression banners and signs will then join the city’s march.

The call for a separate rally states:

“As the conditions of the society pit us against each other, they have also led us to the conclusion that our struggles are linked. The fight must be moved forward together. Therefore, activists from the Black, Mexican, Latin@, Asian and Arab communities have come together to move the age-old fight of liberation into the future—first, by reclaiming our history and using its lessons to shape our struggle; then, by once again taking hold of our future with the optimism and courage that will forever change the world. For neither history nor the future belongs to a book or a leader or a classroom, it belongs to the people. So, just as the people have reclaimed history today, so we will reclaim our future.

“In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the sixties, we ask all people of color to stay true to the values of all our fallen heroes. Year after year the MLK Marade passes, reminding us all of the potential of people of color to change their conditions. Our histories speak repeatedly of those who challenged the roles defined for them by their oppressor, those who refused to become tools for the oppressor, and those who died for the liberation of humankind. In uniting with our oppressed brothers and sisters, in believing in the people’s power to effect change, we are applying the values taught to us by these histories.

“We are calling for a separate rally and feeder march organized and led by people from the communities above to build a united front against racism, oppression, occupation and war.”

DETROIT

The Detroit Martin Luther King Day “Freedom from the shackles of war, racism and poverty” March gathers at Central United Methodist Church, Woodward at Adams in downtown Detroit, at noon on Jan. 15. This year’s rally and march will place special emphasis on the struggle to end the war in Iraq and the rising tide of racism in the United States, especially in light of the affirmative action ban passed on Nov. 7. A sound car sponsored by Latinos Unidos/United of Michigan to build for the march got an enthusiastic response on Jan. 7; more than 1,000 bilingual leaflets were distributed in the Latin@ community.

NEW YORK

In response to President Bush’s expected call for a troop “surge” in Iraq, the Troops Out Now Coalition in New York is calling for a united surge of antiwar forces to converge at Times Square on Jan. 15 at 4 p.m.

TONC leader Sara Flounders told WW: “On Dr. King’s birthday, TONC is working with antiwar forces around the country to launch a massive people’s offensive against the war, which will take us from the local battle fronts to Washington, D.C., this spring. Our central demands are the immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of all occupation troops from Iraq, and a cut off of all—not some, but all—funds for the war.”

NORTH CAROLINA

In Raleigh, Black Workers for Justice and UE Local 150 will hold a Community Speakout and Action Planning on Jan. 13. Their announcement reads, “King stood with sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968! You, your co-workers, family & friends are invited to stand with workers in your community today!”

City workers will discuss their strike, building the union, fighting City Hall, the struggle for collective bargaining rights and building for a mass Feb. 10 NAACP march, which will deliver the organization’s 2007 14-point program to the legislature. This includes demands of “U.S. out of Iraq!” as well as repeal of N.C. General Statute 95-98, an anti-collective-bargaining rights law.

On Jan. 15, a March against War and Racism will be held in Chapel Hill.

SAN DIEGO

The San Diego parade to honor the memory of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was, years ago, moved out of the Black community. For many San Diegans the ubiquitous presence of FBI, police, U.S. military and militarized student contingents has become increasingly offensive and intolerable.

In an effort to return the commemoration to the Black community and to restore the tone to one opposing war and racism, the San Diego International Action Center initiated a coalition, the King/Chavez Coalition for Justice and Unity, which will hold a community rally and picnic at Martin Luther King Jr. Park, 6401 Skyline Avenue, on Jan. 15.

Coalition organizer Gloria Verdieu explained the purpose of the coalition is “to reclaim our legacy and cultural heritage in an effort to continue the advancement of social justice and unity.”

Uniting the names of two great leaders in the struggle for social justice, Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, is a defiant answer to Minutemen types active in Southern California, who, as part of their efforts to criminalize undocumented workers, seek to drive a wedge between Black and Latin@ communities.

Larry Hales, Larry Holmes, Cheryl LaBash, Bob McCubbin and Dante Strobino contributed to this report.

Imperialists stand by as AIDS crisis grows

By Melissa Kleinman

Published Dec 23, 2006 12:24 AM

In the year to come, thousands of Caribbean people will die of AIDS and thousands more will become infected with the HIV virus. In just the past two decades, over 6,000 AIDS deaths were reported in the Caribbean, but the actual number is admittedly higher due to underreporting or misdiagnosis.

All the while, as people die and infection increases, imperialist governments in the United States and Europe reveal their racism as they economically strangle Caribbean countries such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They offer no reparations for the centuries of damage and exploitation done to these nations and peoples. Capitalist drug companies are even reluctant to provide the desperately needed antiretroviral drugs that can improve the quality of life and life expectancy for those living with HIV/AIDS.

In Haiti, the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic and Guyana, the AIDS epidemic has spread beyond those called “high risk” to the general population. This occurs once the infection rate in the general population reaches approximately 5 percent. At such a rate the HIV virus spreads even more rapidly.

AIDS is most devastating to Haiti, where 12 percent of the urban and 5 percent of the rural population are estimated to be infected with the terrible disease.

By the end of 1999, 83,000 children under the age of 14 had been orphaned by AIDS in the Caribbean.

Furthermore, the AIDS epidemic is placing tremendous burdens on health care systems and on the labor force. As of 2006, 83 percent of AIDS cases in the Caribbean were found in the age group 15 to 54 years old, considered the prime age span of the work force. This epidemic not only affects personal lives and relationships but has the potential to negatively impact various key sectors, from agriculture, tourism and

mining to trade, as well as national budgets.

In the Caribbean, AIDS is a “hurricane” disaster, said Dominica’s Minister of Planning Artherton Martin in his closing statement at a recent HIV/AIDS conference: “We must deploy against HIV/AIDS as we would any other disasters. In fact, it is worse than hurricanes because it destroys people, our most important resource.”

Haitians in Dominican Republic

Amelia Cayo, 53, who is part Haitian and a Creole speaker, is one of 43 AIDS patients receiving free antiretroviral therapy from a clinic in the Dominican Republic sponsored by Bateye Relief Alliance Dominicana, a nongovernmental organization. She is one of many people who will be destroyed by AIDS if left untreated. Like many victims to the virus, she is on a time-consuming regimen of antiretroviral treatments, taking as many as four to seven different pills three times a day.

Cayo comments, “I feel better since I started the pills, and you can be sure I will keep taking them.” She and other descendants of Haitian sugarcane workers are part of an estimated 200,000 residents of bateyes, migrant worker communities adjacent to the mostly now-fallow sugarcane fields. Before the opening of the center, the estimated 3,000 bateye residents in the area received no medical care whatsoever.

There are currently only 3,500 people taking drugs, and they receive little or no medical attention. Among the country’s bateye inhabitants, roughly 5 to 12 percent are HIV-positive. Alliance Executive Director María Virtudes Berroa says sugarcane workers have been systematically excluded from the public health system because of racial, economic and social discrimination.

The Bateye health group has already lost funding in education and prevention programs for 30 bateye communities and at this point is reaching only a tiny portion of the people with AIDS in the bateyes. Wendy Valdez, a physician in the Cinco Casas bateye, said, “It would be disastrous if we had to stop.”

It has been suggested that an individual could receive antiretroviral therapy for less than $1 a day—which of course would exclude profits for the drug companies. However, under common political and funding trends, including all the programs underway and all the funds donated towards the Global AIDS effort, these medicines reached fewer than 1 million people by the end of 2005.

Worldwide, including the Caribbean, 5 to 6 million people urgently need antiretroviral treatment (ART), due to the severity of their illness, but only 300,000 people in developing countries receive these medicines. Many grassroots efforts have shown that ART can be delivered in poorer countries as effectively as developed countries. The World Health Organization says that increasing the availability of antiretroviral therapy makes it more likely that people will come forward for HIV testing, learn their status, receive counseling and care and become knowledgeable about preventing the spread of the virus.

Nevertheless, by the year 2015 the Caribbean region stands to have nearly 3.5 million people living with the virus, according to UNAIDS.

Yet there is a small beacon of light in the Caribbean, 90 miles from U.S. shores on the island of Cuba. The Cuban government has sent at least 4,000 doctors and health personnel to the poorest countries in the Caribbean, those most hard hit by AIDS, with the idea of creating an infrastructure able to provide the population with medications and the necessary follow-up. (www.cubaweb.com)

The immediate ongoing need is for the international community to come forward with the raw materials for further products and services. Yet, with the ongoing war on people of color and the poor, what can Caribbean countries and individuals like Amelia Cayo hope for from greedy capitalist nations?

Melissa Kleinman is a FIST member and a Denver public health care HIV/AIDS worker.

Youth continue effort to close recruiting station

By Ben Carroll
Chapel Hill, N.C.

Published Dec 19, 2006 10:09 PM

Some 50 youth and community members held a demonstration Dec. 15 at the recently opened Army recruiting station in Chapel Hill, N.C. The demonstration, organized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was scheduled to coincide with an official ribbon-cutting ceremony at the station by the Chapel Hill Chamber of Commerce.

About 10 youth activists, including members of Raleigh FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand Together), were prepared to attend the ceremony posing as onlookers. When the ribbon was cut, they would unzip their jackets to reveal shirts that read “Iraqi Civilian” splattered with red paint and fall to the ground in a die-in. The direct action was called off at the last minute, however, as the activists received word from a Town Council member, from recruiters present for the ceremony and from the media that the ceremony had been canceled.

Youth activists then joined community members in a picket line in front of the recruiting station. With chants of “Out of Iraq! Out of our schools!” and “No justice, no peace! U.S. out of the Middle East!” the demonstrators made their presence known.

After several minutes of the moving picket line, about 10 police officers and the property manager descended on the group of demonstrators and ordered them to leave the supposedly public ceremony. Using their physical prowess, the cops herded the demonstrators from the shopping center and onto the sidewalk.

It became apparent that the ceremony was indeed taking place, even without the Chamber of Commerce present. Three older community members who had remained at the ceremony then revealed signs that read, “Hands off my grandchildren—no recruiting” and “We mourn the dead.” These peaceful demonstrators were promptly arrested and hauled off to jail. Additionally, two youth activists received citations for holding a banner.

The Chapel Hill Chamber of Commerce later issued a public statement claiming it had received credible information that the demonstration was going to be “non-peaceful” and that it felt the “safety of Chamber staff and volunteers” was threatened. The Chamber used this violence-baiting not only as a tactic to avoid addressing the political content of the demonstration, but also to justify the police repression under the guise of “public safety.”

Youth activists from FIST and SDS said the reaction by both the Chamber and the police reveals the strength of the movement the youth are building. These organizations have vowed to continue confronting this recruiting station until it is forced to close its doors for good.

Anti-recruiting in New York

Anti-recruiting activists from North Carolina attended the Troops Out Now Coalition Antiwar Summit meeting in Harlem last Nov. 18, where the breakout group on counter-recruiting decided to do something concrete to impact the ability of Washington to wage war. “The one way we could do that,” Dustin Langley said, “was to hinder military recruiting.”

“So far,” Langley continued, “we in New York have been picketing at the Chambers Street recruiting station each Tuesday and Thursday. Our plans for the New Year are to hold a counter-recruiting activists meeting in January and see if we can organize picketing outside the station every day.

“After the New Year, we will also be calling on antiwar activists across the U.S. to ‘adopt a recruiting station’ and maintain a regular presence at that site with the goal of shutting it down. So far we’ve gotten a friendly reception on the street, and even a small protest will bring all the recruiters out and stop them from recruiting.”

Statewide Day of Action Against Smithfield

By Dante Strobino
Raleigh, N.C.

Published Dec 8, 2006 11:27 PM

More than 700 people gathered in 11 cities across the state of North Carolina on Dec. 2 to support the just demands of workers at Smithfield, the world’s largest hog slaughtering plant located in Tar Heel. The statewide day of action was held at North Carolina-based Harris Teeter grocery stores to demand that they support the largely immigrant workforce by not selling the company’s pork.

Smithfield workers " border="1">

Dec. 2 Raleigh solidarity action with
Smithfield workers

Photo: Donald Minor

Most of the Smithfield plants across the country are unionized through the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). But pork and turkey coming out of the North Carolina plants find their way into several local grocery stores, including Harris Teeter, which uses mostly Smithfield meat for its store-packaged pork.

The USDA requires that codes be placed on all meat designating its origin. Any meat containing codes 18079 or 79c is processed at the Smithfield plant by oppressed workers.

Demonstrations organized by UFCW and community supporters were held in Asheville, Charlotte, Durham, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Hickory, High Point, Raleigh, Rocky Mount, Wilmington and Winston-Salem. At each site there was a media conference where workers—most of whom were Latin@ or Black—spoke out about the conditions in the plant. After the press conference, workers and union organizers marched into the stores and delivered a statement requesting that Harris Teeter stop doing business with Smithfield.

The biggest demonstration was in Raleigh where almost 200 people gathered, including members of the NAACP, the N.C. Council of Churches, N.C. Public Sector Workers Union (UE local 150), Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST), Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), N.C. State University Student-Worker Alliance, College Democrats, Action for Community in Raleigh (ACRe), Teamsters, AFL-CIO, and high school students from Raleigh Charter and Athens High, amongst other organizations. Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) also played an important role statewide in mobilizing to support the demonstration.

Participants, stretched at arms length, nearly surrounded the entire parking lot of a Raleigh Harris Teeter and handed leaflets to customers that explained the union’s main grievances are that Smithfield “has used violence, threats and intimidation against workers to suppress their rights; creates a dangerous workplace with fast line speeds and inadequate training; routinely fires injured workers and denies their workers’ compensation claims; and stirs racial tensions among African-American and Latino workers.”

Supporters’ signs read “Power to Immigrant Workers, Union Rights Now” and “Black and Brown Unity—UNIDAD Moren@ y Latin@.”

North Carolina is ripe for class struggle. It is the second-least unionized state in the country and also has the fastest growing immigrant population. Led by two Latina women still wearing their hair nets and work hats, more than 1,000 workers walked out of the Smithfield plant, shutting down two shifts of production on Nov. 16. Even the private police force could not coerce workers back into the plant as they continued to exercise their class power through unity.

It is only through unity amongst the Black and Latin@ workers that the will of workers will be exercised. The majority Black workforce of city workers across the state continues to organize their union, UE 150, and build their power following the historic strike of Raleigh sanitation workers two mornings in mid-September. Durham city workers later held a two-hour work stoppage on Nov. 27.

UE150 is convening a Statewide City Workers Summit on Dec. 9, drawing union workers from Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Durham, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Greenville, Raleigh, Rocky Mount and Wilson.

The struggle continues as these two strong workforces continue to learn from each other and mutually build working-class power in North Carolina.

The writer is an organizer with Raleigh FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand Together) youth group. Contact fist@workers.org.

Youth fight back on Rosa Parks Day

Published Dec 7, 2006 10:36 PM

A march was held in New York to commemorate Rosa Parks Day, Dec. 1, and continue that legacy of struggle. Organized by FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand Together) leader and high school student Mia Cruz, the march focused on the criminalization of youth, demanding removal of the roving police scanners recently implemented in New York City schools. Students have suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the cops who enforce the scanners, as well as have had their personal property, such as cell phones, markers and iPods, confiscated.

—Report and photo by LeiLani Dowell

FIST