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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 11, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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California marchers defend affirmative action

By Tahnee Stair in San Francisco

On Aug. 28 the notorious Proposition 209 went into effect, ending affirmative action in the public sector in California. Mass outrage poured across the Golden Gate Bridge in a march to protest the racist, sexist Proposition 209 as well as SP-1, the 1995 University of California Regents' ruling ending affirmative action in the state university system.

The outrage against Proposition 209 has built up over the last year as the effects of the various attacks on social gains have become apparent. Workers have been attacked with so-called welfare reform, immigrants denied the right to food assistance and health care, and police brutality is on the rise.

Some 10,000 people marched on Aug. 28, walking across the bridge to a rally featuring the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Farm Workers Vice President Dolores Huerta and others.

Contingents came from as far away as Philadelphia. There was a strong youth presence. Religious groups mobilized in large numbers.

Members of the National People's Campaign Youth Committee carried a banner.

The march--planned in only two weeks--also marked the anniversary of the 1963 civil-rights march on Washington, when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his great "I have a dream" speech. That march helped propel the civil-rights struggle forward. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

WILSON FRONTS FOR BIG BIZ

The Aug. 28 march took place on a beautiful day. There were people of all ages and nationalities--some in business suits or work clothes, some in their culture's traditional dress.

San Francisco officials have vowed to re-enact and expand the city's affirmative-action programs next year. But the court stay that had prevented the state from implementing Proposition 209 was overturned in August. And a request for another stay, to block the anti-affirmative-action measure from taking effect until the Supreme Court can hear the case against it, was also denied.

Still, city officials say they are confident their policies will hold up in the federal courts. They face lawsuits from the racist administration of California Gov. Pete Wilson. These lawsuits could cost the state millions of dollars that could be spent to build another university or provide scholarships to under-represented Black, Latino, Asian and Native students.

Where affirmative action has already been blocked--for example, at the University of California--the ramifications can now be seen. At UC-Berkeley's Bolt Law School, Eric Brooks is the only African American to enroll this fall.

Wilson orchestrated the racist, sexist, anti-worker onslaught--the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, Proposition 209, and the three-strikes law tightening repression in the criminal-"justice" system--at the behest of big business, and to aid his aspirations to ascend to presidential power. Business executive Ward Connerly, who led the campaign to end affirmative action, let himself be used against the social gains of generations trying to build a more equal society.

It shows again that capitalist politicians cannot be trusted to protect rights that are always won through struggles in the street. Continuing these struggles against racism, sexism and lesbian/gay oppression is the only effective avenue now to defend social gains and win back rights.

Jessie Jackson has called for another march in defense of affirmative action, to take place Oct. 27 in Sacramento.

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