-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 13, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

Rally shows unity vs. right-wing terror

By Liz Toledo in Atlanta

A thousand people rallied in Atlanta March 1 to protest the Feb. 22 bombing of a lesbian club here and to denounce a whole series of right-wing terrorist attacks. Coming after a rash of arson fires at Black churches, bombings at the Olympics and women's clinics, the bombing of the Otherside Lounge has spurred mass outrage here.

The rally at the Martin Luther King Memorial was organized to demonstrate unity among all the groups under attack. Gay community activists were joined by labor leaders and Black elected officials, including the mayor and several members of Congress, in condemning racist, anti-woman and anti-gay violence and vowing that right-wing terror will not divide the communities.

Representatives of the Georgia Equality Project and the Human Rights Coalition welcomed the crowd. Rep. John Lewis said: "When someone attacks any member of our community, he attacks each and every one of us. We won't give up, we won't give in!"

Rep Maxine Waters of California added, "We aren't going anywhere!" Waters, who heads the Congressional Black Caucus, came to Atlanta to take part in the rally. Rep. Cynthia McKinney also spoke.

Sheila Mobley, president of the Atlanta chapter of the Federation of Teachers, brought an official statement of solidarity from the Atlanta Labor Council. "An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere," she said.

"We will stand strong and stand together. We demand justice and respect for all our individual differences."

John Hawthorne, the husband of the woman killed by the Olympic Park bomb last summer, said: "I didn't know about this gathering until it was on TV this morning. I felt that I had to come up here from Albany [in another part of Georgia, a five-hour drive from Atlanta] to be with you. I didn't come to talk, just to be here."

He urged the crowd to make "this bomb a personal call to action. Together we can turn this thing around."

The city's large lesbian/gay/bi/trans community experiences daily abuse. There has been no prosecution in at least four murders of transvestites in recent years.

Other speakers recalled the many terrorist acts in the area, going back to the temple bombing of 1958. In that year members of the Klan who were identified but never convicted set off a bomb in Atlanta's biggest synagogue.

- END -

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://www.workers.org)

Copyright © 1997 workers.org