![[WWP web page]](../home.gif){kind=small}
![[News]](../news.gif){kind=small}
![[Subscribe]](../free.gif){kind=small}
![[Vote WWP]](../vote.gif){kind=small}
![[Join us!]](../join.gif){kind=small}
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted
from the Aug. 22, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
A week-long series of protests, including at least two marches, are scheduled to take place during the Democratic Party's national convention in Chicago Aug. 26-29.
On Aug. 28, a march on the convention site is being sponsored by the Cash the Check Coalition, an African American-led mobilization which includes longtime Black activists Dr. Conrad Worrill, Ron Daniels, the Rev. Al Sharpton, attorney and anti-police brutality activist Standish Willis, Bob Brown of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, and the leaders of a number of Black churches in the Chicago area.
The coalition takes its name from the famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in which King said the United States had issued promissory notes to each of its residents. However, when Black people tried to "cash the check," the notes were returned marked "insufficient funds."
"August 28 will be the 33rd anniversary of Dr. King's speech," Dr. Worrill told Workers World. "Today we see the Democrats and Republicans engaged in a second historic compromise, similar to that of 1876. But this time they are compromising all the gains of the civil rights movement.
"We are challenging both parties, exposing their attacks on the Black community, on affirmative action, on labor, on immigrants, on women. We're telling both Clinton and Dole:
`It's time to cash the check!'"
The Aug. 28 march has been endorsed by the Not On the Guest List! Coalition, which is sponsoring an Aug. 27 march to the convention site. The Guest List demands are: "Stand up against the racism and classism of the criminal `justice' system; free all political prisoners in U.S. jails; stop police brutality; and abolish the death penalty."
Coalition endorsers include Pam Africa and the
International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, American Indian Movement Grand Council; Eighth Day Center for Justice (Chicago), Equal Justice/Quixote Center, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), Leonard Peltier Defense Committee; Movimiento de Liberacion National Puertorriqueno, National Lawyers Guild, Neighbors Against Police Brutality (Chicago), Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, Refuse and Resist!, Women's Action Coalition (Chicago), the Job is a Right Campaign (Milwaukee), Workers World Party and peace and justice activist Dave Dellinger, who was prosecuted as one of the "Chicago 7" defendants for his role in the 1968 protests.
Also on Aug. 27, the National Committee for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience to Free Leonard Peltier will hold civil disobedience actions.
Other convention-related events include an 11-day counter convention organized by the Autonomous Zone of Chicago around the theme of "community building" and a "Festival of Life" to be held Aug. 24-29 at Grant Park.
It has been 28 years since the Democratic Party held a national convention in Chicago. In 1968, the U.S. government was waging a genocidal war against the people of Vietnam, as well as a war of racist repression against the Black, Latino, Indian and Asian peoples here at home.
Protests that year were viciously attacked by the police under orders of the notorious Mayor Richard Daley. The widely televised police brutality had a radicalizing effect on sections of the country's population, particularly its youth.
Chicago's mayor today is Richard M. Daley, the elder Daley's son, who is determined to prove that he can play host to an orderly convention-complete with lots of Chicago cops and officially sanctioned "protest areas."
However, while there may not be a mass anti-war movement raging in the streets today, the country isn't exactly at peace, either.
Since 1968, the U.S. prison population has increased by over 500 percent. Some 700,000 Black men are now in state, county or federal prisons and jails. Over 3,000 men and women, half of them people of color, languish on death rows.
And despite its best efforts, the government has been unable to bury the memory of political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt, Sundiata Acoli and many others. These issues are motivating many activists, particularly among the youth, to see the 1996 Democratic con vention as a focus to protest racism, police brutality and prisons.
Furthermore, the convention takes place against a background of devastating economic attacks against the communities of color and poor and working people in general. President Clinton has just signed a thoroughly reactionary welfare bill that wipes out a 60-year-old government commitment to provide some measure of support for poor families in time of economic crisis.
His economic "recovery" has meant the loss of millions of good-paying union jobs and their replacement by low-wage, part-time, dead-end employment. Clinton and the Democrats offer only the mildest of resistance to Republican attacks on Medicaid, Medicare and other important social programs. They agree in principle on the need for cuts and differ only in their severity.
Although forces raising these broader economic issues have yet to mobilize in a powerful way around the Democratic convention, the issues themselves are sure to feed the protests against racist repression.
- 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@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com. Web: http://www.workers.org)