Brooklyn action jumpstarts Oct. 25 march
Black community rallies to 'bring troops home'
By G. Dunkel
Brooklyn, N.Y.
A strong and informative rally filled the
House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn Aug. 19. The gathering
kicked off the New York City campaign to mobilize for the Oct.
25 march on Washington to end the occupation of Iraq and bring
the troops home.
With anger and humor, speakers showed their concern for both
the U.S. troops who are dying daily and the greatly suffering
Iraqi people who are dying in greater numbers.
Two speakers have children among the U.S. troops in Iraq.
One's son is a war resister.
The enthusiastic, majority Black audience filled the
sanctuary and most of the balcony on this workday midsummer
night. The crowd greeted Cynthia McKinney, the former member of
Congress from Georgia, with a standing ovation and fists in the
air.
As they left, many people took extra leaflets about a Sept.
28 march to support the Palestinian struggle as well as those
for Oct. 25. Many were community or union organizers.
"This war was unnecessary, unjust, it was about oil and
hegemony," said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry in welcoming the
rally to his church. "It was about oil, you know it and the
American people know it. It was naked imperialism."
Daughtry, who is 73 years old, has been a national leader of
the Black United Front and has a 45-year-long history of
involvement in major national and citywide progressive
struggles.
ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) leader Larry
Holmes thanked Daughtry for risking having an anti-war rally in
his church. Referring to the power outage that struck the
Northeast Aug. 14, he said: "It probably only took 15 minutes
or so for the people here to start thinking about Baghdad,
Basra, Iraq, their lack of food, medicine, and power.
"There's power outages over there because of the war and the
bombing. Over here there was a power outage because no one
could figure out how to make a profit from fixing their hokey
grid. Those in power failed, their system failed because they
couldn't figure out how to make a profit."
Holmes had some fun with terminology. "A blackout," he said,
"is when Black people go on strike. A power outage is when all
of us go on strike. And that's people power.
"A power surge is when we go out into the street and stop a
war or some other injustice. We need to get the people in power
out of it."
Holmes called for people to go to Washington on Oct. 25 and
to organize others to go. He pointed out that there are new
forces entering the struggle--resisters in the military and the
families of soldiers. They will lead the Washington march.
Holmes ended his talk with: "Stop all the dying, stop all
the colonizing, stop all the occupying. We must make this
occupation fail. Iraqi people know what they have to do. We
have to do our part.
"If this occupation fails, it will be much more difficult
for Bush and company to occupy North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Libya,
Zimbabwe, anywhere they're scheming to control."
Family members speak out
Gloria Jackson, a childcare worker in Local 205, AFSCME
District Council 1707, whose 29-year-old daughter is in Iraq,
had this message: "I want my daughter home. I don't see why she
can't come home. She was scheduled for Sept. 4 but they said
they couldn't replace her."
Jackson said, "I need you to help me fight for her and for
all of them and bring them all home."
Moonanum James is co-chair of United American Indians of New
England and a Vietnam-era veteran. His son is a reservist now
stationed in Iraq. James said, "I honor my son by standing here
and talking about this struggle. Native Americans have been on
the receiving end of 500 years of a relentless campaign of war
and terror. Isn't it open racism behind this drive to see our
Arab sisters and brothers as somehow less than human?"
James called for unity with the Palestinians struggling for
their land, and for solidarity with Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu
Jamal and all other political prisoners.
Ron Kuby, a lawyer who has handled the cases of many
military resisters, said, "Now that the war is not going so
well, when troops say 'get us the hell out of here,' the
military's response is to say 'if you speak out, you will be
court martialed.'"
McKinney, who was singled out by the Bush administration for
defeat when she opposed the pro-war campaign just after the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said, "In the most passionate spirit
of patriotism, we say bring the troops home now."
McKinney gave shocking details about how the Pentagon
disregards soldiers' reasonable health concerns by ordering
them to take anthrax and smallpox vaccines that it knows are
dangerous. DynaCorp, a firm with close political ties to the
administration, produces the vaccines. But the Pentagon can't
find enough money to guarantee enough water to soldiers serving
in one of the hottest countries in the world.
She asked, "If the government could spend $40 million to
impeach Bill Clinton for having sex, if they denied me
re-election for asking questions about 9/11, if they try to
recall Gray Davis for a bad economy, doesn't a conspiracy to
use false grounds for going to war, looting the treasury,
mishandling 9/11 provide grounds for the impeachment of George
Bush?"
Union supporters
Brenda Stokely is president of AFSCME District Council 1707,
which represents home-health-care and childcare workers in New
York City. She said: "It's always very important when we come
together like this. It's always very important when we go out
in public and march. It's always very important when we rally.
But what's equally important is what we do on a daily basis to
bring this leadership down to its knees and out into the
streets because this ain't about reform."
She went on: "This country can't recover based on the
foundation it was built on. It was built on kidnapping and
robbing people from another land, stealing the land from the
people who were already here when that idiot who thought he was
in India landed here. ... People who run the IMF, the World
Bank are the ones we must get rid of to get rid of
imperialism."
This aroused a cheer from Gloria Jackson, who is also a
member of Stokely's union, and who let everyone sitting near
her know, "She's my president!"
New York City Councilmember and former Black Panther Charles
Barron recalled his youthful appreciation of Ho Chi Minh, Kim
Il Sung, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kwami Nkumrah, Julius
Neyrere and Amilcar Cobral. He said, "What's happening in Iraq
is not about Saddam, it's about people who have had enough
occupation."
Barron plans to run for mayor of New York in 2005 as a
representative of the Black community and of other people of
color. He said, "The bottom line is that America needs a
revolution--radical, root change."
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice
in Washington, D.C., and an ANSWER steering committee member,
pointed out: "Bush's preventive war is not just against Iraq,
but it's also against human rights, against workers in the
United States and elsewhere in the world. It is also against
Social Security, education and health care."
She said the people gathered together can "force this war to
come to an end."
Reprinted from the Sept. 4, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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