Black struggle commemorated
By
B. Sandburg
San Francisco
Published Feb 17, 2005 10:04 PM
An extraordinary
panel of Black leaders spoke at a Black History Month forum sponsored by Workers
World Party Feb. 12. The event was held at the African American Art &
Culture Complex in San Francisco.
Dr. Henry Clark, executive director of
the West County Toxics Coalition, connected racism to the high unemployment and
prison rates and the dumping of toxic chemicals in low income, predominantly
Black communities.
"They say, 'look at all the jobs the Chev ron Texaco
refinery is giving you' in Rich mond, Calif.," Clark said. Instead of jobs
"we've got high rates of children's asthma, high rates of cancer and 33 percent
more lung cancer than the state average."
Just as corporate greed hurts
communities of color, so too is U.S. imperialism trying to dominate the world,
Clark said. He pointed to the lie of the Bush Admini stration that it was
removing Iraqi Presi dent Saddam Hussein because he repressed Iraqis.
"In
terms of using their own people, no one can beat the U.S. government," Clark
said. "The U.S. government dropped bombs on the people of Philadelphia. The
FBI's Cointelpro killed people in the Black Panther Party and Martin Luther King
and Malcolm X. The government is still holding Black Panthers and Leonard
Peltier in prison."
Monica Moorehead, a Workers World Party national
leader, spoke about the political and economic inequality that exists between
Black and white--the disparity in income, education, health care and
mortality.
Racism, sexism and lesbian/gay/bi/ trans oppression are special
oppressions because they occur on top of the exploitation workers face,
Moorehead said. Bush's 2006 budget calls for the slashing of more than 150
social programs, which will hurt Black people and other people of color in
grossly disproportionate numbers while giving more funds to the warmakers.
"This is all-important to bring up because there are those in the
progressive movement who still cling to the erroneous view that the class
struggle is over here and racism and other special oppressions are over there,
as if one is divorced from the other--that somehow even within the working class
we are all equal when in reality there is inequality," Moorehead said.
"Racism is the center of the class struggle in this country. Racism is
the main weapon that the bosses use not only to super-exploit and super-oppress
whole peoples based on their nationality, but to divide and conquer the
multinational working class to keep us from uniting against all of the
injustices."
Moorehead said the only way workers can win the struggle
against the bosses, who are trying to take back all the gains won in the 1930s
and 1960s, is to merge the anti-war struggle with the struggles of workers and
the oppressed. And the way to do that, she said, is with strong working-class
leadership--like that provided by the leaders of the Million Worker March
movement.
Clarence Thomas from the Interna tional Longshore and Warehouse
Union, a national co-convener of the Million Worker March, spoke about the
legacy on which the MWM movement is based. A group of Black trade unionists
launched their own MWM--the March on Wash ing ton Movement--in 1941. The
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters planned to bring 100,000 people to the
National Mall to protest discrimination, particularly in the defense and civil
service industries.
The march was called off when Presi dent Franklin
Roosevelt signed an executive order calling for an end to discrimination in
these industries and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission.
Thomas also recalled the great strike of 1934 when dock workers demanded
the right to a union hall, to control the dispatching of jobs and to have
collective bargaining. "At the time Black workers were used as scabs to cross
the picket line," Thomas said.
Harry Bridges, a founder of the ILWU, went
to the Black congregations in Oak land and San Francisco and told them he'd make
them members of the union if they refused to cross the picket line.
"Harry was a Marxist ... and understood that racism was a tool of the
bosses," Thomas said.
"The white working class needs to understand that
the struggle to end racism is right up there with the class struggle because
they're linked together--there is no either-or," Thomas continued.
Thomas
said the call of C.L. Dellums, an organizer of the railroad car porters--"Fight
or be slaves"--reminds him of the Million Worker March slogan, "Speaking and
mobilizing in our own name independent of Republican and Democratic parties."
He called for reclaiming May Day with the slogan: "Stop feeding the
Pentagon and starving the cities."
Arthur League, a member of a prisoner
solidarity community group, All of Us or None, stated: "When people fight back
this place is set up to make the most extreme examples of them. They won't walk
out of prison unless and until everywhere we stand and everywhere we speak we
remember these people."
League said All of Us or None is fighting the
sanctioned discrimination that former prisoners face. Convicted felons are
unable to get jobs, are cut off from welfare, are denied housing and food
stamps. The group recently held a demonstration outside Oakland Mayor Jerry
Brown's house after he announced plans to impose a curfew on parolees.
"If
you've been convicted of a felony," League said, "you're a legal slave in the
United States."
Sandburg chaired the Feb. 12 forum.
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