Protest for immigrant, workers’ rights

By Adriane Harden
Montgomery, Ala.

Photo: Adriane Harden

Demonstrators rallied at the Alabama State Capitol on the afternoon of March 9, after completing the final leg of the 54-mile, week-long march between Selma and Montgomery. Marchers protested Alabama’s toughest-in-the-U.S. immigration law, for workers’ rights and against laws in 31 states requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls.

This year’s commemoration of the historic 1965 march that forced passage of the Voting Rights Act brought together an impressive coalition of organizations committed to civil, immigrant and workers’ rights.

The week began on March 5 with thousands of people reenacting the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where 47 years ago demonstrators were met with vicious police brutality so intense the day is known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Two hundred people began the long march to Montgomery. Each day more people joined. By March 8, the day dedicated to the struggle for immigrant rights, more than 1,000 people, many undocumented, walked toward Montgomery with their children.

Upon arriving at the Capitol on March 9, thousands more — coming on buses organized by labor unions, immigrant and civil rights groups from throughout Alabama, Georgia and other states — converged to demand an end to all the attacks on these diverse yet united communities.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the civil-rights group, National Action Network, and host of ”Politics Nation” on MSNBC, said, ”Our fathers beat Jim Crow. We’re going to beat James Crow Jr. We have awakened again. Black, white, Latino, Asian, workers, union members, young folk, old folk.

”The only voter fraud that we can find is the statement that there is widespread voter fraud,” Sharpton said. ”The fraud is to use nonexistent widespread voter fraud to try to suppress and stop people from voting.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow Push Coalition voiced support for a federal bill that would provide paths to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children.

”Democracy is a path to citizenship, not deportation,” Jackson said. ”Democracy is the path of the DREAM Act, not the nightmare act of racial profiling, violence and family separation.”

Other speakers included Bob King, president of the United Auto Workers, AFL-CIO Vice President Arlene Holt-Baker, who made the entire walk, and Service Employees Union leader Tony Lewis.