May Day
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It's good to see people taking back the historic political meaning of May Day as International Worker's Day. Ironic that it commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, and yet it has rarely become a primary focus for demonstrating here in the U.S., or when it has, that history isn't often discussed-as it references communities of color.
Lest we forget -it was on May Day that A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin called on 100,000 blacks to march on Washington, DC, in 1941. The march, called in protest against discrimination in the military and in the war industry, was scheduled for July 1, 1941.
The call for this massive March pressured FDR to take action.
March on Washington, 1941
Since World War I, African Americans had protested both the segregation of the U.S. military and the systematic job discrimination in war-powered defense industries. In 1940 A. Philip Randolph, joining Walter White, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and T. Hill Arnold of the National Urban League, urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to end segregation in the armed forces and to permit blacks to obtain more jobs in the defense industry. Unable to resolve these issues satisfactorily with President Roosevelt, Randolph planned a protest that called for a march on Washington for jobs in national defense and equal integration in the fighting forces of the United States. With a forecast of 100,000 African Americans marching on Washington D.C., President Roosevelt met with Randolph and White on June 18, 1941, to avoid the embarrassing attention such a demonstration would attract. Six days before the march, Randolph canceled the protest when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which abolished discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee.
People around the U.S. have rallies and actions planned today - not just OWS folks, but also coalitions of workers, students and immigrants.
This video from NYC is an example. It was good to see organizations from a wide range of grassroots groups supporting the mobilization:
May 1st Coalition, La Fuente, New York Immigration Coalition, New Immigrant Communities Empowered (NICE), El Centro de Inmigrante, NYC LCLAA, National Institute for Latino Policy, Mothers on the Move, National Lawyers Guild, Occupy Wall Street Immigrant Worker Justice Working Group, Occupy Wall Street en Espanol, Occupy Wall Street Latin America, National Lawyers Guild, Community Farmworker Alliance, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Adelante Alliance, Jornaleros Unidos, Families for Freedom, Restaurant Opportunities Center-N, Domestic Workers United, New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Laundry Workers Center United, Brandworkers International, Independent Workers Movement, La Peña del Bronx, Centro Guatemalteco Tecun Uman, Philippine Forum, Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center
I have very strong memories of attending a massive May Day rally in the People's Republic of the Congo (now the Republic of Congo) in 1971 which not only honored workers but also victories of
MPLA in Angola.
There, in the large stadium in Brazzaville, I sat in the reviewing stand as a member of the Black Panther Party delegation, watching thousands of cheering and banner carrying groups celebrate. I was particularly moved when the women from the URFC (Union Révolutionnaire des Femmes du Congo Revolutionary Union of Congolese Women) marched by.
I was 24. Though many years have passed since then, I scan the news each year to follow May Day events around the world.
What's happening on May Day in your community?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on the reaction to his memoir. Atlantic: White Privilege.
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There's a very nice note in the comments section for my post below this one from a gentleman who was kind enough to read my memoir:
I read 'The Beautiful Struggle' a few weeks ago (& enjoyed it very much, & found it very affecting: sincere big thanks). In many ways, our childhoods and adolescences couldn't be more different: I'm a white guy from a comfortably affluent family who grew up a few years after you (crack still a power but very much on the downswing) in a medium sized, uglily-segregated city in the midwest.
I was given all sorts of privileges withheld from you, and grew up in a much less hostile world. I'm a little uncomfortable making comparisons: I'd be an awful jackass to diminish your experiences in any way. With that said: while in objective terms, our middle school years were very different, I really recognized atmosphere you portrayed, and that recognition had a lot to do w/ how effective it was for me, despite different settings. I'm not sure exactly what point I want to make: certainly not that privileged white boys can be self involved, though there is a little of that ... something vague and ill-thought-out about universality and uniqueness in how adolescence is experienced, I guess.
I want to stress that I really appreciate this note. While I wrote thinking mostly about a young black kid who might find himself in the sort of situation I found myself as an adolescent, I also wanted the book to be open and hoped that people who were nothing like me might find something in there. With that said, I want to offer something that may do well to tie up the past week of discussion.
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Author Toni Morrison is going to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Plain Dealer: Ohio natives John Glenn, Toni Morrison to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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Novelist Toni Morrison, a Lorain native, also will receive the medal, the nation's highest civilian honor. Obama will present the awards at the White House in late spring.
Other recipients will include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, songwriter and musician Bob Dylan, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the late Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low and NCAA women's basketball coach Pat Summitt.
"These extraordinary honorees come from different backgrounds and different walks of life, but each of them has made a lasting contribution to the life of our nation," Obama's announcement said.
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A growing problem of militias New York Times: Haiti: Rogue Force Refuses to Disband.
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A rogue band of armed men pushing for the revival of Haiti’s military are refusing to disband and leave old military bases, the leaders of the group said Tuesday, despite repeated orders from the government. In a news conference at an army barracks just outside Haiti’s capital, several veterans of the defunct army said Haitian officials broke a promise by failing to appoint them to lead an interim force until the military is officially reinstated. The former officers began recruiting men and a few women a year ago with the hope that the armed force disbanded in 1995 would be reinstated. The Haitian government has repeatedly ordered the former soldiers and their followers, which number about 3,500, to vacate the old bases they seized several months ago, but it has taken no concrete action.
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Are development experts becoming racists? Foreign Policy Magazine: Dumb and Dumber.
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Columnist John Derbyshire's recent effluvia on the subject of things your white kid should know about black people was met with suitable disdain and a rapid expulsion from the web pages of the National Review. Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence -- alongside the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould, among others.
Sadly, Derbyshire-like prattishness on the intellectual inferiority of dark-skinned races and its impact on social and economic outcomes in the United States has a historied international equivalent. In fact, if anything, the academic consensus on why some countries are rich and others are poor is tacking closer to the shoals of genetic determinism than it has been since the days of high empire. Derbyshire's deserved disgrace is a needed reminder to throw brickbats at his partners in malodor who work in global development.
The supposed superiority of the white man's genetic endowment was one important justification for his colonial "burden" at the height of empire, perhaps especially in Britain, where the country's industriousness was taken as a sign and symptom of Saxon racial superiority. Nineteenth-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle epitomized the thinking in his "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" -- though expressing the sentiment in such shockingly crude terms hastened the decline of his influence. Talking to his "obscure black friends" in the West Indies, he laid plain why whites should rule over the former slave population: "You are not 'slaves' now; nor do I wish, if it can be avoided, to see you slaves again; but decidedly you will have to be servants to those that are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you -- servants to the whites, if they are (as what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you."
Development economists over the past 50 years have eschewed genetic explanations for the wealth and poverty of nations, favoring factors from lack of investment to lack of health care and education to wrong policies to poor government institutions. But the mainstream is moving back in the direction of "deep causes" of development. These involve determinants such as the relative technological advance of regions some centuries (even millennia) ago or levels of ethnic diversity that have long historical roots. And Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have gone even further back, arguing that "genetic distance" -- or the time since populations shared a common ancestor -- has a considerable role to play in the inequality of incomes worldwide. They estimate that variation in genetic distance may account for about 20 percent of the variation in income across countries.
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On Sunday, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry tackled the difficult ethical and policy issues associated with the death penalty. The Root: Melissa Harris-Perry on Life, Death and Penalties.
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The U.S. ranks fifth in the world in executions behind Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, which is No. 1. Harris-Perry talked with a mother whose son is on death row and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project about the human and financial costs of the death penalty in the U.S., where 1,294 people have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Watch video footage here:
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I kept a dream journal for years until the fatigue of ten hour days working physical labor caused me to make a choice; a choice between rest or the listings of the ethereal. In time it didn't matter. No list will ever adequately catalogue the immensity of it all.
So I rested and became...
Dust
Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
-- Dorainne Laux
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Welcome to the Front Porch.
In case you missed it navajo hosted a community fundraiser for our BKos community member Aji.
Front Porch Music: viral video
over 5 million hits so far for POTUS slow jammin' the news with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots.