Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles invites all to join September 9, 2015 press conference and benefit performance of award winning play "Real Women Have Curves" at Pasadena Playhouse. FIGHT WAGE THEFT! Support garment workers organizing!
Ajamu Dillahunt, founding member of Black Workers for Justice, a grassroots organization focused on empowering African-American workers to become leaders in the Black Freedom and labor movements. The text below is from an oral history interview conducted on May 8, 2014. This interview was supported by the Southern Oral History Program and is a part of a larger oral history project focused on documenting the recent political upsurge in North Carolina and across the South.
How a new generation of tech-savvy activists made violence against African Americans into global headline news
Leadership and organizing cannot be simply tweeted into existence. Movement-building is forged in struggle, through people building relationships within organizations and collectives. Social media is only one part of a much larger effort . . . Group-centered leaders are at the center of many concentric circles. They strengthen the group, forge consensus and negotiate a way forward. That kind of leadership is impactful, democratic, and more radical and sustainable.
Johnson gave full credit to the movement. “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform. He has called upon us to make good the promise of America.”
As CAPITAL & MAIN's “State of Equality” series has documented, economic inequality poses a grave threat to California’s future. Conditions would be far worse if not for progress made by activists, community leaders and lawmakers. In the last several years, California has generated some of the nation’s most innovative and effective strategies to reverse inequality. Here Judith Lewis Mernit lists 10 landmark achievements worth celebrating,emulating and strengthening.
Campaigns for social control of capital look different from social democratic movements that began in the 1870s and endured through the mid-1960s. Thus many underestimate the significance of the Occupy Movement, the mobilization of domestic workers, immigrants, restaurant and fast food workers, home healthcare workers, self-employed women workers, tomato pickers or the landless. Nonetheless, we should recognize that these campaigns all challenge capital.
There is no silver bullet in this fight for economic justice. Not one public official, nor one economist, nor one President will solve our mess. A return to democratic principles and a deepening of participatory process is what it will take to uplift the working class.
Beyond the massive effort to deliver clean water, there has been an unprecedented surge of interest in organizing for long-term solutions.
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