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Top Civil Rights Official: Discrimination Persists in 2010
After eight years in which “critical civil rights protections gathered dust,” the Obama administration has made enforcement of civil rights laws a major priority, the nation’s top civil rights official said over the weekend.
Thomas Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, told the AFL-CIO King Day celebration in Greensboro, N.C., which ended Jan. 18:
In 2010, we have an African American president. And yet discrimination persists—both blatant discrimination and the dangerously subtle kind—in so many of our institutions, showing up in our schools, in our workplaces, in our health care system, in our financial system.
Saying the union and civil rights movements share the same goals, Perez, the son of Dominican immigrants, added:
Over the last century, those two movements have learned from each other, have helped each other and have changed our nation into one where more people have access to the promise of equal opportunity.
Read excerpts from Perez’s speech in his Point of View column here.
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In addition to the celebration in Greensboro, working Americans across the country from Seattle to Chicago to Little Rock, Ark., to Atlanta held roundtables, marches and rallies to remind their lawmakers that King’s vision for the nation included not only civil rights but also an economy that served all Americans—a vision that is far from fulfilled.
In Joliet, Ill., clergy and other religious leaders announced a boycott to restore justice to a group of Bissell warehouse workers who were fired last year when they blew the whistle on violations at their workplace.
The workers were fired en masse after filing legal complaints over the many violations of state and federal law in the warehouse and announcing to management that they were forming a union.
More than 400 union activists took part in the Greensboro celebration, which focused on economic justice. In workshops and speeches, the activists made the point that King’s dream of a better, more equal America must include good, meaningful jobs.
Participants honored the four trailblazing men whose sit-in 50 years ago at the Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro ignited a nationwide effort that resulted in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and AFGE President John Gage addressed the participants, along with Rebecca Blank, undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Commerce Department.
Community service is a major portion of each year’s King Day celebration, putting into action the union values of collective assistance for those in need. This year, participants sorted and distributed donated goods to local homeless shelters.
A town hall meeting on the jobs crisis highlighted the need for economic justice, and participants discussed the AFL-CIO’s five-point plan to save and create millions of jobs in the next year, especially in the nation’s most distressed communities where the population is primarily people of color.
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2 Comments
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Go out onto Main Street. Ask the first 100 people you meet if they voted for Obama. Of those who answer yes ask them why.
Here’s what you’ll hear. “To end the war”; “to provide health care for all”; “to put America back to work.”
You won’t hear them saying anything about further privatizing the war[s] by rewarding no-bid contracts to criminal war profiteers. Not a one will say that they were looking forward to an amendment to Section 1322 of ERISA that would have enabled states to attempt real healthcare reform because Congress wouldn’t. Nary would a person say they were willing to endure further unemployment so that banks could get bailed out and then turn around and reward their CEOs with bonuses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The people of this nation are far ahead of the Congressional corporatists posing as either Republicans or Democrats. They are far ahead when it comes to ethics and morality, even though we are bombarded with half-truths by the media.
Generally speaking, the majority of people support true democracy and liberty and justice for all.
It is Congress and their corporate benefactors that lack ethics.
Case in point: Our new president didn’t even have a chance to warm the chair in the oval office before Blue Dogs were attacking his programs. Those heirs of Dixiecrat politics either supported the Bush agenda or barely made a peep when he was running amok, but now that Obama is in office they seem to have found their voices.
Equality in America? Yeah, sure. And my Aunt Helen is my Uncle Al.
Humane, moral, and ethical people want everyone to have the same opportunities. They believe all people everywhere should have access to decent housing, health care, education, employment, and other components of the “American Dream”.
That puts Congress and corporate America in bad company. They deserve each other, just not at our expense.
The struggle for civil rights and worker rights continues today. Both movements work hand in hand for the benefit of working people. Case in point: 1) The recent organization of the Smithfield Packing plant in N.Carolina. The UFCW with assistance from the civil rights movement finally overcame blatant racism and anti-union activities from the packing house hosses. 2) The 1987 civil rights/labor victory at Stephen F. Austin state university in Nacogdoches, Texas where the Texas State Employees Union/CWA and the NAACP teamed up to help bring justice to African American workers employed at the university after decades of discrimination and racism by this state university bosses.
I too am disappointed with Obama, but we must not give up! Progress comes about only through organized and peresistent struggle!