Let’s Look at the Issues

February 23, 2015 8:59 AM

Movie goers are flocking to theaters to see the motion picture “Selma,” which is appropriate especially now, as the 50th anniversary of that famous civil rights march is only a week away.

In many respects, the Selma incident stood as a wakeup call for a lot of Americans, too many of whom had been sitting on the sidelines during the struggle for equality. The Civil Rights Act had been enacted less than a year earlier, but the law had weak enforcement mechanisms—a problem that would be partially corrected with additional legislation in subsequent years. The fight in Selma was for voting rights, and it is no coincidence that the Voting Rights Act was enacted just five months later.

As many of you know, our Union was an eager and active participant in the battle for civil rights. As an example, our Union contributed strongly to a fund that helped finance the U.S. Supreme Court case that led to desegregation. As another example, Local 6 in 1954 established a civil rights award that provided crucial funding to its recipients. Among those who received the Local 6 Civil Rights Award were Dr. Martin Luther King (who received it twice), labor leader A. Philip Randolph, publisher and NAACP activist Daisy Bates, the Little Rock Nine—a group of students in Arkansas who braved threats and actual violence to integrate Central High School in their state’s capital, James Meredith, the first black student to attend Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi), and Ralph McGill, an editor and columnist at the Atlanta Constitution.

Our Union picketed stores in New York whose parent companies had segregated lunch counters in the South, we sent members to civil rights marches, including those in Washington, D.C., where hundreds of them personally witnessed Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech, and engaged in other actions to impel the civil rights movement forward. One of those actions occurred in 1964, when we joined forces with several other New York unions to finance a program that sent teachers to Mississippi. It was an important part of what was called Freedom Summer.

One of the teachers sponsored by our Union in 1964, Susan Butler, recently wrote a letter to Hotel Voice. She had kept a diary of her time in Mississippi and the Union published exerpts from it 51 years ago in this very publication. As we go to press with this edition of Hotel Voice Ms. Butler is on her way to Alabama, for the Arc of Justice Conference. Two of the days during that conference will take place in Selma, where Ms. Butler and others will reenact the march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where civil rights activists were attacked by the police in 1965.

How bad were things in the South in 1964? Well, through Ms. Butler’s diary Hotel Voice readers learned that a young African-American political science major at Harvard University “failed” her application to vote in Alabama. Ms. Butler further reported that the white registrar who rejected the Harvard student’s application to vote had himself failed to graduate from high school! In another diary entry Butler told readers about a church burning. She also reported the repeated threats made against Freedom Summer participants. You get the idea.
In her recent letter to Hotel Voice Ms. Butler noted the fact that not all of organized labor was helpful to the civil rights movement. But she praised our own Union’s involvement, saying she was donating her papers (including Hotel Voice articles) to the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. “The role of unions during the period of the civil rights movement was not exactly exemplary,” Ms. Butler wrote. “I am donating these papers because I want to be sure that both the teachers union and the hotel workers union get the credit they deserve for their work on behalf of freedom and equality.”

Susan Butler isn’t the only one who has saluted our Union’s efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement. Ernest Green, who was one of the Little Rock Nine and who later became a member of President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet, recalled what our Union did for him and others. On the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock incident Green told of an obvious conspiracy in Arkansas that had prevented him and other members of the Little Rock Nine from finding summer jobs in 1957, 1958 and 1959. Our Union came to the rescue, finding summer employment for them in New York.

“Those jobs helped fund my college education at Michigan State University,” Green told the New York Daily News in 1997. “The summers in New York had a profound beneficial impact on my life.”
Carlotta Walls Lanier, another member of the Little Rock Nine, also recalled with gratitude what our Union did for her and her fellow students in “A Mighty Long Way,” her autobiographical account of the Little Rock incident.

This brief look back at our Union’s efforts of behalf of the battle for civil rights comes at a time when a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge in Texas, Andrew Hanen, has raised a modern civil rights issue. That judge this week negated executive orders by President Obama. If allowed to stand, this judge’s ruling will stop five million undocumented immigrants—those brought here illegally as children by their parents but have lived their entire lives in the U.S., and millions of parents of U.S. citizens—from becoming free of the threat of deportation. In what sounds more like a political belief than a legal opinion, Judge Hanen said Obama’s executive orders would have a significant impact on “the nation’s entire immigration scheme and the states who must bear the lion’s share of its consequences,”

Pending an appeal of this judge’s sweeping ruling, this may become the prime civil rights issue of 2015.