Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. president
James Harris, a unionist and member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, has been involved in the fight for Black rights, in mobilizations against imperialism and its wars, and in working-class politics for over three decades. Harris, 48, is a resident of Atlanta, a worker at the Hormel meatpacking company, and a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
Harris helped initiate recent protests in Atlanta to condemn Washington's threats against Cuba and to oppose the bipartisan drive to tighten the economic embargo imposed on that nation. He has led trade union members of the Socialist Workers Party in stepping up their defense of the socialist revolution in Cuba among co-workers, and in selling revolutionary books and newspapers to fellow unionists.
Before moving to Atlanta, Harris lived and worked in Detroit in the early 1990s and was a member of the United Auto Workers union. He helped build solidarity with struggles by working people wherever they broke out, especially those of workers on strike against Caterpillar, and others locked-out or on strike and fighting to defend their union in Decatur and Peoria, Illinois. Harris spent months in Peoria, helping to establish a branch of the Socialist Workers Party there in response to the deep-going battle by members of the UAW against Caterpillar.
Born into a working-class family in Cleveland, Ohio, Harris's first political activity was as part of the civil rights movement. With growing protests against racist discrimination in all aspects of life, tens of thousands of Black families in the city staged a school strike in the early 1960s, setting up "Freedom Schools" for several days to study African-American history as part of the fight.
Upon graduating from high school in the mid-1960s, Harris attended Cleveland State University, where he was a founding member of the Black Student Union. He organized fellow students into demonstrations opposing the U.S. war against the Vietnamese people as well as actions to combat the racist practices of the college, which at that time had only a small percentage of Black students. Harris became a member of the Student Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam (SMC) and later served on its national staff in Washington, D.C.
During the third-party presidential campaign of Alabama racist George Wallace in 1968, Harris organized protests when the candidate came to Cleveland.
Shortly afterwards he joined and later became a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance. Fielded as a candidate for school board as part of the Socialist Workers Party ticket in 1969, he quickly decided to join the SWP.
A supporter of the Cuban revolution, Harris participated in the second Venceremos Brigade to Cuba in 1969 along with hundreds of other young people from the United States. Brigade members cut cane for a couple of months in an effort to maximize production of the island's main export crop, and thereby generate badly-needed income to provide resources for the advancement of the social and economic aims of the revolution. Working along with Cuban workers, and meeting volunteers from Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere deepened his sense of internationalism.
Harris moved to Atlanta in the early 1970s, and joined in the struggle of the Black community against police brutality. At the time a number of young Blacks had been killed by police SWAT units. Later Harris took part in the effort to mobilize supporters of Black rights to back the unfolding battle for busing and school desegregation in Boston, helping to organize bus loads of supporters from Atlanta to mobilizations in Massachusetts.
In 1977 Harris moved to New York to join the staff of the National Student Coalition Against Racism (NSCAR), which had helped lead the mobilizations in defense of school desegregation. He became a national chairperson of the coalition. NSCAR also helped mobilize support in defense of victims of a racist frame-up, known as the Wilmington 10, as well as protests demanding affirmative action programs and against apartheid in South Africa.
In the late 1970s the SWP responded to the first signs of growing capitalist economic crisis, employer and government attacks on the trade unions, and working-class resistance by organizing to get a big majority of its members into the industrial unions. Harris helped lead this effort, and became a production line worker at the Ford Motor Co. auto plant in Metuchen, New Jersey, in 1978 where he joined the United Auto Workers.
Harris later worked in a garment factory in Los Angeles as the party deepened its turn to industrial workers by building fractions of party members in the garment unions. While in Los Angeles he helped the branch reach out to the growing numbers of immigrant workers coming into the United States, and was the chairperson of the party in the city.
He also participated in brigades to solidarize with and help defend the Nicaraguan revolution in the mid-1980s, and joined a delegation to visit revolutionary Grenada in the early 1980s, to help bring the truth about the first revolution in a Black and English-speaking country in the Caribbean to workers and youth in the United States.
He has traveled to Trinidad, Grenada, Zimbabwe, and South Africa helping to get revolutionary literature into the hands of workers and others seeking to organize to fight the devastating consequences of the economic and social decline of capitalism. While Harris was helping to distribute Pathfinder books in Grenada in 1988, five years after the overthrow of the revolutionary government headed by Maurice Bishop, a Pathfinder shipment was banned by the reactionary U.S.-backed government.
Harris served for a time as the national organization secretary of the SWP. He was a staff writer for the socialist newsweekly the Militant in the late 1980s in New York City. He helped cover the rising battle of the South African masses to bring down the apartheid system and the strike by members of the International Association of Machinists at Eastern Airlines. In September, 1994, Harris traveled to South Africa to attend the Congress of South African Trade Unions national congress.
A longtime advocate of independent working-class political action, Harris participated in the National Black Independent Political Party, formed in Philadelphia in November 1980. In a well-publicized campaign in 1971 in Washington, D.C., Harris was the SWP candidate for non-voting delegate. A centerpiece of the campaign was the struggle to advance Black self- determination.
Harris is a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Atlanta Network on Cuba, and the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Laura Garza
Socialist Workers candidate
for U.S. vice president
Laura Garza, currently a staff writer for the socialist newsweekly the Militant, has a 25-year record in the fight for socialism - from struggles in the labor movement to battles for women's emancipation and Chicano liberation.
Prior to moving to New York, Garza lived in Miami, where she was a production worker and member of the United Steelworkers of America. She helped organize meetings, picket lines, and protests against the U.S. embargo of Cuba, for the right to travel freely to the island, and in defense of free speech in Miami.
Garza visited Cuba several times, helping to lead delegations of youth to learn about the revolution, and to report for the Militant during the "rafters crisis" and subsequent military and economic threats by Washington in August 1994. As the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Miami in 1993, and one year later for U.S. Congress, she participated in debates and was an outspoken defender of the Cuban revolution. She advocated following the same road - that of workers and farmers taking power and overthrowing capitalism - throughout the world.
Garza built protests in support of abortion rights and joined in defending clinics that provide abortion, which were the target of rightist assaults in Pensacola, Florida, where two doctors and a clinic volunteer were murdered in 1993 and 1994. She joined others in initiating actions against police brutality in Miami and in defending the rights of Haitian refugees and opposing deportation of immigrant workers. Garza opposed the U.S. government support to Haiti's ruling rich and military and stood up against Washington's 1994 invasion and subsequent military occupation of the country.
Born in New York, Garza, 37, joined classmates at her junior high school in a walkout to protest Washington's escalation of the Vietnam War with the invasion of Cambodia. Her family moved to Chicago a short time later, where she involved fellow high school students in the fight for women's rights, organizing to get young women to a conference in support of legalizing abortion. She joined the Young Socialist Alliance while involved in this struggle.
Finishing high school in Los Angeles, Garza joined with other YSA members and students in the anti-Vietnam War movement. She volunteered full-time in the NAACP office during the battle to desegregate the Boston school system, and helped build a march in Los Angeles to back the fight for desegregation in Boston and Los Angeles.
During the 1970s, the struggle by Chicano, Mexicano, and Filipino farm workers to unionize the giant "factories in the fields" in California gained national prominence. Garza participated in protest marches in the countryside and in the cities, also building the boycott of grapes called by the United Farm Workers.
With the growing weight of the struggles for Chicano liberation and for the rights of the immigrant population from Mexico and Latin America, the SWP sought to expand the number of party branches in the Southwest. Garza moved to San Antonio, Texas, to build the party. While there, she helped establish a chapter of the Chicano student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) at the University of Texas. Garza then worked in several factories organized by the International Union of Electrical workers, and later as a presser at a Levi-Strauss plant where she was a member of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.
Garza volunteered for months at the Washington, D.C., mobilization office for a march against the moves by the James Carter administration to reintroduce the draft, part of Washington's militarization drive in response to the Iranian revolution and overthrow of the U.S.-backed shah in 1979 and the anti-capitalist revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua. Garza also joined the staff for a national mobilization in 1980 against U.S. intervention in Central America, opposing Washington's support of the contras in Nicaragua, and aid to the military regime in El Salvador.
She was elected a national officer of the Young Socialist Alliance in 1985, leading the organization in actions to demand that Washington break all ties with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.
Garza has traveled widely, helping to lead teams of socialists to sell Pathfinder books, the Militant, and Perspectiva Mundial in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and across the United States. Following the Mexico City book fair last year, she took part in a Militant reporting team to Chiapas, where she participated in a peasant congress. She also attended the international women's conference in Beijing, China, last September. Garza is a member of the National Organization for Women, an activist in New York in building solidarity with the socialist revolution in Cuba, and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.