BY JOSHUA CARROLL
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - On Friday, May 31, this reporter and Andrew Feine made our way here. Feine is a Yale University student who will be participating in the upcoming U.S.-Cuba Youth Exchange. Both of us have been active in the New York U.S.-Cuba Youth Exchange Committee.

We came here to help get 8,500 signatures on petitions to put James Harris and Laura Garza on the ballot in Alabama. I volunteered for this trip a few days earlier. Andrew attended a house meeting on May 30 with Harris, who was in New York as a part of his campaign tour. He decided on the spot to come along and help out. Ten hours later we took off for Alabama.

At the meeting, Andrew and Antonio Olivo, a student at New York Technical college, decided they wanted to support the socialist campaign by going out to picket lines, demonstrations, and other social protest actions to present a working-class alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans. Both signed up as Young Socialists for Harris and Garza.

What you do when you petition is briefly explain what the socialist campaign is about, and then ask if the person would like to sign up to put Harris and Garza on the ballot. The two main places we petitioned over the next few days were in a Wal- Mart parking lot and outside the building where people pay their utilities bills.

The response was really good. I would say over two-thirds of the people who actually stopped to listen to us ended up signing the petition. Some of them said they would vote for William Clinton, but thought it was important to have alternative choices on the ballot. Others simply agreed when Andrew and I said, "Working people can't look for the lesser evil among candidates who speak for a few already wealthy families, but have to do something different to defend our class interests."

Some people who initially didn't want to sign would flatly state, "I don't vote." We frequently won these people to sign our petition when we explained that we sympathize and even agree with many people's motivation for not voting: there's no capitalist candidate who is offering any solution worth workers' support anyway. We said that the Democrats and the Republicans are completely bought stock-lock-and-barrel by the landlords, big- businessmen, and bankers.

With the help of other volunteers from the Birmingham area, however, we were able to get 2,200 signatures, including nearly 200 at Birmingham's Gay Pride March on June 9. Andrew was the top petitioner during the five-day period he was there - getting 36 in his very first hour alone. That first hour was hard to match for the rest of the week, but we were able to average over 20 signatures per hour.

Among other supporters who helped out petitioning were four Young Socialists for Harris and Garza here. Three of these people expressed interest in coming to the International Socialist Conference in Oberlin, Ohio, next month (see ad on front page). We were also able to recruit two more young people as Young Socialists for Harris and Garza, one of whom subscribed to the Militant.

Volunteers are needed to petition there full time between now and July 3. Help is also needed for other petitioning efforts: July 10 - August 20 in New York; July-August in Washington, D.C.; as well as in Utah, Minnesota, Iowa, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Washington state.

Joshua Carroll is a member of the National Committee of the Young Socialists.  
 
 
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