Participants were welcomed by Amanda Ulman, a textile worker, who thanked supporters of the bookstore for their efforts to renovate the premises.

Maria Moncada, who attends weekly Militant Labor Forums here, welcomed everyone to the bookstore. "As we say in my country, 'my house is your house.' That is what we are saying with the bookstore. That you are welcome here."

Moncada is currently reading the Spanish-language edition of Opening Guns of World War III: Washing-ton's Assault on Iraq by Jack Barnes. "The lessons of this book seem very relevant today. Pathfinder books explain not just what you should be against, but what we should be for. They offer a revolutionary perspective."

The grand opening was combined with activities to get out the word on the fight of Mike Italie, who is waging a nationwide campaign to demand reinstatement to his job at Goodwill Industries where he worked as a sewing machine operator (see article on front page).

Willie Head, a vegetable farmer and leader of the Peoples Tribunal, an organization of rural workers and farmers, came to the meeting after having addressed a New Order event earlier in the day.  
 
March against police brutality
New Order, an anti–racial profiling organization in Marietta, Georgia, held the first ever march against police harassment in Cobb County, Georgia, October 20. The group is planning another march February 23.

Head had explained in his presentation to the group that defense cases like Italie's and the fight by Valdosta State University instructor Leigh Touchton, who is demanding her job back after being fired for speaking out on campus and in the community, are important ways to oppose the war on working people--a war that is intensifying as the U.S. government presses its assault against the people of Afghanistan. He invited members of New Order to attend a meeting of the Peoples Tribunal, founded in a fight against police brutality in 1999.

Eight members of the group traveled with Head to Atlanta to attend the bookstore grand opening. Many of the youth picked up a range of Pathfinder titles from a sale table, and in subsequent phone discussions have said that they are enjoying reading them.

"This bookstore is very important to me because it's how we workers can know what is going on with other workers. We are the ones who produce the wealth of any country," Heriberto Ruiz told the crowd at the bookstore opening. Ruiz, a worker from Mexico who now lives near the bookstore, met socialist workers staffing a book table with Pathfinder literature in the surrounding working-class district that includes several trailer parks where hundreds of immigrant construction workers live.

"Participating in the meeting tonight opens doors for me," he said at a social after the grand opening. "I am beginning to understand that it's not just Mexicans who face the problems we do, but Black workers and white workers. We're all the same."  
 
 
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