Vol. 79/No. 34      September 28, 2015

“We have been marching and will keep up the fight,” Local 1422 member Tyrone Sanders told some 600 participants in the Sept. 5 demonstration. Sanders’ son, 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders, was one of those killed in the church. His wife and granddaughter survived the attack.

“This event gives me the strength to come out to more rallies and get more involved in the union and the coming together of the races,” Sanders told the Militant. “It’s good to see Blacks and whites coming together for a common cause.

“Our union has always been involved in the fight for people’s rights,” he said, pointing to the local’s support for the Wilmington 10 — civil rights fighters framed up in North Carolina in 1972 on charges of firebombing a store — and backing the 1969 strike of Black hospital workers against racial discrimination at what is now the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

Wendy Williams, a nurse recently axed by MUSC after 19 years on the job, told the Militant she was fired “because I’m outspoken and support the union there, the United Healthcare Workers.”

Williams said she and others went to hand out flyers for the Days of Grace outside the hospital, But “management told us to leave, saying we were ‘harassing’ people.”

A wide range of unions, church groups, campus and academic associations and civil rights organizations endorsed the weekend activities. Participants came from other Southern states as well as New York, California and Washington, D.C.

Family members of the nine people killed in the church and of Walter Scott led the march.

“This racist massacre could never happen in Cuba because the very foundation of that country is based on respect for humanity and collective care for each other,” said a message of solidarity from the National Network on Cuba read to applause. “Cuba has been the shining example of sending brigades to help fight against diseases, and they are first responders when a disaster happens.”

The keynote speaker at the rally and conference was Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP and initiator of “Moral Monday” actions there to champion the fight for voting rights and other labor and social struggles.

The post-Civil War Reconstruction governments, set up by “a fusion coalition of Blacks and whites” after the defeat of the slavocracy, Barber said, changed voting laws, labor laws, the criminal justice system, and introduced public education for all before being defeated by Klan brutality and white supremacist “Redeemers,” who organized a bloody counterrevolution when the U.S. rulers pulled federal troops out in 1877.

The mighty Black-led movement that brought down Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and ’60s brought Blacks and Caucasians together again, Barber said, in a struggle marked by discipline and courage.

The grace and forgiveness expressed by the families after the recent church killings was in continuity with that tradition, he said. “They did not just do what was right, but what was necessary to build a modern movement in the South.”

Other featured speakers at the rally included Norvel Goff, interim pastor at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church where the terrorist shootings occurred, and Darby Joseph, presiding Elder of the Beaufort District of the AME Church.

“We have a fight on our hands to stop police violence and the economic violence in our community,” said Dawn O’Neill, 48, a child care worker who was among four vanloads of people fighting for a minimum wage of $15 an hour who came from Georgia and Alabama.

“It’s getting harder and harder for the working person,” James Colburn, 47, who is Caucasian and a truck driver in Charleston, said. “The companies don’t want to pay anything, and the cost of everything is going up. This is happening to everybody, Black and white. We got to find a way to come together.”

“I came to show solidarity from our union in Alabama, where we experience the same situation regarding workers’ rights and discrimination,” said Mark Bass, president of ILA Local 1410 in Mobile, Alabama.

At the conference the next day, two rounds of workshops were held on the topics of voting rights; ending discriminatory policing; education; economic justice, wages and collective bargaining; Medicaid and access to health care; and ending gun violence.

Janice Lynn, Rachele Fruit and Maggie Trowe contributed to this article.  
 
 
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