Pete Seeger knew the answer to the question: "Which Side Are You On?"

 

(Pete Seeger performing at a CIO labor canteen in Washington, D.C., in 1944, with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the audience.)

Roots music fans across the country are mourning the recent death of American folk music hero Pete Seeger at the ripe old age of 94, and many of them, like me, are thinking about their favorite Seeger songs. It’s a huge body of work.

For me, there’s not much question. It’s not a Pete Seeger original, but the Seeger-led Almanac Singers’ version of Florence Reece’s Which Side Are You On? (from a 1955 collection--not sure when it was recorded) wins hands-down. It’s a haunting version, made more so by the slow, percolating sound of Seeger’s banjo in the background.

Don’t scab for the bosses

Don’t listen to their lies

Us poor folks haven’t got a chance

Unless we organize

                                                (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1gX0SxtidI)

Seeger’s long life stretched across modern labor history in this country, and he was a major champion of the movement, celebrating its music as well as its stand for the working man and woman. Seeger kept alive a tradition that goes back to the anthem of the French Revolution, La Marseillaise, and the Paris Commune, L’Internationale, across the ocean to Wobbly troubadour Joe Hill at the turn of the last century and Reece’s 1931 hymn to striking coal miners in Harlan Country, Kentucky. Also in that tradition is Sarah Ogan’s bitter indictment of rabid, unhinged capitalism in the 1944 ballad Come All You Coal Miners (recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax).

Seeger performed at rallies for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, worked with Lomax on a book of protest and workers’ songs in the late 1930s, sang and raised hell with balladeer Woody Guthrie, joined the American Communist Party for a time, got in trouble with the House for Un-American Activities Committee and was found guilty of contempt of Congress by that less-than-august body. He and his 1950s group The Weavers were banned from the television show Hootenanny in the early 1960s even though that show ostensibly championed folk music.

Seeger was the connection between those earlier traditions and a later generation of labor and folk-singing musicians like Joe Glazer and Anne Feeney. Rock ‘n’ Rollers like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello pay homage to Seeger’s legacy in their music.

Working people had a champion in Pete Seeger. They’ve always needed music to articulate things banners and speeches aren’t always able to say. Seeger knew that, and he provided a heck of a lot of that music. We’ll be hearing it for a long time to come.

Cereal maker Kellogg's union-busting in Memphis would make "Boss" Crump happy

 

(E. H. "Boss" Crump of Memphis in 1949)

Memphis, Tenn., is the city where political strongman E. H. “Boss” Crump launched what labor historian Michael Honey called a “Reign of Terror” in 1940 against efforts by the Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize the giant Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.

Police raids, beatings, arrests, and unprovoked street confrontations of blacks across the city succeeded in preventing the CIO from successfully organizing workers. One union activist, Robert Cotton, became one of Memphis’ “disappeared.”

Fifteen years later, the South’s leading segregationists—among them, Strom Thurmond and Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, “Big Jim” Eastland of Mississippi, Leander Perez of Louisiana and Herman Talmadge of Georgia—met in the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis to organize the Federation  for Constitutional Government. They declared war against union organizers as well as civil rights activists.

And, of course, in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. lost his life in Memphis after supporting the city’s striking sanitation workers.

Today Memphis is against a center of labor strife as hundreds of workers protest their months-long lockout by the Battle Creek, Mich.-based cereal-making giant Kellogg. The workers, members of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union, refused to approve a company plan to cut wages and benefits as well as hire new “casual” workers at lower pay.

The 200-plus locked-out workers, an estimated 60 percent of whom are black, say production of Frosted Flakes, Corn Flakes, and Froot Loops has dropped to less than half. Still, the company has brought in scabs to replace the workers, and it insists that production is keeping pace with consumer demand.

This is yet another example of a company trying to join its Wall Street brethren in busting unions and lowering pay and benefits for workers in the process. Kellogg profits totaled $352 million for the quarter ending last June, up $28 million from the same period the previous year.

The lockout focused on Memphis because the company’s contract agreement with workers there expired last October. The lockout does not extend to the Kellogg plant in Rossville, Tenn.

Meanwhile, the Memphis workers are marching and protesting in freezing temperatures, and the company has cut their health care and life insurance benefits.

Citizens in Memphis are showing their support for the workers, however. An online petition has gained some 8,500 signatures, and hundreds rallied at the plant in November in a show of solidarity.

I know that I, for one, am not eating another bowl of any Kellogg cereals until the workers get fair treatment.

Nelson Mandela and Jesse Helms: A South African hero and a Southern mossback

(Here's one more look at the late Nelson Mandela and the Southern senator who dismissed him as a communist. This was published recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.)

(Nelson Mandela in 2008)

When Nelson Mandela spoke to the U.S. Congress on June 26, 1990, the godfather of modern-day Republican obstructionism, the late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, wasn’t in the chamber.

I was there as a reporter, but “Senator No” was protesting. “Before we get his halo in place too securely, let’s examine this guy,” Helms groused.

Of course, Helms had made up his mind about the man who led the fight for freedom against apartheid rule in South Africa. Helms called Mandela a “communist,” much like he called Martin Luther King Jr. a communist, and he opposed sanctions against South Africa like he opposed civil rights legislation and a holiday named after King.

Helms missed a good speech. It came just four months after Mandela’s release from 27 years in prison. Mandela died last month at the age of 95.

Echoing King’s speech in the 1963 March on Washington, Mandela said South Africa “has known nothing but racism for three centuries,” but it could become “an oasis of good race relations, where the black shall to the white be sister and brother, a fellow South African, an equal human being.”

Mandela even invoked King in his speech, citing him along with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and others as having inspired South African freedom fighters in their “struggle to guarantee the people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

(To the right, Jesse Helms)

If Ol’ Jesse were alive today, what would he say about his philosophical successor, Tea Party hero and Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas? “Nelson Mandela will live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty around the globe,” Cruz posted on his Facebook page Dec. 4. “Because of his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free.”

Cruz has since caught hell from supporters even farther to the right than he is. Still, Cruz is no hero. Had he been a senator back in Helms’ day, he would have fought side-by-side with the owlish North Carolinian, raising Cain about commies in both the U.S. South and South Africa. It’s easy to praise someone after he’s safely entombed in the grave.

 Helms wasn’t the only conservative of his day who held contempt for Nelson Mandela. President Ronald Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and then-Congressman and future Vice President Dick Cheney all preferred racist, white-ruled South Africa and apartheid to Mandela and his African National Congress.

The world rightly mourns the death of a great leader in Mandela. Again much like King, he took his stand at a time when non-racist rule in his homeland seemed impossible. King spent time behind bars, and so did Mandela, nearly three decades of it. He even refused a pardon in 1985 when the condition for it was a renunciation of violence in the cause for freedom.

Like King, Mandela once believed nonviolence was the way to end racism, but the South African government’s own brutality convinced him the ANC had to arm itself and wage combat if it was to succeed. In the end, however, it was Mandela’s genius at negotiation and vision of a nonracial future, not violence, that won the day. He proved Mao Zedong was wrong when the old revolutionary insisted that “in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”

The struggle, of course, goes on, both in South Africa and here at home. Mandela helped end apartheid, but deep poverty continues. One out of every four South Africans is jobless. Racism in the U.S. South is no longer officially sanctioned, but blacks continue to be the poorest in what is still the nation’s poorest region.

At the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, public protests by churches and groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society and the Congress of Racial Equality forced Chase Manhattan and other major banks to withdraw some $40 million in financial support for South Africa’s white government.

Yet major banks today continue to be on the wrong side in social justice issues. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s divestment campaign against JP Morgan Chase for its support of Reynolds American finally forced the tobacco company in 2012 to agree to meet with FLOC regarding serious health and other issues among migrant workers in the tobacco fields.

Back in 1990, Mandela told Congress that he hoped the poor would never point a finger of accusation “at all of us because we failed to respond to the cries of the people for food, for shelter, for the dignity of the individual.” Mandela heard their cries. Who does today?

Fighting the "Spirits of Darkness" in 2014: Insight from a 16th century magician

 

(To the right: Cornelius Agrippa)

The 16^th century German occult writer and magician Cornelius Agrippa had this to say about those of us suffering from chilly climes these days:

“As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine Light of the Sun, but also be our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire of Wood doth the same.”

The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier used this quote to begin his famous poem, Snow-bound, a fitting way to begin Labor South’s journey into 2014. Aren’t we all hovering near the fire—be it wood, gas or electric—these days to keep warm as we prepare for the challenges of the New Year?

On the labor front, economists are warning that the U.S. income gap is threatening the nation’s economy and future. The richest 10 percent of Americans control 80 percent of stock market wealth. Average income for the middle 20 percent of Americans has risen just 5 percent over the past 20 years. For the richest 5 percent of Americans, income has jumped 17 percent.

Other than securing votes on election day, Republicans could care less about average Americans.  Their solution to our national ills is simple: reduce all spending except for corporate welfare and military contractors. Those out of a job and unemployment benefits need to look for the nearest breadline. To those with no health insurance, just don’t get sick. As for immigration, more fences, more border patrol, and more prisons should take care of it.

Let’s not let Democrats off the hook. Following in the footsteps of his NAFTA-loving predecessor Bill Clinton, President Obama is pushing a similar trade deal with Vietnam and other Asian nations so U.S. corporations, frustrated with rising wages in China, can now go elsewhere to find the bottom-feeders whose sweatshops and slave wages make that 10 percent of Americans who control 80 percent of stock market wealth happy.

 But “Angels of Light” are out there fighting these spirits of darkness. Organized labor is reaching across international borders today, joining with counterparts in other nations and making a difference. Rising wages in China are a result of a vocal workforce tired of getting next to nothing for doing the dirty work of rich corporations. Unions like the United Auto Workers are working closely with unions in Germany, South Africa, Japan and other countries to put pressure on international corporations like Volkswagen and Nissan. Migrant worker organizations both here in the United States and around the world are giving voice to the most downtrodden of modern-day workers.

It’s going to be an exciting year—full of challenge, with some losses and hopefully some big victories. Dig in your heels, join the Angels of Light, and let the “Celestial Fire” keep you warm and full of passion as it “drives away dark spirits”!

The Holy Family: Migrants in a hostile land

 

(To the left is "The Flight Into Egypt" by the 14th century Italian painter Giotto)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to the followers and readers of this blog! Below is a column I wrote for Christmas 2010. It still is timely, however, because sadly the issues have not changed. Today is also the anniversary of the death of St. Frances Cabrini, the Patroness of Immigrants. Best wishes to all!

They were descendants of immigrants who themselves became immigrants.

Soon after the baby arrived, a dream came to the father that the little family would have to leave their homeland if they were to survive. Even the life of an innocent child was in danger in their homeland.

So the three of them—father, mother and child—left their tiny village and embarked on a treacherous journey through the desert wilderness. They were very poor and had little more than the clothes on their backs.

They traveled by day and by night, ever fearful they might be captured or attacked, until they finally crossed the border. They brought no documentation with them, only their humility and the father’s willingness to work hard to support his family.

He was a trained craftsman, good with his hands, and his work was valued even if he was paid so little he could never hope to rise out of his poverty. With his teenage wife tending to their baby, he went out among the people to earn bread and shelter for them.

He heard the whisperings among those in this new land. They called him and his family foreigners, outsiders, and even illegal aliens, as if they had come from the moon and their very existence was something less than human, a violation of not only the law of the land but also God’s law.

“They’re just here to take our jobs, to feed, house, and clothe themselves at our expense,” he heard one of them say.

“They don’t even take the time to learn our language,” said another.

“Why are they even here? Is their own country not good enough for them? Perhaps they’re spies,” said yet another.

“The way people like these spawn they’ll soon be everywhere, expecting their new offspring to be treated equally just because they were born here, like so many little anchors for their illegal parents. Anchor babies, that’s what they’ll be.”

Some of these whisperings came from the very people who benefited from his labors. They would say these things as soon as they walked away from the worksite and rejoined their neighbors and friends. Local leaders heard the comments, too, and saw an advantage in such fears, prejudice, and suspicions. So they began to talk among the crowds and, being leaders, talked loudest of all, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Even the priests joined the chorus, invoking God’s judgment from their pulpits, condemning the strangers for breaking the law and taking advantage of people’s hospitality.

The father and mother, already homesick, longed for their faraway families and friends. They knew many did not welcome them in this strange land, but they also feared for their child’s life if they returned home. Did their little child have any idea of all the troubles that surrounded them?

The father remembered how his ancestors had been immigrants to this very land many generations before and had prospered here, but then a new leader had turned them into slaves and they had left. Now he and his wife and child had returned because their own land had become hostile. When would it all end? Where was there a refuge?

Eventually the father, whose namesake had been a dreamer and an interpreter of dreams, had yet another dream, and this one told him the time had come to return home. So he and his wife packed their belongings, wrapped up their child to keep it warm, and journeyed back to their homeland. They had to be careful. Dangers still lurked, but at least they were home.

And back in the strange land where they had sought refuge, some indeed missed them. “He did good work,” one said. “You know, they never really bothered anyone,” another said.

But these voices were quickly drowned out by the leaders and their priests who cried “Good riddance!” and then looked for others to condemn.

The U.S. Gulag: Incarceration and the "immorality" of private prisons

(To the right is a 1911 photograph of prisoners at Mississippi's state penitentiary in Parchman)

JACKSON, Miss. - Mariachi guitarist Johnny Mora’s bout with drugs was years in his past, but the legacy of jail time it led to is as much a companion as his guitar when he travels to perform in clubs and restaurants around Mississippi.

“I was afflicted, and by the grace of God I am here today,” Mora said at the recent “Crimmigration: The Tragic Consequences of U.S. Drug Policies on Families and Youth” conference in Jackson sponsored by the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “It wasn’t because of the jail system.”

Mora was one of several speakers who talked of a painful past that included incarceration in what has become the world’s largest gulag: the U.S. prison system, which holds 25 percent of all prisoners around the globe. After losing his insurance business in California, Mora turned to music and moved to Mississippi to find work.

Kevin Elders is another Mississippian with a jail record because of a past drug conviction. “It was difficult for me to get a job,” said Elders, son of former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders. “So many doors slammed in my face.”

An estimated 65 million people in this country have a criminal record, more than one out of every four adult Americans. One out of every three black males now in their early teens will spend time in jail, according to the Justice Department. For Latino males, it’s one of out of every five.

Not even Cuba, China or Russia put as many people behind bars as the United States.

Mora picked one of the worst states in the country for a man with a record to start a new life. Mississippi ranks second in the nation in incarceration—behind Louisiana, a state once described in the New York Times as “the world’s prison capital”—with more than 26,000 inmates behind bars or in custody at a cost of $339 million to taxpayers.

Fueling incarceration rates in Mississippi and around the country is the private prison industry—an “immorality” in the words of Father Jeremy Tobin, a Catholic priest who gave the invocation at the “Crimmigration” conference. Close to 50 percent of all immigrant inmates are in for-profit prisons or facilities. The nation’s two largest private detention companies—Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group—spent $25 million lobbying politicians and contributing to their campaigns over the past decade.

“They want to keep an indentured class,” Tobin said. “This country was built on slavery. They (immigrants) were asked to come and do the jobs nobody wanted to do, and they came and did it, and now we want to screw them. Think of all the African Americans out there who can’t vote (because of criminal records).”

For a state with as ugly a record on criminalization and racial prejudice as Mississippi, you’d think political leaders would think twice before turning to profiteering private companies with a vested interest in crime and punishment to handle what is morally a state responsibility.

Yet their failure is why the Mississippi prison system today is as bad as it was a century ago when racist demagogue Gov. James K. Vardaman got so frustrated he compared it to the Spanish Inquisition.

Here are a few examples:

- Last June, the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center called conditions at the privately run East Mississippi Correctional Facility “barbaric and horrific” and in a class action lawsuit spoke of rat-infested cells and feces-and-urine-covered floors.

- In May of this year, Mother Jones magazine listed the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in Leake County, when run by the GEO Group, as one of “America’s 10 Worst Prisons,” a “cesspool” in the words of a federal judge where young children were subjected to sexual abuse and solitary confinement for long periods of time.

- In late July 2012, a riot broke out in the Hinds County Detention Center after an inmate protested his 11 months behind bars without an indictment on a marijuana possession charge.

- In May 2012, the undocumented migrant workers imprisoned in the privately run Adams County Correctional Facility got so sick and tired of conditions that they rioted, leaving one guard dead and 19 injured.

- Two years ago, the state Penitentiary at Parchman shut down its Unit 32, which housed death row inmates, as a result of lawsuits decrying conditions that allowed several killings and a suicide.

The first step Mississippi should take to rid itself of the “immorality” in its prison system is to get rid of private prisons. “If you’re getting paid per head, you want to keep ‘em coming in there,” Kevin Elders said about them.

The next step is to decriminalize minor drug offenses and migrant work.

Like usual, Father Jeremy was right. It’s a question of morals. Either you have them, or you don’t.

(This column recently appeared in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.)

Remembering the late Mississippi populist Gov. Bill Allain preaching social justice to 3,000 Pentecostals

More than 3,000 Pentecostals had gathered under their giant tabernacle in Raymond, Miss., that July night back in 1985. It was what one preacher called an “old-fashioned, God-sent, Holy Ghost camp meeting,” and on the stage was Mississippi Gov. Bill Allain, a devout Catholic.

Allain died at the age of 85 this past week, and it brought back memories of that long-ago Mississippi District United Pentecostal Church Revival Camp Meeting.

It was a night of foot-stomping, hand-clapping and palm-waving. Choirs sang songs like “He Ain’t Never Done Me Nothin’ But Good” and “I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me”. As 74-year-old Christine Craig told me that night, a man has “got to have the Holy Ghost, speak in tongues and be baptized in Jesus’ name” to get into heaven.

“Y’all better sit down,” the governor told the crowd as he stepped behind the microphone. “I might preach a little.”

Just two years before, Allain had suffered through the dirtiest campaign this reporter has ever seen in a nearly 40-year career as a journalist.

A fiery former state attorney general who had shaken Mississippi’s political elite to its core, Democrat Allain was coasting to an easy victory over Republican Leon Bramlett when just weeks before the election, deep-pocketed Republican financiers went across the state in an effort to tar brush him as a man who not only kept pornography in his Jackson apartment but who had paid for sex with three black male transvestites.

The Republican operatives held press conferences and dumped hundreds of pages of so-called “testimony” by Allain’s accusers on reporters. Television journalist Geraldo Rivera even came to the state to report on the sordid accusations, which evoked all the ghosts of Mississippi’s tortured past of race, prejudice and demagoguery. The Mississippi people didn’t buy it, however. On election day, 55 percent of them voted for Allain. He won 74 of the state’s 82 counties.

I’ve never been prouder of Mississippi. The prostitutes later recanted their stories.

“If you are not clapping your hands … I said if you go out there and you’re not clapping your hands, you either took the wrong road and are on the wrong campgrounds or you are spiritually dead inside,” the Catholic governor told his Pentecostal audience that night. An organ played in the background, and cries of “Amen” came from the crowd.

Jesus “fed the hungry, clothed the naked, healed the sick and infirm,” Allain told them. “That is the standard by what we must love one another.”

As much as any political leader in Mississippi’s modern history, Allain tried to live by those rules.  “Many times I sit in my office and think I only have four years,” Allain said. “Then I think: Jesus did what he did in three short years. Look at all the good things that can be done.”

As a young assistant attorney general in the early 1960s, Allain found himself on the wrong side when he had to represent the state in such cases as segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett’s fight to keep James Meredith from becoming the University of Mississippi’s first black student.

However, as attorney general and later governor in the early-to-mid 1980s, Allain fought the good fight – taking on the big utilities and the all-powerful state Legislature, led as it was then by entrenched pols such as state House Speaker C.B. “Buddie” Newman from the Mississippi Delta. Allain succeeded in getting legislators kicked off executive branch committees and winning approval of successive terms for governor (although he himself declined to run for a second term). He also appointed women and blacks to important positions. That includes appointing Reuben Anderson as the first black member of the state Supreme Court.

“He overcame a lot of stuff,” said Faye Moser, a 52-year-old housewife from Jackson, at that camp meeting back in 1985. “When a Christian has a trial and they overcome it, it makes them stronger.”

Allain did overcome his trial, and he helped Mississippi become stronger, too.