Voting Rights
Black-Labor Alliance and the Voting Rights Act
According to the Brennan Center, last year, 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. Some observers, like Professor Carol Anderson of Emory University, see these laws as an effort to bring about the “delegitimization of Black voters” as most of these laws target places with significant Black populations. This year, we are celebrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as his family wants it, highlighting the need to advocate for fair federal voting rights legislation.
For a Different World: Bayard Rustin and the A. Philip Randolph Institute
By Guillermo Márquez
In times of trouble, we often look to the past for guidance. Today is no different as our right to vote suffers at the hands of those who seek to deny it. Thus, we take this opportunity to meditate on the importance and influence of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) and its longtime president Bayard Rustin.
Founded in 1965 by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, APRI sought to bridge the gap between the civil rights and labor movements by forging an alliance between them, citing the intersection of African American and labor interests. To achieve the goal of social and political freedom and economic justice for all the people, the Institute and its volunteers organized voter registration drives and educated the community on their rights and voting. The Black-Labor Alliance’s efforts thus proved fruitful as they culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
Equally important is the leadership and vision of Bayard Rustin, who served as APRI president and co-chair from 1966-1979. Rustin was first exposed to social justice activism by his Quaker upbringing and by his grandmother, who was a member of the NAACP. During his youth, he became involved in social justice initiatives and eventually traveled the country, at one point serving as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most trusted advisor and chief architect of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where his passion for non-violence paved the way. During his presidency at APRI, he sought out to do just that, envisioning a more just world and encouraging people to build it alongside him.
What are we working on
By Marta Valier and Guillermo Márquez
Speaking of voting rights, here are some images by Emmon Clarke taken on November 4, 1966, when farmworkers working at the DiGiorgio ranch located between Arvin and Lamont cast their ballots, deciding whether to be represented by the United Farm Workers (UFW) or not. Farmworkers working for the same company in Delano and Borrego Springs had already voted earlier in August, but for months DiGiorgio did not allow farmworkers working at the 9,000-acre farm near Arvin to have elections. Only after a sit-in and a picket line in front of Di Giorgio’s office in San Francisco, pressure by Governor Pat Brown, and the looming threat of a boycott, DiGiorgio agreed to hold elections at his biggest California property. Fifty-nine percent of voters chose to join the UFW.
“I was confident of victory here and I think it is just the beginning of unionizing farm workers all over the country,” Mack Lyons, a 25-year DiGiorno field worker who had worked in fields since he was 7 years old, told El Malcriado. “There is a place for everyone in the union, Negro, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Anglos.” These elections represented an important victory for the farmworkers as DiGiorgio was one of the largest landowners in California, and an aggressive opponent of farmworkers’ attempt to unionize.
The company had been a leader in anti-labor associations in California for decades, had sponsored anti-picketing ordinances throughout rural California, organized blacklists of union activists, fought federal relief for strikers, and directed vigilantes to attack strikers. The company had also led the attack on John Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath, which was banished from the schools and the public libraries in Kern County, it violently ended the 1947 strike against DiGiorgio’s Arvin ranch, and it sued the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) for libel over its film Poverty in the Valley of Plenty about the strike. But these elections were a short-lived victory, as the new contracts did not include successor clauses. In the two years following the 1966 elections at Arvin, DiGiorgio sold the ranches in Sierra Vista, Arvin, and Yuba City and none of the new owners signed with the UFW. By 1968, the DiGiorgio contracts were lost.
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Great articles on voting rights. I learn something new and see images I have never seen before when I read Liberated!! Thank you.