Celebrating Black and Brown Labor Leaders

Work. From chattel slavery to today's bitter debates over undocumented immigrants, it has defined the African-American and Latino experience in the United States. And for decades, Black and Brown leaders have resisted workplace discrimination and abusive bosses by organizing, leading and participating as members in labor unions.

On this year's Labor Day, let's take a moment to celebrate ten leaders who have fought for safe workplaces, fair pay, and dignified work for all:

1. Lucy Parsons

Born in 1853, Parsons was an anarchist labor activist with African, Native and Mexican roots. After moving to Chicago with her husband Albert, a white Radical Republican, she wrote and organized extensively around the major labor issue of the time -- the 8-hour workday. Parsons helped organize a massive general strike on May 1, 1886, involving 80,000 workers. After a bomb was hurled at police in Chicago's Haymarket Square, authorities rounded up and sentenced to death prominent anarchist organizers, including Albert Parsons. Today, May 1st is recognized around the world as the real "Labor Day," and as a major milestone in setting the 8-hour workday as the standard in the U.S.

2. Luisa Capetillo

Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico at the end of the 19th century, Luisa Capetillo was a union organizer and militant feminist. Her first contact with unions came in a Puerto Rico cigar factory, where she was hired to read novels and the day's news to cigar rollers. Capetillo went on to organize farmworkers in Puerto Rico and tobacco workers in New York. Recognized as Puerto Rico's first suffragist, she was also jailed after wearing pants in public in 1919.

3. Luisa Moreno

Born in Guatemala, Moreno moved to the U.S. as a young woman. After police killed an activist protesting an anti-Mexican movie in 1930, Moreno was inspired to help organize the community response. Deeply affected by the experience, she decided to spend her life fighting for justice for Latino workers. She organized tobacco workers in Florida, sugar beet workers in Colorado, cotton pickers in Texas and cane workers in Louisiana. She is also credited with organizing the first US Latino civil rights assembly in 1939.

4. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

When he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, MLK was supporting a union struggle by black sanitation workers. The campaign began after two workers were killed on the job and the city refused to compensate their families. In an observation still relevant today, King explained to Memphis workers in his final speech that "the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other."

5. Dolores Huerta

Along with Cesar Chavez, Huerta helped found the United Farmworkers, the most important farmworker union in U.S. history. Today, Huerta continues to play a major role in the struggle for social justice. Her foundation focuses on issues such as sexual harassment of women farmworkers, community organizing and education.

6. Baldemar Velasquez

Velasquez founded the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in 1967, and continues to serve as its president. Born into a migrant farmworker family, Velasquez and FLOC have led successful union campaigns against companies like Campbell's and Heinz among farmworkers in the Midwest and the South.

7. Clayola Brown

Brown got her start in the labor movement during a union campaign at a South Carolina factory where she operated a sewing machine. She continued to fight for workers' rights by getting a job with the textile workers' union, and quickly moved up the ranks. Today she serves as a vice president of UNITE-HERE and president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

8. Lee Saunders

Recently elected as International Secretary-Treasurer of AFSCME, a government employee's union, Saunders is one of the highest-ranking African-Americans in today's labor movement. An AFSCME member since 1978, Saunders has worked as a labor economist and once headed New York's largest public-employee union.

9. Eliseo Medina

Currently second-in-command at SEIU, the country's largest service worker's union, Medina has been at the forefront of labor's support of immigrant workers. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Medina was working in the California fields when he met Cesar Chavez in 1965. By 1970, he was favored to follow Chavez as president of the United Farmworkers. He has since been instrumental in organizing tens of thousands of home-care workers and janitors in Los Angeles.

10. The Workers

More than any leader, hundreds of thousands of African-American and Latino union members have been crucial to the U.S. labor movement. Throughout history, these workers have fought for an equal place at the table with white members and -- like all workers -- their contribution to our nation's history has often gone unnoticed.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center, poet Martin Espada wrote this touching tribute to union members who died in the twin towers:

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.

Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

---

from Alabanza: New & Selected Poems

Photo Credit: Seiu1