This great Civil Rights era anthem is one I’ll be humming or singing every day now as I work to keep my spirits up during the current onslaught. As Democratic New York Assemblywoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez teaches us in her YouTube talks—very much worth your attention—our first responsibility is to prevent paralysis and overcome despair, and singing is one of the best ways to do this, I know.
Another is community action. We are not isolated unless we choose to be, and there are more of us than there are of them.
Many of us attended the inspiring rallies in cities everywhere a few days ago—and do watch out for undercounting of the crowds in your local news stories. My beloved Santa Fe New Mexican is exhibiting a slow swing to the right, mirroring the moral collapse of the New York Times. Participants counted a thousand at our rally here but the newspaper account called it five hundred.
Part of this apparent swing to the right may be accounted for by the fact that local newspapers depend on carrying wire service reports for national and international news—it’s been decades since small newspapers had bureaus outside their region—and the absence now of Washington, DC news may be laid to the fact that Mr. T banned reporters from his press conferences and press plane if their newspapers continued to call the Gulf of Mexico by its name rather than by the T-ordered Gulf of America. This lends to a perception that local newspapers are avoiding carrying national stories for political reasons. But this may well not be the reason.
The next event where we will participate as an enormous crowd of protesters is a nationwide boycott which will occur on February 28. On that day we will be able to show our muscle as consumers by refusing all types of buying, including food, meals out, gas, bank deposits and any other purchases. This is going to send a powerful message to the corporations in this country who have the president’s ear.
The history of consumer protests links us to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, an empowering connection. On Easter Sunday, 1960, the big African-American community in New Orleans was asked by their Consumers’ League to abstain from their traditional shopping for new Easter clothes—coats, dresses, suits, shoes, hats. Across the country, people still show our joy at the Resurrection and the end of Lent by buying new clothes to wear to churches for the Easter services, and this is manifest in the African-American community.
The collapse in profits that the Easter Boycott in New Orleans brought caught the nation’s attention. Stores in New Orleans began to hire African-American staff, one of the goals of the boycott. I expect it led to the lifting of the ban on African Americans trying on clothes in white-owned department store dressing rooms. If they insisted on trying on hats at the first-floor counters, they had to wrap tissue paper around their heads first.
The Easter Boycott also led to three students in New Orleans founding CORE, The Congress of Racial Equality (Note: not “for” but “of” as of an already existing entity). CORE spread nationwide and became a powerful tool in the fight to reinforce the rights of African Americans as enshrined in Federal Law since the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Many of the 15 thousand undocumented workers here in New Mexico who take care of our gardens and fields, our houses and our children may not be aware of the fact that they have rights, even as the undocumented: if confronted by ICE agents, you have the right to remain silent, to withhold your identity papers, and to refuse to allow ICE into your house, work place or school unless they carry a search warrant signed by a judge.
“Remember: ICE doesn’t know that you’re an illegal immigrant unless you tell them.”
Please check “Know Your Rights” on the Somos Un Pueblo Unito webpage, attached here. Print it out and carry it with you.
And we shall overcome.
Download English-language flyer (.pdf)
Thank you for rigorously continuing the good fight!
Carol Mullen, (Lukey’s buddy)