Protest Reports
The 13th Amendment is celebrated for abolishing slavery. But many Americans are not aware that it includes a legal exception for continuing slave labor in the prison system: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
After the amendment was passed, many former slaves were arrested on petty or trumped-up charges, and returned to being slaves within the prison system. Part of what continues to drive mass incarceration in the U.S. is the profit motive: millions of inmates are forced to work for little or no pay. With the highest per capita prison population in the world, U.S. prison labor is a huge industry.
On August 27 prison abolitionists, anarchists, socialists, and other opponents of the prison industrial complex marched from the Ohio Statehouse to support a nationwide prison strike planned for September 9, the 45th anniversary of the prisoner uprising at Attica, New York State’s most notorious prison.
After a Donald Trump town hall reached capacity Monday afternoon, about 150 Trump supporters who had been turned away milled around the vendors of campaign merchandise outside the Columbus Convention Center. Trump falsely told his supporters that thousands were turned away “for political reasons.”
One merchandise hawker tried to turn the setback into an opportunity. “$5 off all Trump gear if you couldn’t get in!” he shouted over a bullhorn. Then he started to heckle protesters across the street who held signs saying “Wall off Trump,” “Love Not Hate,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “No Más Trump.”
Protest organizer Rubén Castilla Herrera also had a bullhorn. “We’re black, brown, white, queer, straight, immigrants, women, men,” he said. “We’re a diverse community, and we’re to tell you that Trump is not welcome here!”
A Trump supporter grabbed the hawker’s megaphone. “How can you say that black lives matter?” she said. “All lives matter!”
Despite an attempt to sabotage it via social media, a Black Lives Matter march went on as planned Thursday evening. Over 100 protesters marched around the Ohio Statehouse and continued to the Columbus Division of Police headquarters.
That morning, organizers became aware that the Facebook event page for the march had been taken down, and the account associated with it was locked. Someone had reported the event to Facebook, flagging it as involving either “violence or harmful behavior” or “hate speech.”
Facebook made no attempt to contact the organizers of the march to verify whether it would involve anything inappropriate. They just took down the page. Undeterred, organizers quickly got the word out to supporters that the event was still on.
The attempt to derail the march underscores the racial tensions in Columbus that go unspoken. Instead of engaging in an open, honest dialogue with the Black Lives Matter movement, someone decided to stay in the shadows and employ a dirty trick to try to stop the march.
On July 21, the last day of the Republican National Convention, activists across the nation rallied at the offices of Republican politicians and corporations sponsoring the RNC to denounce the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny expressed by Donald Trump. In Columbus the focus was primarily on Trump’s disdain for green energy.
“No more coal. No more oil. Keep your carbon in the soil!” shouted a dozen young protesters outside the Columbus office of Senator Rob Portman. “Don’t give in to racist fear. Immigrants are welcome here!”
“We’re trying to make people aware of the dangerous rhetoric that Donald Trump, Senator Portman, and the rest of the Republican Party have put into their platform: attacking the environment and not moving in the direction of clean energy,” said David Miller, organizer for NextGen Climate. “Donald Trump complains about the EPA and has talked disparagingly about the movement for clean energy. Gutting the EPA is a very dangerous position to take.”
In the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in St Paul, and Henry Green in Columbus, a Black Lives Matter rally was scheduled for Friday, July 8 at the Franklin Park Amphitheater. But it almost didn’t happen.
As news came in Thursday night about the shootings of Dallas police officers, the original organizers of the action postponed it, citing safety concerns. This didn’t sit well with many who planned to be there. By early Friday afternoon new plans were in place for a speak-out in the evening at the same location. About 450 people showed up.
On June 22 over 50 Unitarian Universalists gathered outside the Wendy’s on Woodruff & High calling attention to the nation-wide boycott of the Ohio-based fast food chain. The protest happened in tandem with the Unitarian Universalist Association, with hundreds of thousands of members worldwide, officially endorsing the Wendy’s boycott.
It’s a new chapter of a long story: the Free Press has covered the now 3 ½ year campaign urging Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) for farmworker dignity. The Program entails corporations paying one penny more per pound of tomatoes purchased and agreeing to buy from reputable farms that uphold basic rights such as breaks, shade, and zero tolerance for wage theft and sexual harassment — conditions all too common in the industry. All of Wendy’s major competitors in the fast-food industry — McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Taco Bell and Chipotle — are partners in the Program.
Over 50 years ago, the TV documentary Harvest of Shame brought a national spotlight on the town of Immokalee, Florida and the exploitation of migrant farm laborers across the U.S. In the years that followed, the work of Cesar Chávez and the United Farm Workers brought some incremental improvements, but agricultural laborers have still been “exempted” from most of the protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In the past five years, the lives of Florida farmworkers and their families have taken a dramatic turn for the better, thanks to the Fair Food Program, an organizing strategy developed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a group of Florida farmworkers who have been fighting for human rights in the tomato industry since 1993.
On May 19 demonstrators gathered at the Ohio Statehouse and the North Market to raise awareness of the forms of violence experienced by black women, girls, and transgender women. They called for an end to criminalization of black victims of sexual violence, gender discriminatory legislation, and narrow social standards of black womanhood and femininity.
“We’re here today to join a national day of action lifting up the names of black women, girls, and femmes who have been killed in the past two years,” said Rev. Lane Campbell, minister of religious education at the First Unitarian Universalist Church. “These are just the cases that we know about. There are many other names that we don’t know.”
The protesters unfurled a large scroll of names and read them aloud, chanting “Say Her Name” after each victim’s name.
When President Obama issued an upbeat Presidential proclamation about Loyalty Day last week, he left out the dark history behind the national observance. In 1958 Congress introduced Loyalty Day as a tool of anti-communist propaganda at the height of the Cold War, when countless leftists in the U.S. were persecuted for their political beliefs.
The Los Angeles Times notes: “It's no coincidence that Loyalty Day falls on May 1 or ‘May Day,’ a celebration of workers around the industrialized world observed on the anniversary of the 1886 Haymarket Square incident in Chicago — when four people were executed on the strength of murky evidence that they killed eight people (seven of them police officers) during a labor rally for the eight-hour workday.”