Protest Reports

A Statement from Advancement Project

WASHINGTON – In a landmark ruling issued today, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned North Carolina H.B. 589, a monster voter suppression law with sweeping implications for voters. Presented with clear evidence that provisions of the measure would disproportionately burden voters of color, the three-judge panel struck down the law, finding that it violated the Voting Rights Act, the United States Constitution and that it was enacted with discriminatory intent. The court stated that it “cannot ignore the record of evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina History.” Advancement Project, a national multi-racial civil rights organization among the groups that brought suit challenging the law, released the following statement:

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.

>>>>italics: This is urgent if you care about limiting efforts to not
limit GMO labeling, a vital consumer protection issue. Write your 2
Senators as soon as you have read this....


I'm writing to ask you to oppose the Roberts-Stabenow compromise language
on the GMO labeling bill. This legislation would overrule Vermont's GMO
labeling law, and prevent states from passing similar laws.

This legislation would create a confusing, misleading and unenforceable
national standard for labeling GMOs. Instead of a uniform labeling
standard like Vermont's law, the language allows text, symbols, or an
electronic code to be used. This is intentionally confusing to consumers,
and the information may be entirely inaccessible if the consumer does not
have access to the internet.

Perhaps most shockingly, this bill imposes no penalties whatsoever for
violating the labeling requirement, making the law essentially
meaningless. Thus, this is a weak bill, full of loopholes, without any
requirement to comply.

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.”