The Gainesville Iguana

by Bob Zieger, University of Florida Professor Emeritus and Labor Historian

Remarks at the annual Labor Day Breakfast on Sept. 3, sponsored by the North Central Florida Central Labor Council, Gainesville.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has recently said that “nostalgia for organized labor’s past is no strategy for our future.”

As a historian, however, I do think that the past can continue to instruct us.

Let me bring you back to the year 1935 and the founding of the CIO, or Congress of Industrial Organizations. The CIO existed as a separate organization between that year and 1955 when it merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO. Many historians see the formation and struggles of the CIO to build industrial unions as the single most important episode in the history of American labor.

Much has changed since the 1930s. Then the “typical” worker dug coal, poured steel or assembled automobiles. Today, she is a health care worker, a retail clerk, a school teacher.

But there’s an old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Billy Bragg bids us to remember “the lessons of the past.” What are the lessons that the rise of the CIO holds for us?

I’ve written a 400-page book about the history of the CIO, available in quality bookstores nowhere. In view of the shortness of time available for us today, however, I’ve boiled what I’ve learned down to four words:

Fight

Unite

Connect

Vote

The CIO was a fighting organization. It took the struggles of the sit-down strikers, picket line walkers, wildcaters and police-defying militants to bring such powerful corporations as General Motors and U.S. Steel to the bargaining table. As singer Pete Seeger reminds us in “Talking Union,” “If you wait for the boss to raise your pay/You’ll be waitin’ till judgment day.” The methods of union busters have changed since the 1930s, but the need for workers to fight for their rights remains central, as the Verizon workers and the folks in Wisconsin have recently taught us.

The CIO united workers across ethnic, racial, religious and skill boundaries. Prior to the CIO, organized labor’s record with respect to African Americans, immigrants and people of Asian descent, and in organizing women and the unskilled, was a dismal one. It was only by organizing black workers on the kill floor of the meatpacking plants that the CIO was able to build a packinghouse workers’ union; only by bringing workers of diverse skill levels and ethnic backgrounds into common cause could unions be built in the industrial heart of the economy.

Today right-wingers invite us to pit immigrant workers against native-born workers and workers in private employment against public workers. The CIO wasn’t built by caving in to such divisions nor will labor be revived today if workers succumb to ethnophobia and to attacks on our brothers and sisters who work as teachers, firefighters and public healthcare providers.

The CIO connected with the progressive community, religious and secular. It reached out to allies in the churches, radical movements and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP. These allies provided key support for union struggles.

Today’s labor movement must continue its efforts to connect with progressives in the community–women and men of faith, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights activists, civil libertarians, human rights advocates. And, equally important, our allies in the community must come to the support of the embattled labor movement. Let us never forget that labor rights are HUMAN rights; and the labor movement is a crucial component, under siege as we speak, of the progressive community. Indeed, in many ways, it is the last line of defense against the triumph of the corporatist, right-wing agenda.

The CIO pioneered in creating the original political action committee. Under the leadership of Sidney Hillman and Walter Reuther, the CIO and its affiliated unions, notably the UAW, stressed the centrality of the political process in the struggle to raise standards. True, it does too often seem that although “labor does the heavy lifting,” it quickly becomes “the caboose at the end of the train” when those whom it supported gain office. Even so, the need for labor, in alliance with other progressive elements, to mobilize its members and reach out to working people in the political process has been powerfully demonstrated–positively in 2006 and 2008, negatively in 2010.

So, a formula for revivifying a beleaguered labor movement, as the CIO sparked the labor resurgence of the 1930s and 1940s: FIGHT, UNITE, CONNECT, VOTE.

In closing, I’m tempted to end with Dr. King. Despite the Koch Brothers and Fox News, in defiance of the union busters and Tea Party, his powerful words continue to give courage: “The Arc of the Universe bends slow,” he assured us, “but it bends toward Justice.”

But I think instead I’ll end with a voice from the CIO era. Back in 1941, Pete Seeger had this advice to workers in the auto plants, shipyards, and steel mills: “Take it easy,” he counseled, “but take it.”

Thank you.

by Jeremiah Tattersall, FBF Organizer

About 50 people attended the Fight Back Florida conference in Orlando in early November. The group organized marches and rallies over the last year following the election of Gov. Rick Scott. According to their website, “The message of Fight Back Florida is simple: We demand a Florida government that works for the people, not against them.”

Attendees discussed the attacks against working people and students we are expecting this next legislative session, what Fight Back Florida is, and how they are going to organize against it.

The most important thing discussed was the plan of action for this next legislative session, including a statewide coordinated day of action during the second week of the session (Jan. 21). Then they will mobilize to Tallahassee the following month (Feb. 25) for a Fight Back Florida rally on the Capitol. The next conference and state planning meeting will be in late May. They also plan to march on the Republican National Convention in August.

Locally, the Postal Service will be holding a public meeting, Thursday, Dec. 1, at 7pm to discuss the closure of the Gainesville postal facility and hear any opposition to the plan. The meeting will be held at Santa Fe College, Building WA, Room 104.

Fight Back Florida will be there to ensure that the people of Gainesville have their voices heard: “Hands Off Our Post Office!”

The closure of this facility could lead to a massive loss of jobs as well as reduced service for Gainesville and the surrounding areas. The Post Office makes more than enough money to keep it open, but is being arbitrarily forced to cut services.

Make sure to come out and tell the Postal Service why the last thing we need in this economy is more unemployment!

by James Schmidt, CMC Coordinator

The Civic Media Center will screen the documentary film “Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore,” on Monday, Dec. 5, at 7pm as part of its Monday movie series. Dec. 25 will mark the 60th anniversary of the bombing that claimed the lives of Harry Moore and his wife.

In 1951, after celebrating Christmas Day with their family, civil rights activist Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette retired to bed in their house in Mims, Fla. Ten minutes later, a bomb hidden under the floorboards beneath their bed shattered their house, their bodies, and the “moonlight and magnolias” fiction of the segregation-era South in Florida.

Harry Moore died on the way to the hospital, and Harriette died nine days later. “Freedom Never Dies” tells the story of Moore and his family on film for the first time and, in doing so, uncovers a tragically hidden and suppressed, but tremendously important, piece of Florida history.

Harry Moore was an organizer and staffer for the NAACP in Florida. He founded the first branch of that organization in Brevard County and eventually served as the secretary for the statewide organization. As an NAACP staffer and as leader of the Progressive Voters League, Moore organized voting drives that successfully registered over 100,000 African Americans to vote in Florida, a huge increase in the number of black voters and 51 percent higher than the proportion of blacks registered to vote in any other Southern state.

This would have been a fantastic accomplishment for any organizer at any time in history, but given that most of Florida (in the 1930s through 1950s when Moore was working) was about as deep as you could get in the segregated “Deep South,” with a violent white supremacist culture holding sway from the swamp savannahs to the highest offices of the land, the success of his voter registration drives must be seen as nothing less than heroic. Throughout his life, Harry Moore spoke out in public and in print, in meetings and church services, in letters to newspapers, magazines and public officials, and by every other means at his disposal, against the injustices that blacks endured, from lynching to employment discrimination to the scourge of taxation without representation via the institutional racism and grassroots terrorism that kept black people locked out of the political process.

For his audacity in giving loud voice to the righteous anger and frustration of his community, and for his persistence in his mission, the racist white power structure of Florida determined to silence him, one way or another.

Though no one has ever been convicted of the Moores’ murders, evidence unearthed in recent years points to what was long rumored and conjectured, a conspiracy by members of the Central Florida Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan.

The CMC invites you to please join us in honoring the legacy of Harry and Harriette Moore, and learn more about the amazing accomplishments of a fearless, tireless organizer who stood up to white supremacy in Jim Crow Florida, and paid the ultimate price for his disciplined, unwavering fight for the liberty and dignity of his people. Come learn more about the man who has been called the first Civil Rights Movement martyr.

In recent years, the state of Florida and Brevard County, where the Moores lived and worked, have finally begun to honor their historic legacy by creating the Harry T. and Harriette Moore Memorial Park and Interpretive Center at the homesite in Mims. Through the park, this film, and the efforts of journalists and authors (including our own Stetson Kennedy, who never stopped trying to uncover the truth about the bombing), Floridians have started down the long path to raising public awareness of Harry Moore’s achievements and restoring their story to its rightful place in our state’s history.

Out of the “American Dream” show came MASS Visual Arts in an effort to produce and present creative, theme-based exhibitions to provoke, inspire and challenge the thoughts, conversations and dreams of the Gainesville community.

“What we are striving to create is an alternative opportunity for contemporary artists in North Florida to present their ideas and efforts in a contemporary gallery type setting,” said Dale Gunnoe, board member of MASS Visual Arts. “What an exhibition does for an artist is what publishing work does for a writer, or releasing a CD does for a musician. It offers the artist the opportunity to share and express themselves to a community of peers, elders and to those who may otherwise never experience art outside of the Internet or television.”

MASS Visual Arts is currently seeking artists to exhibit work across all media in the Below the Belt exhibition, which will open the first weekend of March 2012 and run all month.