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Letter to Our Fellow White Workers:

Are you tired of being afraid? The news says we’re threatened by protests and “unrest.” But show me the protestor that’s a banker, a boss, a bill collector, or a landlord. While the boss is trying to cut your benefits or wages, we protestors are fighting to raise them.

Our wages are pitiful, our debts are piling up, and good jobs are harder and harder to come by. Yet the talking heads on TV are telling us to blame everyone but the ones sitting on all the money and power, who are living in mansions while we struggle to make ends meet.

The government can’t find the money to guarantee hurricane evacuees a place to lay their heads at night while billionaire Trump is handing out millions in “relief funds” (our tax dollars) to his slumlord son-in-law. Trump handed out trillions to increase the value of his cabinet’s corporate investments.

The politicians and their mouthpieces in the big business media are selling us lies. Trump, Pelosi, and all their billionaire buddies are the real criminals.

They want us to believe that Black or immigrant workers are stealing our jobs or living off what we pay in taxes. Our fellow workers aren’t the ones to blame for the more than 30,000,000 layoffs this year. Immigrant workers pay taxes; Amazon doesn’t. While we’re going hungry, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has gotten $48 billion richer since the beginning of the pandemic. Who’s stealing from who?

Whether by layoffs or cut hours, slashed benefits and pensions, or attacks on union rights, the rich are out to turn us into paupers—now more than ever. And though some may be spared today, the capitalists have it out for workers of all nationalities, Black and white, documented and undocumented. They’re poisoning and killing us off with drugs. Now they’re threatening tens of millions of us with evictions and foreclosures in the middle of a pandemic. We’re doomed if we don’t wake up and unite.

Are you better off now than you were in 2016? In 2008? Obama dumped trillions into the banks 12 years ago, and this year, Trump has dumped trillions into Wall Street. Yet again we workers have been hung out to dry.

Trump’s campaign promised to protect our jobs four years ago, but where are they now? Real unemployment numbers are worse than any time since the Great Depression. Instead of jumpstarting a jobs program, the Federal Reserve just spent $250 billion of our money to buy private corporate stocks. Just like after the 2008 bailout, trillions of dollars of our money will wind up stashed in private off-shore bank accounts.

Trump had four years to bring the troops home. Instead, he’s brought us to the brink of war with countries that have done nothing to us, like oil-rich Venezuela and Iran. Meanwhile, 200,000 people in the U.S. have died of COVID on his watch.

Trump sits on his gold-plated toilet and offers us nothing but fear and bullshit. And Trump’s fear-mongering is nothing but a service to the billionaires who sit on the boards of insurance, pharmaceutical, oil, and war-profiteering companies. He wants you to pay more for private health insurance even though the deductible is so high you can’t even use it. He wants you to doom the future of the planet to protect oil companies’ profits, not oil workers’ jobs. He wants you to believe that China threatens our national security so that he can give billion-dollar contracts to his buddies on the boards of war-profiteering companies.

It’s time we see through the lies that keep us workers from getting organized. Our enemies have enormous wealth that they’ve taken from our labor. But we’ve got the power of the world’s working class on our side—as long as we stay united. The bankers, bosses, and war-profiteers will do their damnedest to pit us against each other, to bribe us, or to trick us into squabbling over crumbs while they make out like thieves.

White workers, aren’t you about done letting the rich use us make themselves richer? They don’t give a shit about us. Trump said of his own supporters that COVID-19 might be a “good thing” because it would keep him from having to shake hands with “disgusting people.” Biden is just the same.

It’s only right if you’re angry. It’s time to turn that anger against the real enemy. Reject the racist lies of the rich! Reach your hand out to your fellow workers and start marching towards the future we deserve. United, we workers can win the world.

Sincerely, Sally (Alabama) and Joseph (Mississippi).

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“From Confederate Park to Jackson Square, Fight White Supremacy Everywhere!”

Jacksonville, Florida, March 23.

By Tina Orlandini

This past weekend, March 22–24, a delegation of Take ‘Em Down NOLA comrades traveled to Jacksonville, Florida for the second annual Take ‘Em Down Everywhere international conference. This global grassroots movement is “a black-led, multiracial, international, intergenerational, inclusive coalition of organizers committed to the removal of ALL symbols of white supremacy from the public landscape as a part of the greater push for racial and economic justice and structural equity” (TakeEmDownEverywhere.org). Take ‘Em Down Everywhere was inaugurated last year in New Orleans, bringing together organizers from Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Trinidad & Tobago.

This year in Jacksonville, described by locals as “the city that time forgot,” organizers and allies spent the weekend sharing local history, exchanging organizing strategies, and hitting the streets. On Saturday, March 23, local historian Rodney Hurst led a bus tour of Jacksonville, visiting the birth place of James Weldon Johnson, author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (also referred to as the Black National Anthem); Hemming Plaza where the monument of the Confederate soldier stands (for now), along with a historical marker commemorating Youth Council sit-in’s at W.T. Grant Department Store and Woolworth’s Five and Ten Cent Store in 1960. Though this was not the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in Jacksonville, it signaled a turning point in local consciousness and was succeeded by further agitation that forced the integration of lunch counters, schools, parks, restrooms and other public facilities within the decade.

Later that day, Take ‘Em Down Jax, the Northside Coalition, and the Jacksonville Progressive Coalition organized a rally, beginning with a press conference at Confederate Park in front of the Women of the Confederacy monument, where they proposed an economic boycott of Jacksonville. Ben Frazier of Take ‘Em Down Jax and the Northside Coalition said to a cheering crowd, “it’s time for us to start telling people not to come to Jacksonville, Florida. Don’t come to Jacksonville because Jacksonville is a racist city which refuses to deal with these Confederate monuments.”  The crowd of about 140 marched in Take ‘Em Down NOLA style formation to the International Brotherhood of Electoral Workers (IBEW) Union Hall for a panel discussion featuring Take ‘Em Down NOLA’s very own co-founder, Michael “Quess” Moore. Other panelists included Reverend Ron Rawls, Pastor of St. Augustine Church in Saint Augustine, a city 40 miles south of Jacksonville described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964 as the most racist city in the United States. Maya Little of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s “Move Silent Sam” movement skyped into the panel and shared her account of the recent removal of the Silent Sam Confederate Soldier monument, current attempts to bring it back to campus, and ongoing intimidation she’s experiencing from local white supremacists and the police.

Following the panel, Take ‘Em Down organizers broke bread and continued to build at the Yellow House Art Gallery, described by director and Take ‘Em Down Jax member Hope McMath as a space where art and activism meet to create change.

On the final day of the conference, organizers from New Orleans and Jacksonville discussed specific successes and strategies to move forward the work of dismantling white supremacy, rooted in the South with eyes on the more than 1,500 white supremacist symbols littering the United States, and even more internationally. By the end of the conference, Take ‘Em Down Everywhere announced that next year’s convening will take place in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Take ‘Em Down NOLA delegation left Jacksonville with gratitude for Take ‘Em Down Jax and energized by this growing movement of working class organizers, teachers, historians, artists, faith based leaders and elders unified in the revolutionary struggle to end white supremacy everywhere.

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The Next Five Targets for Take ‘Em Down NOLA

E.D. WHITE
As a Supreme Court Justice, White ruled with the majority in Plessy vs. Ferguson, legalizing the Jim Crow system. He was a member of the Crescent City White League, which murdered Black and white police officers in an attempted coup. He was a former Confederate soldier and segregationist.

ANDREW JACKSON
A genocidal, lying racist who owned 150 people as slaves, Andrew Jackson betrayed the enslaved people to whom he promised freedom after the Battle of New Orleans. He led military forces against the “Negro Fort” in Florida where 270 Black people were murdered in 1816. He authorized the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which caused the ethnic cleansing and forced migration of 60,000 Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole and other indigenous nations.

MCDONOUGH
The famed plantation owner whose name is on many local schools, McDonough’s statue in Lafayette Square serves as a monument to a man who owned slaves, fought to protect slavery, and wrote that slavery was good for African people. The money he donated to public education created the first separate and unequal schools in New Orleans.

BIENVILLE
Credited with founding New Orleans, Bienville brought the first enslaved people to the city in 1708. He used enslaved and convict labor to build the settlement after it was established in 1718 and stole millions of acres of land from Choctaw, Chickasaw, Chitimatcha, Natchez and other indigenous nations for France. He expelled Jews from the colony and restricted the rights and freedom of African people in Louisiana through the Code Noir colonial laws.

HENRY CLAY
A statue of South Carolina slave-owner Henry Clay stands in Lafayette Square, honoring a man who was responsible for the Missouri Compromise that upheld slavery until the Civil War.

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Residents of Gordon Plaza Fight Decades of Environmental Racism

RELOCATION IS THE ONLY OPTION

By Sanashihla

Around the world, people are dealing with the impacts of environmental injustice. Of course, Black and Brown communities deal with it more, because these are the communities most vulnerable to being targeted for oil and other corporate plants. What used to be known as the plantation, is now too often the corporate plant, which come with their toxicity.

Whether dealing with climate change, or blatant disregard for the earth and communities across the United States, we never have to go far to come up close and personal with environmental injustice.

Let us examine the daily experience of the residents of Gordon Plaza, who are entire community of predominately Black residents who were sold homes built on a TOXIC dump. Periodically, they have seen trash work its way up from the depths of the soil, up through their grass into their yards. Their soil was tested, and over 100 high level TOXINS were found.

What is the story of the residents of Gordon Plaza?
“Residents of Gordon Plaza, Inc. is a group of neighbors that purchased houses in good faith only to find out that our houses were constructed on top of hazardous waste. We are New Orleans families, African American, trapped in homes built on the Agriculture Street Dump, a former city waste dump that was designated a Superfund site for high levels of contamination, including hazardous waste that can cause cancer. We suffer and some have died from cancer. We want to relocate.

From 1967 through 1984, city land use decisions approved residential developments on the Agriculture Street Dump. These developments included the Gordon Plaza single-family homes where we currently live, the abandoned Press Park townhomes built by the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), and the abandoned Robert Moton Elementary School built by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). The fact that homes and a school were built on the Agriculture Street Dump was not a concern for city officials. Families who bought homes in Gordon Plaza were never told that the land was a former city waste dump. Again, our families are predominantly African American.

Beginning in 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dug up, piled, and hauled off a portion of the contaminated soil on the Agriculture Street Landfill Superfund Site, while our families still lived in our homes. Public health and environmental experts criticized the EPA for jeopardizing the health of residents and failing to provide an effective and humane solution. Although the EPA detected 17 feet of highly contaminated soil, the agency removed only two feet. Today, at least 15 feet of the contaminated soil remains beneath homes, yards, streets, and other areas of the former Agriculture Street Dump.

There was a class-action lawsuit that ended with a $14.2 million settlement award in which the lawyers and a court-appointed administrator were paid $7.1 million, one-half of the settlement award. The remaining half was distributed among the 5,053 people represented in the lawsuit, resulting in an average pay-out of less than $2,000. With a few thousand dollars, the families living in Gordon Plaza cannot relocate from this toxic neighborhood. We cannot purchase new homes, nor can we sell our current homes for what our homes would be worth if we were not on a toxic Superfund Site.”
The city of New Orleans is responsible for giving permission to developers to build these homes on the Agriculture Street Landfill, and now take no responsibility. THIS is an inhumane environmental injustice, Black Lives Matter, lack of equity issue. The New Orleans Peoples Assembly organizing committee stands with the residents of Gordon Plaza in their call for complete relocation.

This is a Complete Injustice

We Stand with the Residents of Gordon Plaza

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Police Murders Continue Non-Stop. We Must Demand Justice.

By Gabriel Mangano

The police murders of working class and oppressed people continues without end, rising to 277 by early April.

Especially targeted are African Americans who are 31% of police murder victims but 60% of unarmed victims. In Brooklyn, 4 police shot Saheed Vassel, a mentally ill Jamaican immigrant, 10 times within 10 seconds of confronting him. He was holding only a showerhead and was known as harmless and helpful to people throughout his neighborhood. Demonstrators demanded justice and condemned the lack of mental health services.

In late March, police in Sacramento, CA shot Stephon Clark, a 22-year old father of two, 8 times in the side and back in his grandmother’s back yard. He was holding a cell phone. Thousands demonstrated against this murder blocking freeways and forcing the cancellation of two NBA games. And in Louisiana, right-wing state Attorney General Jeff Landry refused to indict the cop who murdered Alton Sterling. Even after a video shows Officer Salamoni telling Mr. Sterling that he would murder him if he moved, he was not jailed, just fired.

As of yet none of these murderers have been indicted.

In California, state legislators proposed a law that would change when lethal force can be used to “only when necessary” from “when reasonable”. All this will change, however, is the language the police will use to justify their killings.
Since the murder of Trayvon Martin, millions of people have demanded justice for these police and vigilante killings. And many reforms have been proposed and put into practice. However, all of these reforms are doomed to failure. For example, civilian review boards have been highly touted as a way to control brutal “bad apples”. Yet after years of struggle, the Newark, New Jersey civilian review board was effectively broken by a judge’s injunction restricting its subpoena and investigatory powers. Body cameras are another minimal solution that has proven unworkable as police routinely turn them off. As well, district attorneys often fail to indict, and juries rarely convict those who are indicted despite overwhelming graphic evidence of what would clearly be murder for anyone but a cop.

These reforms and other false cures cannot succeed because they are based on the lie that the police are here to serve and protect everyone equally. The role of the police is to serve and protect the ruling class, the owners and their property. And they can only do this by reigning terror on working class and minority communities. The rich know they stole their wealth from our labor, and they will use every means to keep us down.

While the revolutionary workers know that these reforms, although they may save a few lives, will not solve the problem of police terror and that the murder of working class men and women will continue unabated, we still fight for these reforms. Only in this way can we expose the rottenness of the capitalist system and the murderous thugs who help protect it. Only the overthrow of capitalism can finally end this plague on working and oppressed people.

Black mothers and babies die at more than double the rate of white mothers and babies.

Criminal racism, cuts to healthcare are to blame.

Black Lives Matter

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Take Em Down Everywhere Conference Comes to New Orleans

By Toni Jones

On March 23 to 25 a historic strategic organizing conferenc hosted y Take Em Down NOLA convened to build up support and create bonds of unity between groups organizing in many states to rid public spaces of symbols to white supremacy.

The weekend included strategy sessions, videos, a public rally of hundreds and a Sunday march. At the march, Shabaka from Trinidad and Tobago, (fighting statues of Rhodes and Columbus), spoke in front of the Bienville statue. Bienville was a brutal slaveholder, and oppressor of Native Americans, stealing their land for his plantation. Shabaka said “You are an inspiration to people all around the world. Everytime you take down one of these genocidal monsters, we in the Caribbean, Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, and Haiti, we see it and we are inspired. we are strengthened, and we know that what we are doing is right. and it gives us fuel to keep our work going.”

Conference participants and New Orleanians took to the streets to make their demand: “Take ‘Em Down Everywhere!” in the heart of the tourism capital of the south. Large metal fences had been erected, barricading the State Supreme Court, and the iron gates of Jackson Square had been locked shut in a cowardly attempt from the rich to save dead men’s monuments from retribution for their racist crimes and genocidal hatred.

TAKE EM DOWN NOLA TAKING IT TO THE NEXT STEPS
As Angela Kinlaw said at the rally about the four white supremacy monuments removed due to Take Em Down NOLA organizing, despite threats from fascists and police, “people said we’d never see this in our lifetime….But when you have an uprising, a collective mass movement that demands forward change, that change will come.”

Mayor Landrieu, New Orleans outgoing white mayor, seeking national office, is trying to claim credit for his “bravery”, all the while he has presided over increasing institutional racism in housing, wages, schools and mass incarceration. It was non-stop organizing in the streets, community, schools and workplaces that forced the first four down.

Participants decided to carry the work forward together by forming a national network called Take Em Down Everywhere.

As Rev. Marie Galatis, a veteran leader of the civil rights struggle and struggle to get rid of white supremacy monuments said, no one will stop us, we will keep marching, keep protesting until they’re all down.

NEXT STEP – NEW ORDINANCE
A new ordinance has been drafted that calls for all monuments to white supremacy come down as they represent past and present racism. The former council resolution merely named four monuments to come down because they are a “nuisance”. While that was a victory it still took over a year of protests to get Lee, Davis, Beauregard and one more off our streets.

But there are many more. The most well known is that of Andrew Jackson a symbol of the city in tourist ads. Jackson was a brutal slave holder who committed murderous attacks on “free” people of color and carried out genocide against Native Americans, as the architect of the Trail of Tears.

So even though Robert E. Lee came down (a joyous day) there is still Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Jefferson Davis Parkway, the main criminals of the confederacy who enslaved Africans and fought to continue slavery for the rich plantation owners and northern bankers.

At the same time, education and activism will continue focusing on the next five which are listed here with explanations of who these racist, rich monsters were.

The New Orleans Workers Group has been and will continue to be involved all the way and we urge you to roll up your sleeves and get with Take Em Down NOLA

Contact us at: Facebook. com/TakeEmDownNOLA/