Celebrate Juneteenth -- And Keep Up the Fight!
At 7 PM on June 19, activists will gather at the Taco Cabana restaurant in the strip mall right beside Hiway 30 and the Cockrell Hill exit barely west of Dallas. We'll continue asking for decent treatment for Walmart workers. Afterward, we'll celebrate Juneteenth together. First round is on Jobs with Justice!
It is completely fitting to celebrate Juneteenth and fight for the Walmart workers on the same evening. Juneteenth is the anniversary of the freedom of Texas slaves after federal troops arrived in Galveston. That took place in 1865, but 2013 finds wage slavery still a very big part of society.
It is also fitting that all workers come together in this way. As Dr Martin Luther King often pointed out, labor and civil rights are closely allied. King said at the 1961 AFL-CIO convention: "Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor's needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth."