An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA

  A significant amount of Barack Obama’s election and reelection efforts in California and Florida—states with large populations of Latinx workers—hinged on the energy of local labor councils in canvassing, multilingual phone banking, and other outreach activities. Many of the activists in these labor councils, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, had earned their organizers’ stripes during the Great American Strike. Was Senator Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory an example of postracial politics? Not according to the exit polls, which demonstrated the crucial role of race and class in the election.77 Despite the claims of some in the corporate media that Latinx people would “never vote for a black man,” black and Latinx support was crucial in Obama’s victory in key states, including Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Florida. Nationally, 55 percent of white Americans voted for Senator John McCain, with the white college graduate vote split nearly evenly for the two major contenders.78 In contrast, 96 percent of African Americans, 67 percent of Latinx Americans, and 63 percent of Asian Americans voted for Obama. In Florida, Obama won a remarkably high percentage of the Hispanic vote, even though some conservative Cubanos in South Florida featured car bumper stickers that read “Cuba Voted for Change in 1959.”79 On the day after the election, the Miami Herald observed that Obama was the “first Democrat[ic] candidate to win Florida’s Hispanic vote.”80 In South Florida, an epicenter of the strike, Latinx workers—even noncitizens—were a decisive part of Election Day 2012. According to Gihan Perera, “In Homestead [Florida] undocumented workers who couldn’t even vote pitched in with a mariachi band and barbecue” to encourage thousands of African Americans, Latinos, and progressive whites to stay in line and cast their ballot.81

  Intergenerational organizing was pivotal in Obama’s election. Many of the canvassers and door-to-door organizers in the vaunted “Obama Ground Game” in 2008 were veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the United Farm Workers, the Chicano Moratorium, the Young Lords, the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense, and the National Rainbow Coalition.

  In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, nearly three hundred thousand Latinos, African Americans, and Asian American workers organized and joined unions.82 Workers’ strike activity increased significantly around the time of the election. “The number of union-related work stoppages involving more than 1,000 workers, which reached an all-time low of just five in 2009, rose to 13 this year as of October. And unions aren’t done yet,” reported the Los Angeles Times.83 Weathered by their experiences in fighting for immigration and living-wage and voter-protection laws, an increasing number of organizers linked social movement activism with electoral politics. On Election Day, African Americans and Latinx voters in Florida waited six to eight hours to vote in Orlando and Miami. “Voter suppression is not something that is new to our community and neither is our reaction,” said the NAACP’s Marvin Randolph. “If you look back to the civil rights movement, we passed the hat around and raised money to pay the poll taxes. And there were literacy tests. We educated our community to be able to say whatever you had to say to pass those literacy tests. Just as we did this time, we educated.”84 Nationally, Latinx voters chose Barack Obama by a 71 percent margin over the Republican contender, Mitt Romney.85 “This poll makes clear what we’ve known for a long time,” Eliseo Medina, secretary treasurer of the Service Employees International Union commented. “The Latino giant is wide awake, cranky, and it’s taking names.”86

  BACKLASH

  The reaction against African American and Latinx political and labor organizing has been relentless. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has carried out so-called “immigration raids” in many workplaces where Latinx people were trying to organize unions.87 These raids are ostensibly carried out to enforce immigration laws, but the labor journalist David Bacon sees them differently: “If anything, ICE seems intent on punishing undocumented workers who earn too much, or who become too visible by demanding higher wages and organizing unions.”88 During the Smithfield Foods organizing campaign, local government officials assisted the firm by distributing anti-union propaganda at the workplace. Subsequently, state investigators responded to workers’ safety complaints by haranguing them about their union sympathies. The federal government later targeted this same factory complex for a raid on suspected illegal immigrants. The union activist Julio Vargas affirms that Latinx and African American workers believed that the government raided their plant “because people were getting organized.”89 Workers seeking to improve their economic conditions faced opposition from company management as well as local, state, and federal officials. A Human Rights Watch report on American workplaces concludes that “freedom of association is a right under severe, often buckling pressure when workers in the United States try to exercise it.”90 Until the right to organize is guaranteed, efforts to address inequality and poverty will be doomed to failure.

  The Voting Rights Act of 1965, a key achievement of the civil rights movement, has been a continuous target of reactionary forces in American politics.91 The act had helped to protect the voting rights of African Americans, Latinx people, Haitian immigrants, and many other groups that had been historically discriminated against and disenfranchised. Between 2010 and 2013, however, Republican-dominated legislatures in thirty-one states passed scores of bills designed to restrict voting rights in order to constrict democracy.92 Recent advocates of voting restrictions claimed that Hispanic “illegal immigrants” in Florida and other states threatened to “decide the next presidential election.”93 The US Supreme Court lent its imprimatur to the restriction tidal wave by formally abrogating the Voting Rights Act in 2013.94 “Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, declared that the Voting Rights Act had done its job, and it was time to move on,” wrote the New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg. “Republican state legislators proceeded with a new round of even more restrictive voting laws.”95 In response, new as well as older grassroots liberation movements such as the Dream Defenders in Florida, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, and the NAACP launched voter registration and protection efforts nationwide.96

  Racial profiling in policing is part of the backlash to suppress working-class people and to boost dwindling tax revenues by turning low-income communities into cash cows to fund municipalities through the issuance of bench warrants, traffic tickets, and fines.97 In one example of “broken windows” policing—based on the theory that prosecuting minor crimes will prevent major ones and which fueled mass incarceration in minority-majority neighborhoods—individuals in Pagedale, Missouri, were fined if their residences had chipped paint or mismatched curtains.98 In 2010, Arizona moved to enhance the power of the police to detain immigrants. Crafted by the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council and supported by firms that run for-profit prisons positioned to benefit from the detention of immigrants, Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 made racial profiling the de facto law of the state.99 Racial profiling allows law enforcement authorities to target minorities for questioning and arrest. An investigative report conducted by the NAACP discovered that thirty states “have some form of racial profiling laws on the books,” and that no state engaged in training or data collection to ensure that law enforcement officers did not racially profile individuals.100 Bryan Stevenson, the founder of Equal Justice Initiative, observed, “We have a system that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcome.”101 Advocates of racial profiling invoked stereotypes enhanced by Hollywood films and television shows to argue that Latinx people, Arab Americans, and African Americans were criminals.102

  African American critics of Arizona’s SB 1070 pointed out that the law criminalizes Latinx people the way that Jim Crow criminalized African Americans. “To my . . . black brothers and sisters who think this is not your fight,” said the Reverend Al Sharpton, “let me tell you something: after dark, we all look Mexican
right now.”103 Legendary rapper Chuck D from Public Enemy reworked a song that once protested Arizona’s opposition to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday into an anthem against SB 1070 titled “Tear Down That Wall.”104 At the 2010 May Day Immigration Rally in Washington, DC, the Reverend Jesse Jackson compared Arizona today with repressive Selma in 1965 and urged a boycott of the state.105 Congresswoman Barbara Lee called SB 1070 a “national disgrace,” noting, “It harkens back to the era of Jim Crow or apartheid in South Africa.”106

  Concurrently, the passage of Arizona House Bill 2281 was part of a national move to roll back the efforts of schools to offer courses on the contributions of racial minorities in the development of the United States.107 The bill targeted a Mexican American studies program based in Tucson’s Unified School District that had markedly increased student success and graduation rates.108 Considered together, SB 1070 and HB 2281 were efforts to erase the spirit of the nascent Latinx social movement that formed the base of the May Day protests.

  Arizona’s HB 2281 fueled a nationwide response by ethnic studies educators in K–12 schools, as well in communities that demanded that the school districts begin to include the stories of Chicanos, Koreans, Chinese, and African Americans in the building of the United States. In response to a grassroots petition campaign, the Los Angeles Unified School District made ethnic studies learning a requirement for high school graduation in 2014.109 The State of California considered following suit.

  THE FUTURE IN THE PAST

  In 2013, Barack Obama traveled to Las Vegas—the most heavily unionized city in the United States—to make a signature speech on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. To understand why Obama traveled to Vegas at that moment reveals the distance that African American and Latinx workers have traveled in the United States. Las Vegas is home to one of the most powerful unions in the Americas, Culinary Workers Union Local 226, an organization built and led largely by working-class women of color who are maids, custodians, and food service workers on the Las Vegas Strip and beyond.110 Local 226 was one of the first major unions in the West to endorse Obama during the presidential primary season of 2008.111 During the election campaign, then Senator Obama openly endorsed two of the union’s strikes, saying, “I have been on the picket line for years with workers in Illinois, and if workers in Nevada are forced to strike I will be standing on their side as well.”112

  The sixty thousand members of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 hail from eighty-four different nations, and the local has been led by working-class women since the union’s six-year Frontier Strike in the 1990s. Without their endorsement, it is quite likely that Obama would not have been elected to the White House. Herein lies the symbolic power of his speech on immigration as well as the transformations in American life that it reveals. In the 1990s, the Culinary Workers grew to prominence led by the African American unionist Hattie Canty, who migrated from rural Alabama in the late 1950s. In contrast to George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979, who bragged that he had never been on a picket line, Canty led a strike where not a single one of the hundreds of strikers crossed the picket line. “Coming from Alabama, [to me],” Canty observed, “this seemed like the civil rights struggle. . . . The labor movement and the civil rights movement, you cannot separate the two of them.”113 Whether they hail from Alabama, Thailand, Central America, or someplace else, the members of Local 226 represent the potential future promise of the Americas. At the end of the Frontier Strike, the bosses hired back all of the original strikers, and the owner of the chain “said he was happy to have the strikers back since they showed nerve and moxie throughout the 6½ year strike.”114

  The circumstances surrounding President Obama’s Las Vegas speech encapsulates the existence of larger currents of protest that may yet create an expansion of democracy. True, the effort at comprehensive immigration reform in 2013 failed. However, the strikes, boycotts, and extensive organizing campaigns undertaken against the neoliberal backlash demonstrate that working-class politics is not dead. One thing is beyond dispute: African American and Latinx organizers are drawing on the lessons of history to build momentum for social justice struggles. Student immigrant DREAM activists achieved state and national victories, while service workers from Miami to Seattle engaged in rallies and civil disobedience in support of the goal “$15 and a union,” a demand that seemed impossible only a decade earlier.115 The first national conference of Fight for $15 organizers was held in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, “to highlight how racism and anti-union hostility combine to trap an estimated 64 million Americans in jobs that pay less than $15 an hour.”116 Invoking history in his keynote address to an energized audience, the Reverend William Barber II observed, “It took us 400 years from slavery to the present to reach $7.25, but we can’t wait another 400 years.”117

  The Black Lives Matter movement, composed of scores of local and national organizations such as the Dream Defenders in Florida, emerged as a leading national force against inequality. Initially focused on police homicides of African Americans, Black Lives Matter quickly connected anti-Black violence to other forms of oppression. In 2013, the Florida Dream Defenders described the destructive power of the system they were battling:

  In every corner of our country, we find the cancer of an unchecked correctional system. It is ravaging our state and our black and brown communities in particular. . . . We are black, brown, poor and minority. A system that seeks to incarcerate us now invigorates our fight for freedom. We have dedicated our lives to battling the criminalization of our generation. A system that once divided us now unifies us. The Dream Defenders are that opposition.118

  Black Lives Matter activists joined together economic justice, anti-imperial, and prison abolition concerns to draft a platform in 2016, titled “A Vision for Black Lives.” This document was the foremost statement of emancipatory internationalism in the twenty-first century. It pointed out the terrible costs paid by people in the Global South for the United States’ permanent War on Terror. “A Vision for Black Lives” criticized US imperialism in Latin America and misguided foreign policies that led to the oppression of others in the Global South.119 Bakari Kitwana notes, “A public policy agenda hell-bent on elite wealth accumulation at the expense of the majority poor has, ironically, politicized a defiant generation whose brand of resistance insists that the criminal justice system will no longer have the last say.”120

  Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign gained traction by attacking Muslims, African Americans, and Latinx peoples as depraved and violence-prone. Blatantly ignoring two centuries of emancipatory internationalism in the United States, Trump vowed to build a wall to segregate the United States from Mexico and the rest of Latin America. James Brown, an African American probation officer in Lithonia, Georgia, took offense to Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” because of the obliviousness to the true history of the United States that it displayed. In 1923, the Ku Klux Klan in Kissimmee, Florida, had mobilized to lynch Brown’s great-grandfather, Oscar Mack. The KKK targeted Mack because he had accepted a well-paying US Postal Service job hitherto reserved for whites. After a gun battle in which he killed two of his attackers, Oscar Mack fled on foot to the North. For much of the rest of his life, Mack lived under an assumed name, on the run from white terrorists. Mack’s great-grandson vowed to turn a family tragedy into a story of redemption and reconciliation:

  This means a lot to me. Not only for him, but for all of the other people who are lying in their graves who were never heard, who were treated not even as second class citizens in this country. Not only for Black people, but for Hispanics, for women, for any other minority group if you will. We had talked about the fact that our government is saying “Make America Great Again.” I cannot see where she was ever great. The bare fact is that in this country over fifty million Native Americans were murdered, and Black people were enslaved, and other ethnic groups were disenfranchised. So it was never g
reat, but I do believe now because of the stories that are surfacing, we can use these as a tool to bring people out of their ignorance.121

  If American history serves as a guide, not even the president of the United States can stem the tide of grassroots freedom movements and the ability of people throughout the hemisphere to draw inspiration from each other’s struggles. An African American and Latinx history of the United States teaches us that the self-activity of the most oppressed is the key to liberty in the future of the Americas.