An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  59. For the full text of A. Philip Randolph’s address, see “Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington,” by Bill Fletcher Jr. at Teaching a People’s History: Zinn Education Project, August 20, 2013, https://zinnedproject.org/2013/08/the-1963-march-on-washington/.

  60. Paul Ortiz interview with Lawrence Guyot, May 5, 2011; comments by Lawrence Guyot at “Chaos or Community: Where Do We Go from Here?,” Third Annual Civil Rights History Panel, SPOHP, Delta State University, September 21, 2011; Paul Ortiz interview with Hollis Watkins, May 6, 2008, SPOHP, University of Florida.

  61. Paul Ortiz interview with Margaret Block, September 18, 2008, SPOHP, University of Florida; Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Charles E. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

  62. On the rise of SNCC and the MFDP, see Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

  63. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 57. See also Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  64. Horne, Fire This Time, 149.

  65. Ibid., 82.

  66. Ibid., 59.

  67. Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? A Report (Los Angeles: State of California, December 2, 1965), 41.

  68. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” address delivered at Riverside Church, April 4, 1967, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/kingweb/publications/speeches/Beyond_Vietnam.pdf (accessed June 24, 2015).

  69. The following analysis of the Poor People’s Campaign and Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike is based on Gordon Mantler, Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960–1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

  70. “Remembering the Forgotten King,” Bowdoin, January 14, 2011, http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/archives/1academicnews/008141.shtml.

  71. The literature on social movements of the era includes Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Max Krochmal, Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Donna Jean Murch: Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Armando Navarro, The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Frederick Douglass Opie, Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City: From Protest to Public Office (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Gaye Theresa Johnson, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Maurice Jourdane, The Struggle for the Health and Legal Protection of Farm Workers: El Cortito (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2004); Allen Kent, “The Missing Link: Black Police and Black Power in Chicago, 1965–1987,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2015.

  72. Jakobi E. Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 125–66.

  73. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 292.

  74. Jakobi E. Williams, “The Original Rainbow Coalition: An Example of Universal Identity Politics,” Tikkun, http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/the-original-rainbow-coalition-an-example-of-universal-identity-politics (accessed December 10, 2016).

  75. “United Construction Workers Association,” Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/ucwa.htm (accessed December 6, 2015).

  76. “Who We Are,” No Separate Peace 1, no. 1 (May 15, 1975): 2.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (1967; New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

  79. Piri Thomas, “Voices of Fighters Against Oppression,” New York Amsterdam News, November 16, 1985.

  80. “Brickmaking Machine,” Swaan Call: The Newsletter of Washington’s State-Wide Anti-Apartheid Network, no. 3 (October–November 1986): 5.

  81. “Latinos Want South Africa Free,” New York Amsterdam News, November 16, 1985.

  82. Ibid.

  83. “Latinos to Join Soweto March,” New York Amsterdam News, June 14, 1986; “March for Motherland,” New York Amsterdam News, June 21, 1986.

  84. Ronald Smothers, “Jackson Hears Mexican View of Cuba,” New York Times, May 29, 1984; “Jackson Pleased with Mexican Trip,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 1, 1984; Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill & Wang, 2011), 33, 131–37; Crystal Nix, “Many in U.S. Protest on South Africa,” New York Times, October 12, 1985.

  85. Jesse Jackson, “1984 Democratic National Convention Address,” July 18, 1984, San Francisco, American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jessejackson1984dnc.htm (accessed May 10, 2017).

  86. Paul Ortiz, “From Slavery to Cesar Chavez and Beyond: Farmworker Organizing in the United States,” in The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers’ Lives, Labor, and Advocacy, ed. Charles Dillard Thompson and Melinda Wiggins (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 249–76.

  87. JoAnn Wypijewski, “Rainbow’s Gravity,” Nation, July 26, 2004, http://www.alternet.org/story/19332/rainbow’s_gravity/?page=entire. For a critique of the National Rainbow Coalition, see Adolph Reed, The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).

  88. Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982 (1984; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 125; Nelson Blackstock, Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988); Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012).

  CHAPTER 8: EL GRAN PARO ESTADOUNIDENSE

  1. Anita Hamilton, “A Day Without Immigrants: Making a Statement,” Time, May 1, 2006, http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1189899,00.html; Antonio Valencia, “El gran paro: boicot Latino contra Estados Unidos,” La Nación (Chile), piensaChile.com, May 1, 2006, http://piensachile.com/2006/05/el-gran-paro-boicot-latino-contra-estados-unidos/; William I. Robinson, “La lucha por los derechos de inmigrantes,” piensaChile.com, April 29, 2006, http://piensachile.com/2006/04/eeuu-la-lucha-por-los-derechos-de-inmigrantes/.

  2. On the mass strikes of the Vietnam War era, see Brecher, Strike!, 221–42. For an overview of neoliberal
ism, see Miguel A. Centeno and Joseph N. Cohen, “The Arc of Neoliberalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (August 2012): 317–40; Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and the Development of American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011); Jasmin Hristov, “Freedom and Democracy or Hunger and Terror: Neoliberalism and Militarization in Latin America,” Social Justice 32, no. 2 (2005): 89-114. For analyses that frame neoliberalism as a counterattack against democratic insurgencies, including the Chicano, civil rights, and Black liberation movements, see Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (New York: Verso, 2016); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Cedric Johnson, ed., The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Heather Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon, 2016); William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016); Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, “20 Years Since Welfare ‘Reform,’” Atlantic, August 22, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/20-years-welfare-reform/496730/.

  3. “Volcker Asserts US Must Trim Living Standard,” New York Times, October 18, 1979. For a broader analysis of the ways that the Federal Reserve intervened to revolutionize labor relations, see William H. Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).

  4. Thomas Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/reviews/friedman-mag.html.

  5. Grover Norquist: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” “Conservative Advocate,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, May 25, 2001, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1123439.

  6. For an overview of the DLC movement, see Al From, “Recruiting Bill Clinton,” Atlantic, December 3, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/recruiting-bill-clinton/281946/; William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Charles Peters, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” Washington Monthly, May 1983, 9–19; Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986). Neoliberalism in the United States was part of an international trend. See Curtis Atkins, “The Third Way International,” Jacobin 20 (Winter 2016) https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/atkins-dlc-third-way-clinton-blair-schroeder-social-democracy/ (accessed August 5, 2016).

  7. Patrick J. McDonnell, “Seeds of Discontent Grow in Watsonville,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1996.

  8. “Trading Up,” Texas Observer, June 2017, 6.

  9. United Farm Workers of Washington, “Public Action Organizers,” state memo, October 13, 1994 (in author’s collection).

  10. The US Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election (Washington, DC: 2001), http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm (accessed June 12, 2014).

  11. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Merrit Kennedy, “Lead-Laced Water in Flint: A Step-By-Step Look at the Makings of a Crisis,” The Two-Way: Breaking News from NPR, NPR.org, April 20, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/20/465545378/lead-laced-water-in-flint-a-step-by-step-look-at-the-makings-of-a-crisis (accessed May 15, 2016).

  12. Julian Borger, “US Conservatives Round on Bush over Katrina Aid Pledges,” Guardian, September 17, 2005; Julian Borger, “Hurricane Aid Used to ‘Test Out Rightwing Social Policies,’” Guardian, September 22, 2005; John Brown Childs, ed., Hurricane Katrina: Response and Responsibilities, 2nd ed. (2005; Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press, 2008).

  13. “Reports of Anarchy at Superdome Overstated,” Seattle Times, September 26, 2005, http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20050926&slug=katmyth26.

  14. Justin Hosbey, “Consumption and Conviviality: Charter Schools and the Delectability of Black Death in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2016; “Latino Workers Helped Rebuild New Orleans, but Many Weren’t Paid,” NBC News, August 28, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/hurricane-katrina-anniversary/families-scattered-hurricane-katrina-still-making-their-way-home-n417661; “Guest Workers Sue New Orleans Hotel Chain,” Washington Post, August 17, 2006; Southern Poverty Law Center, “SPLC Exposes Exploitation of Immigrant Workers,” news release, August 15, 2006, https://www.splcenter.org/news/2006/08/16/splc-exposes-exploitation-immigrant-workers.

  15. Mary Bauer, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2013), https://www.splcenter.org/20130218/close-slavery-guestworker-programs-united-states.

  16. Mark Brenner, “Katrina’s Aftermath Transforms Work in the Gulf Region,” Labor Notes (March 2006), 1 (accessed May 10, 2017).

  17. Thomas D. Boston, A Different Vision: Race and Public Policy, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 1996).

  18. Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010; New York: New Press, 2012); Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children (2013; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Manuel Pastor et al., In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster and Race After Katrina (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); M. Shahid Alam, Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on the “War Against Islam (North Haledon, NJ: Islamic Publications International, 2007); David Roediger, How Race Survived US History: From the American Revolution to the Present (London: Verso, 2008); Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness.

  19. Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled (London: Verso, 1998); Joe Flood, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—and Determined the Future of Cities (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010); Lydia R. Otero, La Calle: Spatial Conflict and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); Joe Flood, “Why the Bronx Burned,” New York Post, May 16, 2010, http://nypost.com/2010/05/16/why-the-bronx-burned.

  20. Kim Probasco, “For the Greater Good or Greed? Redistributing Private Space Through Eminent Domain Power: Relocating The Dallas Cowboys Stadium to Arlington, Texas,” master’s thesis, University of Texas, Arlington, 2007. For broader discussions of the intersection of race, eminent domain, and public policy, see N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Xavier Perez, “Gentrification and Crime: A Study of Changing Lives in a Puerto Rican Community,” PhD thesis, University of Illinois, Chicago, 2010; Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Eminent Domain & African Americans: What Is the Price of the Commons?, vol. 1, Perspectives on Eminent Domain Abuse (Institute for Justice, February 2007), http://ij.org/report/eminent-domain-african-americans (accessed March 10, 2016).

  21. Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 2; John A. Eterno, ed., The New York City Police Department: The Impact
of Its Policies and Practices (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015).

  22. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991; New York: Broadway Books, 2012), 119–20.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), xiii.

  27. Eduardo Porter, “In Public Education, Edge Still Goes to the Rich,” New York Times, November 5, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/business/a-rich-childs-edge-in-public-education.html.

  28. Bonnie Kristian, “Why The Pentagon Budget Is Out of Control,” Fiscal Times, March 28, 2016, http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/03/28/Why-Pentagon-Needs-Audit-Now.

  29. “The Sorry State of Corporate Taxes: What Fortune 500 Firms Pay (or Don’t Pay),” Citizens for Tax Justice, http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/sorrystateofcorptaxes.php (accessed January 12, 2017).

  30. David Zucchino, Myth of the Welfare Queen: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist’s Portrait of Women on the Line (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). For a historical analysis of blame-the-poor policies and political narratives, see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (1986; New York: Perseus Books, 1996).

  31. Columbia University, National Center for Children in Poverty, “By Race, White Children Make Up the Biggest Percentage of America’s Poor,” news release, November 20, 2007, http://www.nccp.org/media/releases/release_34.html.

  32. Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., The ‘Welfare Queen’ Experiment: How Viewers React to Images of African-American Mothers on Welfare,” Nieman Reports, June 15, 1999, http://niemanreports.org/articles/the-welfare-queen-experiment/ (accessed July 12, 2017).