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Katrina Survivors and
Immigrant Workers
Unite to Arrest Slave Owner
People's
Organizing Committee
February 15, 2007
Poor black working class New Orleans
residents are facing the worst racist attack in decades.
At the same time, immigrant workers from Central and
South America are being trafficked as slaves in New
Orleans and across Louisiana. These two groups have come
together to arrest one of the slave owners and
traffickers.
Public housing residents who just
last Saturday reoccupied their homes in the C.J. Peete
housing development were told last night, Wednesday,
February 14, that they must vacate their units or lose
their vouchers. This would leave their extended families
homeless. Today, young volunteers from New Jersey who
have been helping to clean up the development were
threatened with arrest for their efforts to help the
residents.
Despite this emergency, when
organizers from the New Orleans Survivor Council heard
that immigrant workers had located their slave owner and
were ready to execute a citizen’s arrest, they left New
Orleans to come help their brothers and sisters.
Slave trafficker Matt Redd has been
holding about one hundred Mexican workers as virtual
slaves near Lake Charles, Louisiana. About forty of
these workers, accompanied by supporters from the New
Orleans Survivor Council, walked to the offices of Redd
Properties in Sulphur, LA to attempt to execute a
citizen’s arrest.
At a press conference in a CVS
parking lot, just before going to Redd’s office, workers
told the press that Redd had taken their passports
without their consent at the US consulate in Mexico
where they obtained their H2B (guest worker) visas. Redd
then charged them plane fare and then put them in vans
to bring them to Louisiana, where he leased them out to
low-wage employers in restaurants, car washes and
municipal waste management. He also recently imported
dozens of skilled pipe fitters and welders, who have not
worked in the two weeks they’ve been in the country.
These workers have had no income, and because they do
not have their passports, they can’t even go home. One
worker told the press that his mother needed blood for a
liver operation, and that he was the only family member
whose blood was a match for hers, but he is unable to
return because he doesn’t have his passport. In the past
several days, Redd had begun firing workers for
circulating a petition demanding their passports back.
A spokesperson for the New Orleans
Survivor Council told the immigrant workers the words to
some freedom songs: “before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be
buried in my grave,” and “we who believe in freedom
cannot rest until it comes.” He pointed out that a
carload of NOSC organizers had come to join them in
making the citizen’s arrest despite the fact that at
11:30 the night before, residents who had reoccupied
their public housing units were put out in the street by
the Housing Authority on one of the coldest nights of
the winter. Even so, the speaker said, “we are all the
same people, the only thing that separates us is
language; and we who believe in freedom cannot rest
until it comes.”
The citizen’s arrest statement said
in part, “You are officially accused of taking an
official passport of a person and refusing to return it
in order to prevent the movement and travel of that
worker without lawful authority in order to maintain the
labor of that worker – this is a felony under the law of
the United States of America.” The statement quoted the
particular U.S. and Louisiana laws against slavery and
trafficking in slaves, and pointed out that it is the
right of a private person to make an arrest of a person
who has committed a felony. That person can then hold
the criminal until law enforcement comes to take him
into custody, or can take him to law enforcement.
Redd was not in his office, but the
group had notified law enforcement agencies of their
intention to make an arrest, so when they arrived at the
office they demanded law enforcement find and arrest
him. Sheriff’s police must have been a little worried
about openly defending slavery while the press cameras
were rolling, and they quickly worked out an agreement
with Redd by phone to give back the passports of the
workers present. The Sheriff’s office took possession of
the passports and returned them to the workers, but the
workers are still adamant in their demand that Redd be
arrested for violating the anti-slavery laws. They vowed
to continue their struggle, and to make sure that all
passports Redd is holding will be returned to their
owners. Meanwhile, the Survivor Council members jumped
back in their cars to return to the struggle to reopen
public housing, to rebuild the homes of black residents
the government doesn’t want to come home, and to
continue its campaign to build a world-class levee
around the Lower Ninth ward.
These beginnings of unity between
black New Orleans hurricane survivors and immigrant
guest workers – the descendants of the old slaves
uniting with the modern day slaves – is a very
significant event. As one of the Sheriffs pointed out,
it was the U.S. government itself that gave the
passports to the slaveholder. Just as in the days of
African slavery, the government is on the side of the
owners. When the descendants of the former slaves were
asked what should be the next step, they suggested
filing suit against the government of the United States
for being an accomplice to slave owning and trafficking.
People's Organizing Committee
www.peoplesorganizing.org
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 16 February 2007
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