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MD Freedom Union Files
Constitution
Afro-American (May
10, 1966)
The Maryland Freedom Union (MFU) Monday filed its
constitution with the National Labor Relations Board, thus
making it a legally established union.
Howard Quandry, a volunteer organizer for the MFU, said
Miss Vivian Jones and Miss Ola Johnson, president and secretary
of the union, went to Washington with two other organizers to
file the document with the NLRB's Labor Disclosure Division.
Mr. Quandry said Monday was the deadline for the filing
of the constitution which must be done 90 days after a union is
first organized.
If no constitution is filed before the deadline,
"union officers are subject to a year in jail and a heavy
fine."
Mr. Quandry said the union had discussed its constitution
with NLRB officials previously and had expanded it after being
informed of various points which such constitutions are required
to cover.
The MFU was founded early in February when workers went
out on strike at two West Baltimore nursing homes. Since then
the union has begun to organize workers in small retail and
service establishments in the inner-city and won a recognition
agreement from Silverman's Department Store chain.
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New
Group 'Now a Union':
Freedom Unit Files With Labor
Department
Baltimore
Afro-American, May 10,
1966
The infant Maryland Freedom Union yesterday filed a copy
of its constitution with the Bureau of Labor Management of the
United states Department of Labor in a move to gain recognition
as a legitimate labor organization.
"We are a union now, not just a group," said
Howard Qunder, a field representative of the Congress of Racial
Equality. He is one of the several C.O.R.E. workers--in town for
the summer project--who are also assisting the Freedom Labor
Union.
The filing of the union's constitution is a requirement
of the Labor Management Disclosure and reporting Act of 1959.
1st Victory Won. Filing of the constitution came after
the Freedom Labor Union won its first victory last week, when it
gained a recognition agreement as the bargaining agent with
Silverman's department Stores. C.O.R.E. had organized a boycott
of the stores for two days before the agreement.
John V. Moran, assistant director for compliance
operations in the Office of Labor Management said yesterday that
if "the Maryland Freedom Union says they're a union, we'll
take their word for it."
"You don't have to be very big or very formal to be
a labor organization," he said.
Strikes Unsuccessful. The Maryland Freedom Union got off
to an unpromising start in Baltimore three months ago, when it
organized two unsuccessful nursing home strikes.
Since then, the union's staff has been beefed up by
C.O.R.E. field workers and has shifted its target to the
smaller, non-union retail stores.
"It's much easier to boycott a retail store than a
nursing home," said Michael Flug, another C.O.R.E. field
worker.
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RETAIL STORE
EMPLOYEES' UNION, Local 692
Retail Clerks
International Association, AFL-CIO
305 W.
Monument St.
Baltimore 1,
Maryland
Mr. Oliver
Singleton
Director
AFL-CIO,
Region No. 4
305 W.
Monument Street
Baltimore,
Maryland 1
Dear Brother
Singleton:
As you are aware, the Freedom Union has allegedly
organized a retail food store on Pennsylvania Avenue in
Baltimore.
Specifically, I wish to know the policy of the Civil
Rights Department in regards to this action. Based on
information that this group is apparently trying to organize in
the retail field, I field it is imperative that we have a
decision as rapidly as possible.
With kindest regards, I am
Fraternally
yours,
Alvin Akman
Secretary
Treasurer
posted 24 July 2008
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Roy Wilkins and Spiro Agnew in
Annapolis /
Agnew Speaks to Black
Baltimore Leaders 1968
The End of Black Rage? Class and Delusion in
Black America (Jared Ball)
The Black Generation Gap (Ellis Cose) / Walter Hall Lively
Forty Years of Determined Struggle
Putting
Baltimore's People First
Dominance of Johns Hopkins
A Brief Economic History of Modern Baltimore
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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. . . .— WashingtonPost
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What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers Slavery and the Civil
War
By Chandra Manning
For this impressively researched
Civil War social history, Georgetown
assistant history professor Manning
visited more than two dozen states
to comb though archives and
libraries for primary source
material, mostly diaries and letters
of men who fought on both sides in
the Civil War, along with more than
100 regimental newspapers. The
result is an engagingly written,
convincingly argued social history
with a point—that those who did the
fighting in the Union and
Confederate armies "plainly
identified slavery as the root of
the Civil War." Manning backs up her
contention with hundreds of
first-person testimonies written at
the time, rather than
often-unreliable after-the-fact
memoirs. While most Civil War
narratives lean heavily on officers,
Easterners and men who fought in
Virginia, Manning casts a much
broader net. She includes
immigrants, African-Americans and
western fighters, in order, she
says, "to approximate cross sections
of the actual Union and Confederate
ranks." —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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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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