During an AFL-CIO convention workshop on hate crimes, William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, said the labor movement should fight hate crimes as hard as they fight for decent wage and benefit contracts. Hate crimes, he said, is a polite phrase for "lynching" and it is a menace to all democratic rights.
His call comes just in time. The second of two Wyoming men accused of lynching Matthew Shepard, a gay youth, is now underway. The second Klansman accused of the gruesome dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas has just been found guilty. The trial of the New York police officers who shot Amadou Diallo 41 times is soon to begin. And in Los Angeles, Buford Furrow, the neo-Nazi who opened fire in a Jewish community center wounding several children, and murdered Filipino-American postal worker Joseph Ileto, is awaiting trial.
Hate crimes are driven by a seething brew of fascist ideology: white supremacy, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and male supremacy. Scratch one of these hateful killers and underneath is a labor-baiter or a scab-goon ready to cross a picketline or beat up a striker. Racism and national chauvinism has always been corporate America's favorite weapon for breaking unions and busting strikes. There is an old union song with the lines, "We are Black, Brown, white together, we shall not be moved! Just like a tree that's standing by the water, we shall not be moved!" There is a popular chant in Spanish that says the same thing: "El pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido! The people, united, can never be defeated." The struggle against hate crimes and racism is not a secondary issue; it is the number one issue.
Peoples' Weekly World Editorial