FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
May 2, 2000 Columbus, Ohio
For more info, contact Yoshie Furuhashi (at 614-299-3313 / furuhashi.1 at osu.edu) or Mark D. Stansbery (at 614-252-9255 / walk at igc.org).
NAACP President Kweisi Mfume Refuses to Speak at OSU; Racism Fuels Anti-Unionism
Kweisi Mfume, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was scheduled to give the keynote address of the sixth annual Big 10 and Statewide Conference, which will take place from 9 AM to 2:30 PM today at the Ohio State University. Upon being alerted by T.J. Ghose (an OSU graduate student and member of Students for Equal Rights and Justice) to the OSU's maltreatment of the predominantly African-American Local 4501, Communications Workers of America, however, Mfume declined to speak at the Ohio Union as scheduled today. The theme of the conference is, ironically, "Racial Legacies and Learning: Bridging the Political, Educational, and Economic Divide." Mfume's absence, unionists and supporters argue, should call attention to the widening political and economic divide between largely white OSU management and predominantly black members of Local 4501 - the divide that cannot be bridged by conference speeches and papers.
In fact, since the beginning of the strike of Local 4501, it has become more evident than ever that racism fuels anti-unionism and vice versa. Doug Edmondson, a striker who works for physical facility, had a painful experience yesterday. When Edmondson attempted to talk with a young white student bus driver serving as a scab, the young white man mockingly replied to Edmondson: "Don't worry, you'll go back to scrubbing toilets in a couple of weeks." Edmondson, though, is not a custodian but a skilled worker who handles heating, refrigeration, and air conditioning. Edmondson wryly remarks: "He assumed that I'm a janitor, because I am black." Besides endangering the safety of bus riders by hiring poorly trained drivers, who may even lack a commercial driver's license, in its zeal to crush the strike, the OSU management may be, unionists and supporters wonder aloud, exploiting racism to encourage scabbing.