Do you remember Action Motown '97 on Saturday, June 21, 1997, "[t]he first-ever national AFL-CIO solidarity demonstration in support of a strike" (Chris McKie, "Action! Motown '97: 100,000 Flood Detroit," <em>People's Weekly World</em>, <a href="http://www.pww.org/archives97/97-06-28-1.html">June 28, 1997</a>)? That demonstration drew only 100,000 (which may be an optimistic estimate), according to the People's Weekly World, *even though the march was officially endorsed and mobilized by the AFL-CIO from the top down*.
You wrote: "I talked to an NYC organizer for the march, who told me that they'd view 75,000 as a great success" (Doug Henwood, "Fwd: Help Build the Million Worker March - Oct 17," <a href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040913/020838.html">September 19, 2004</a>). If the Black-led labor left can indeed pull off a demonstration of 75,000, two weeks before the election day, without any support from the AFL-CIO, I, too, would see it as a great success.
>You & Carrol are always talking about black leadership, but that
>doesn't extend to the 90% share of the vote that's going to go to
>Kerry, does it?
There are Black leaders, and there are Black leaders.
The 1995 Million Man March drew a massively larger crowd -- "Independent researchers put that one at about 870,000" (Philip Kennicott, "500,000? 750,000? 1 Million?: Why We Crave A Real Number," <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A58485-2004May1¬Found=true">May 2, 2004</a>, p.B1) -- than the AnybodyButBush-themed "The-World-Says-No-to-the-Bush-Agenda" anti-RNC march (which did NADA for Kerry in any case), not to mention the Million Worker March, by drawing upon Black communities alone. That doesn't mean, though, that the Million Man March was more politically significant for us than the far smaller Million Worker March -- the first-ever national mobilization of rank-and-file labor activists led by the Black left leadership -- will be. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>