Today in Labor History March 28, 1977: AFSCME Local 1644 struck in Atlanta, Georgia, for a pay raise. This local of mostly African American sanitation workers saw labor and civil rights as part of the same struggle. They saw their fight as a continuation of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. For several years, they organized to get black civil rights leaders elected to public office. They succeeded in getting their man, Maynard Jackson, elected mayor of Atlanta. After all, as vice mayor, Jackson had supported their 1970 strike. Yet, in his first three years as mayor, he refused to give them a single raise. Consequently, their wages dropped below the poverty line for a family of four. Jackson accused AFSCME of attacking Black Power by challenging his authority. He fired over 900 workers by April 1 and crushed the strike by the end of April. Many believe this set the precedent for Reagan’s mass firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike, in 1981.
"Emory Stop Cop City dropped banners holding the university and administration accountable for their involvement in the cop city project.
We demand that Greg Fenves, president of Emory, step down from the Atlanta committee for progress and that Emory publicly boycott Brasfield and Gorrie, the main contractor for the cop city project."
Protesters just disrupted a #sxsw panel with Andre Dickens, mayor of #Atlanta, on behalf of the #StopCopCity movement. Dickens fled the panel, hounded by protesters, and it continued without him.
I was briefly detained by police and sxsw staff upon exiting the event. #Austin
“It was really funny watching Andre Dickens scramble outside, only to find more angry voices.”
For Deceleration (and my first byline there!), I covered yesterday's protest against #Atlanta's mayor on behalf of the #StopCopCity movement, which saw him fleeing his scheduled panel at #Austin's #SXSW festival. In addition to photos and video footage, I spoke to one of the activists who participated:
At the end of Black History Month in February, the Dekalb County branch of the NAACP reported that an important historical marker had been stolen from Lithonia, a majority-Black eastern suburb of Atlanta. The marker had been erected in 2021.
Our city, and the South as a whole, is fighting against "Lost Cause" white supremacist propaganda in order to achieve a wider, clearer understanding of the past. There has been resistance and racist backlash to that resistance: the grotesque carving of Confederate generals that defaces neighboring Stone Mountain is the most prominent example. Whoever stole the Lithonia sign hates that progress towards truth and desperately wants to erase Black history from our shared story. They will fail. We, and everyone else who stands against racism, will make sure they fail.
Here is the text of the marker.
"Mob Violence in Lithonia: After Reconstruction was abandoned in 1877, white mobs from Lithonia terrorized the Black community through lynchings that denied Black people their constitutional rights and equal protection under the law. On July 27, 1887, a white mob from Lithonia lynched Reuben Hudson near the Georgia Railroad stop in Redan. Mr. Hudson lived in Covington but worked in Redan. On July 26th, a white woman in Redan reported being assaulted by a "short and heavy set, and very black" man. Low on train fare that day, Mr. Hudson walked 11 miles from Redan to Conyers and boarded a train closer to home. A conductor presumed Mr. Hudson fit the woman's description and had him arrested in Covington. The next morning, as police officers escorted Mr. Hudson back to Redan by train, an angry mob of white men boarded at Lithonia, intent on lynching him. Though legally required to protect Mr. Hudson, the officers handed him over to the mob in Redan without resistance. Despite his pleas of innocence, the mob dragged and tortured Mr. Hudson before hanging him to a tree. Five years later, on April 2, 1892, a white mob from Lithonia began to chase two unidentified Black men after a young white girl reported an assault. When the mob returned to Lithonia without the men, it was reported that "it was generally understood that they were lynched." Despite a functioning legal system in DeKalb County, mob participants were not held accountable for these lynchings."