the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 17, 2014
When votes were tallied in the UAW election at the Volkswagen (VW) plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Friday, February 14th, 712 workers had voted against union representation while 626 had supported going union. Approximately 89 per cent of the around 1500 workers voted.
When the election was lost, the press celebrated what they labeled “a disaster.” Headlines read, “crushing defeat” and “crippling blow” to the UAW and its efforts to organize what are commonly known as the “transplants.” For their part, the right wing politicians and capitalism’s spokesmen in Tennessee were outright gleeful.
Even those sympathetic to the Union said that the failure of this drive means that workers in these Southern plants will never be organized. As one professor put it, “If the union can’t win (in Chattanooga), it can’t win anywhere.”
All of this high drama and all of these sweeping conclusions over one organizing drive in one plant! To say the least, the politicians, the press, the commentators have their opinions and agendas.
But what matters is what workers take out of it. What matters is how unorganized and organized workers alike view the question of organizing themselves and others and making a fight to defend their interests.
From the remarks of some of the workers interviewed, it became clear that at least some VW workers feared that the policy of the UAW would lead to a worse, not better, situation for them in the plant. The UAW had already agreed to support VW’s model of workers’ councils and to represent the workers over benefits and wages only. It was clear that some workers didn’t see an advantage to having the UAW as a third wheel in light of that arrangement. The question would be, “If management would cooperate with the workers, who needed the union in the equation?” In addition, many of the workers interviewed referenced two-tier and plant closings and said, “Why run the risk to end up with an even worse wage arrangement?”
The UAW leadership blamed the defeat on “outside special interest groups,” on the governor and the politicians, and said that those attacking the organizing drive were attacking “labor-management cooperation.” But it is precisely their policy of cooperation that has led workers in factories, organized and not organized alike, to distrust the results this type of leadership brings.
Today, the UAW brags about leading the struggle for the rise of a new auto industry from the ruins of an economic recession. After billions of dollars transferred into the pockets of the auto aristocracy, after concession after concession from the workers, resulting in the lowering of wage and benefit levels, the UAW points to the profitability of the companies as proof that cooperation works.
Is it any surprise that unorganized workers don’t see the win in that? And those who say, “until the transplants are organized, it will be impossible to defend wages in the organized plants” are wrong.
Workers need a fighting policy in the UAW and all the unions; a policy that makes no pretense at cooperating and calls for a fight to regain the wages and benefits all workers have lost. A policy for a fight that attacks and tears up two-tier and flexible shifts and shortened breaks and all the other insults and indignities that have been forced upon us and called “cooperation” by union leadership. A fighting policy to shorten the workweek and share available work out among all workers.
When a fighting strategy results in the power to push the bosses back, unorganized workers will rise to fight for their share as well. They will want to be organized. It will feel good and powerful and right. They won’t be asking for permission; they will organize and join workers in the organized factories in the fight for a better life.
Feb 17, 2014
If you’ve tuned in or read about the Olympic Winter Games at Sochi, Russia, you’ve almost surely been told that there are exceptional and never-ending problems with just about everything: Hotel furnishings, showers, drinking water and other things were said to be unfinished, hastily slapped together or hazardous–as if nothing like this ever happened at Olympic games before.
All this slanted reporting went in the same direction–to convince us that the supposedly brutal, stupid Russians were really screwing things up again.
In fact, every Olympics has had it own problems and politics. In 1976, 1980, and 1984 entire nations (including the U.S. and the Soviet Union) refused to have their athletes compete in protest over rival nations hosting the games, or just being allowed to have their athletes participate.
As an ABC reporter stated a few days ago, “The Olympics you might say are the planet’s most political apolitical event.”
Worst of all, coverage here makes it seem like U.S. athletes are the only ones worth watching, the only ones with background stories, who persevere despite the odds, who perform bravely even when they lose. The athletes from other countries barely get the time of day, unless their stories can be used to criticize their country of origin. All this is used to reinforce the worst nationalist attitudes, and all the imperialist policies that the U.S. carries out around the world are thereby justified.
The Olympic Games are supposed to be–and could be–better than this: a real celebration of the abilities of the best athletes from all over the world, no matter what country they come from. But in the world today–divided into nations with governments devoted to serving the interests of the rich and powerful in each nation–the Olympics will never be this.
Feb 17, 2014
Congress has passed a new farm bill, worth about 100 billion dollars a year for their special friends–like agribusiness, and owners or investors in agricultural lands.
President Obama signed the bill, pretending it would help with income inequality and help reduce the federal deficit.
In this bill, a commodity program for farmers can provide up to $125,000 to “individual farmers” per year from taxpayers–more than twice the median yearly income of all U.S. families.
The agriculture corporations get special deals in the bill, for the “farmers”–who are really big business men–in the rice, peanut and sugar industries. The catfish industry gets its own special deal for being regulated–no longer by the FDA, which lacks enough inspectors in any case, but by a new division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
This bill also provides 18 insurance companies an average of 80 million dollars a year for selling federally-subsidized insurance to farmers as protection against crop losses. The farmers pay a third of the cost of the insurance, while the taxpayers pay two-thirds of the cost.
The sugar industry has done very well by its lobbying of politicians, especially in Florida and Michigan. They are so successful that U.S. consumers pay twice the cost for sugar compared to the rest of the world–26 cents per pound versus 13 cents per pound. And the sugar industry hardly needs the price support, since its friends in Congress have been helping them for decades with favorable legislation. Over the past 15 years, the industry has closed dozens of refineries, laid off half its workforce, exploited its workers enough to double how much sugar each worker produces, and made billions in profits.
On the other hand, in this bill, $90 per month is being cut from the food stamp benefit of about 850,000 of the poorest families in the country. This is part of the great “savings” in the bill, which comes to less than two billion dollars a year.
The editors of the Washington Post–not exactly a radical bunch–call this farm bill “corporate welfare.” Yes, Congress is doing its REAL job of catering to its real constituents: Those who are paying millions to lobby Congress are getting an excellent return on their investment!
Feb 17, 2014
In 2013, the yearly death toll from hospital errors in the U.S. was 440,000, according to a recent study. In 1998, it was 98,000. Thus, the death toll increased four and half times over 15 years. In general, medical errors and complications got worse over the years, today affecting more than one in three hospitalized patients. In total, an estimated 15 million people suffer medical harm in hospitals annually. This shockingly high malpractice rate relates to medical treatment, a very basic human necessity.
Our health expenses have been increasing year after year at a level well above the inflation rate. We spend nearly a trillion dollars on hospital care each year. So, considering this huge spending, along with technological and scientific advances, the hospital malpractice rates should have been minimized, not skyrocketed.
But the hospitals handsomely profit out of this malpractice. The Harvard University researchers explain that “Effective methods for reducing surgical complications have been identified. However, hospitals have been slow to implement them.” A main reason for this slow implementation is that adoption of these methods would drastically reduce the hospitals’ profits.
For example, “if a patient has colon cancer surgery, Medicare pays a certain fee, but if the patient gets a post-operative infection that leads to pneumonia and has to be put on a ventilator for several days, the payment for ventilator care is higher and more profitable than the payment for the original surgery.”
Under capitalism, hospitals are mere businesses. Thus, medical care is another target for profit that needs to be maximized to “efficiently” run the business. But this is a gruesome set-up for our health. We not only pay excessively to get a treatment in hospitals, but we can get killed in the process due to this profit drive.
Feb 17, 2014
Billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins wrote an editorial to the Wall Street Journal: “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, the ‘rich.’” Yes, he actually had the nerve to write that!
Did anyone else notice that the rich actually run this country? And that they are not being persecuted?
Perkins then proposed that people who don’t earn enough to pay income tax shouldn’t be allowed to vote. And to top it off, he proposed that rich people should get MORE votes. “It should be like a corporation,” he said. “You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes.”
Who’s attacking who?! But he’s got one idea right. The rich are waging war on us–it’s about time workers wage one back against them!
Feb 17, 2014
In 2013, the median rent for an apartment in California reached $1,550. This means that about HALF of the rental apartments in the state cost more than HALF of the entire income of a full-time worker who makes $20 an hour, AFTER taxes.
And millions of workers certainly don’t make that much these days–in 2013, the average hourly wage of all renters in the state was $18 an hour.
The high number of foreclosures drove up rents in California because as thousands and thousands of working-class families lost their homes in the “Great Recession” and looked for a rental home, landlords (including the banks that owned the foreclosed homes) jacked up rents to take advantage of these same families in need!
This is exactly how capitalism works.
Feb 17, 2014
This article is from the February, 2014 edition of Workers’ Fight, the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in Britain.
In the last week of January, the Argentinian national currency suddenly lost 16% of its value in a matter of just two days. This was explained away by blaming the “profligacy” of the Argentinian government and its “unaffordable” social programs.
However, Argentina isn’t an isolated case. Over the past months, the currencies of a number of so-called “emerging” countries have been nosediving: the Argentinian peso was the worst affected, with a 35% loss against the dollar, followed by the Turkish lira (22%), the South African rand (19%), the Brazilian real (17%), the Chilean peso (15%), the Indian rupee (14%) and many others.
What has been happening is that over the past years, following the sharp reduction in interest rates in the rich countries, a form of speculation, known as the “carry trade,” has reached a record level. This involves borrowing large amounts of money in the rich countries where interest rates are low and lending them to poor countries where the interest rates are much higher. These loans are then used in the local economies, mainly in real estate.
However, after several years of fat profits made this way, two factors started to reverse this flow of speculative capital: first the fear that the real estate bubble created in some poor countries might burst; and second, the fact that the policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank is likely to result in a rise in interest rates in the rich countries.
Back in 1997, a similar mechanism caused a major financial crisis, albeit limited to South East Asia, with drastic consequences for the populations. The difference today, however, is that this is already affecting most poor countries–not just in South East Asia–and that this is taking place against the back-drop of a 6-year-long world crisis. And this may mean that this time the criminal irresponsibility of these speculators will aggravate the world economic crisis even further.
Feb 17, 2014
On the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s death, it is important to recall just what Leninism represented for the workers movement. This is especially true considering how much the term “Leninism” has been misrepresented, falsified, and emptied of its original meaning. It has been used to support policies that were the exact opposite of what Lenin had advocated and the opposite of the policies that allowed the Russian Revolution to succeed, the first victorious workers revolution in history. The falsification of Leninism by Stalin and his successors in the USSR has had devastating effects on the revolutionary workers movement and continues to do so today.
Capitalism’s defenders and hypocritical apologists continue to hate Lenin because he translated into action the heritage of Marx and Engels. Even in Lenin’s time, there were those who wanted to keep that heritage confined to library shelves. Resisting alien class pressures, Lenin fought to create the necessary tool for the emancipation of the working class: a fighting party composed of militants entirely devoted to the workers revolution–the Bolshevik Party.
He refused to remain in a unified party with the Mensheviks, who claimed to be more open but were in fact only more open to the pressures and influences of the bourgeoisie. Lenin made this decisive organizational choice starting in 1903. Because of this choice, Lenin was denounced as a sectarian, including from within the socialist movement before World War I.
Ideological discussions in defense of Marxism against all sorts of “new ideas” had an immense importance in arming militant workers in Russia both politically and practically. Equally important, those militant workers needed to be organized independently in their own party in order to lead the working class to victory when a revolutionary situation arose. It was a party in which militants and leaders were selected according to their devotion to the cause of the socialist revolution–that is, to the defense of the interests of the international working class.
When the revolution first broke out in Russia in 1905, neither Lenin nor the Bolshevik Party launched it. It was an uprising of the people whose initial spark was the bloody repression of a workers demonstration led by an Orthodox priest. However, Bolshevik militants were in the front lines of the general strike and in the establishment of the soviets (workers councils) that followed. And their party had no hesitation about militarily organizing the workers of Moscow when the workers, showing their determination, decided to confront the Tzar’s troops. Once the revolution’s offensive stage fell back, the Bolshevik Party, following Lenin’s lead, proposed to continue fighting the class enemy, including, eventually, at the electoral level. The elections and the Duma served as a tribune from which to address and respond to the demands of the working masses.
The Bolshevik Party was a fighting party, disciplined in its action, but it was also democratic, contrary to the lies told by its enemies both then and now. When Lenin found himself in the minority within his own party over the question of whether to participate in the elections after 1905, he deferred to the majority decision. He continued to defend his position, however, which ultimately won over the party ranks.
Lenin fought with intransigence to build this party of revolutionaries, contrary to what was happening in other countries. As a consequence, it was practically the only European party to maintain the banner of internationalism and socialism when World War I first broke out. The Bolshevik Party refused to rally to its national bourgeoisie as did the vast majority of European socialist parties and unions. But Lenin was not a pacifist: the party called on the masses, in their greatest moment of despair, to transform the imperialist war into a workers insurrection to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
The existence of such a party allowed the revolution that started in February 1917 in Petrograd to go up to the end of its possibilities, permitting the working class to come to power in October. Without the Bolshevik Party and Lenin, who was its most well-known leader, the revolution could not have triumphed. Temporarily hesitant, the party was re-oriented towards the pursuit of the workers revolution after Lenin directed a few letters and addressed the party in a speech in April 1917. The Menshevik leaders and their allies in government, on the other hand, cast themselves as defenders of “democracy,” which, in reality, meant a defense of the bourgeoisie.
To quote Rosa Luxemburg, the Bolshevik Party had “dared.” It was again Lenin who, with certain difficulties, convinced the party to take the step from which there was no turning back: to prepare in October 1917 for an armed insurrection to transfer power to the soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers. To do so, he had to oppose many of the party’s historic leaders, who did not dare to cut all ties with the old world.
The millions of Russian workers and peasants who made the revolution successfully resisted the combined capitalist forces who sent troops to crush the first workers state. They did so under the leadership of Trotsky, who created and led the Red Army.
Lenin, like Marx before him, saw the need to go up to the end of the possibilities offered by the period to overturn the established order. And he conceived it within the framework of the struggle by the international working class for a new socialist society. Using the prestige conferred on them by the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, Lenin and Trotsky worked to establish the Third International, proclaimed in 1919 when the Russian Civil War was in full swing. In order to mark a break with the social-democratic parties that had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie in 1914, the Communist International, the worldwide party of the revolution, called for the creation of revolutionary communist parties in every country.
It was tragic that the international working class and its militants did not have the time to build experienced parties with mass roots before the revolutionary wave that followed the end of World War I fell back. The absence of such parties proved fatal for the European workers revolution, despite the courageous fight of millions of workers and peasants, notably in Germany, Finland, and Hungary, from 1918 to 1923. With the complicity of the social-democratic leadership, the German bourgeoisie assassinated the most capable revolutionary leaders of Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, whose credit in the eyes of the population would have opened the door for the construction of a powerful communist party.
This defeat of the European working class had catastrophic consequences. In the USSR, it accelerated the degeneration of the workers revolution, which was left isolated in a backwards country. The victory of the bureaucratic reaction and the installation of a Stalinist dictatorship dug a ditch of blood cutting off the ideas and traditions upheld by Lenin and carried on after his death by the Bolshevik militants grouped around Trotsky. Stalinism was a monstrous caricature of what Lenin had built. One of the results of this betrayal was the transformation of the Stalinist parties into guardians of the bourgeois order alongside the social-democrats.
Today, in the United States as in other countries, the working class remains deprived of parties that represent its political interests. As the current crisis deepens, as the class warfare carried out by the international bourgeoisie intensifies, it is vital for the future that new generations reconnect with the revolutionary heritage of the workers movement dating back to its origins.
The working class cannot regain confidence and defeat the bourgeoisie without becoming conscious of its historic mission and giving new life to revolutionary communist parties, like the one that Lenin devoted his life to building.
Feb 17, 2014
This article is translated from part of an article in the February 14th, 2014 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
“The bourgeoisie has played an eminently revolutionary role in history,” Marx wrote in 1847. He recalled how this new social class had put an end to the privileges of the nobility and the constraints it had set, in order to develop production and trade at a global level, allowing for the peoples of the world to come together.
167 years later, does anything progressive about the bourgeoisie’s domination remain? Even the most impressive of its inventions and advancements end up being turned against us. A significant part of humanity is today dying of hunger or of minor diseases, but not because there isn’t enough food produced or because we don’t know how to cure these diseases. Millions of families are homeless, including in the richest countries on the planet, but not because we don’t know how to build houses!
Today, the bourgeoisie’s economic system is sunk in total stagnation, even giving few opportunities for the capitalist class to increase its profits. Its prosperity therefore relies essentially on worsening the level of exploitation.
The enrichment of the ruling class now depends on society’s general impoverishment and on the decline of public services, which is inevitably accompanied by the fracturing of society and by its moral degeneration.
It is in this situation that reactionary ideas and actions have flourished—attacks on immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, racist violence, anti-worker attacks. The only way to oppose the rise of reaction is to strike at the heart of this unjust and insane system. The only class capable of doing this and offering another social organization to humanity is the working class.
Workers must take up the fight for their own class interests. The workers are the only progressive force of our times. However, in order to step forward as a progressive force, they must take up the fight for their own class interests, and they must find again the will to impose their common demands: a job, a good wage, retirement, housing, and a decent existence. These demands, modest as they are, will force workers to confront the capitalist class. And when they become aware of this, they will have the power they need.
Workers must find the dignity that comes with knowing that they are the source of all wealth. They are the only ones with legitimate demands, since, contrary to the parasitic bourgeoisie that is driving this society over a cliff, they wear themselves out to make it even function!
The workers are the only ones who do not exploit anyone, and their interests are aligned with those of the rest of society, including independent workers, artisans, small businesspeople, and peasants, all of whose incomes depend on the buying power of wage-earners.
By fighting on their own grounds and going so far as to contest the bourgeoisie’s claim to rule, workers will allow the entire society to progress materially and morally, as they have always done.
For yes, the workers movement embodies moral values that are the exact opposite of those held by bourgeois society. Against the individualism and the every-man-for-himself mentality of this capitalist society, the workers movement is the bearer of solidarity and fraternity. Against the love of money, it upholds collective interests. Against nationalism, it holds the torch of internationalism.
Feb 17, 2014
In the spring of 2013, California’s Air Quality Management District reported that a very big battery recycling plant in Vernon, seven miles south of downtown Los Angeles, was emitting high levels of arsenic into the air, endangering the health of the 110,000 people in the working class communities that surround the plant.
This kind of report was nothing new for Exide Technologies, the giant multinational whose Vernon plant takes apart and smelts the contents of up to 40,000 car batteries every day.
Between 1999-2000, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) found heavy concentrations of lead in the sediment at the bottom of the storm water retention ponds near the plant. According to news reports at the time, the DTSC “was clearly aware” that the company had purposely put holes in the lines even though lead could leak into the soil.
In 2004 and again in 2008, the DTSC took emergency measures to force Exide to clean up a lead-contaminated drainage channel, and public areas like sidewalks, streets, and neighboring roofs.
In 2004, Exide paid $3,000 to settle two air quality violations with state regulators.
In 2006, the DTSC fined Exide $39,000 for failing to minimize the possibility of hazardous releases.
In 2007, a study prepared at the request of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board estimated “that in the last three years, Exide has contributed through deposition approximately 424 lbs. of lead in both 2004 and 2005 and 712 lbs of lead in 2006 to the watershed.”
And on and on... year after year. Meanwhile, the Exide plant continued to spew poisons that caused cancer, autoimmune diseases, asthma and learning disabilities.
But starting in the spring of 2013, many people from the surrounding area began to mobilize. They picketed the plant. They picketed government offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento. They jammed public hearings. A community spokeswoman, Dolores Mejia, denounced the company and government regulators as “The Cartel of Contamination.”
Faced with this increasing mobilization, the regulators shut down the Exide plant for a couple of months–only to have a judge order the plant reopened last summer.
Meanwhile, the plant continues to pollute, with at least three reports of high lead readings by government regulators since the fall. As one activist told a town hall meeting last October, “Exide is gassing our children, our people.”
Feb 17, 2014
The Detroit City Council agreed to “sell” 39 parcels of city-owned land for the construction of a new 450 million dollar hockey arena to billionaire Mike Ilitch–for $1.
Under the agreement, the city will sell the land to the Detroit Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which collects property taxes in downtown Detroit, none of which goes into the city budget. The DDA will contribute 261 million dollars from property taxes it collects to pay for almost 60 per cent of the costs to build the arena. The DDA will, in turn, allow the Ilitich-owned Olympia Entertainment to “manage” the entertainment complex for up to 95 years. Olympia will receive ALL of the revenue generated by the arena, including concessions, parking and naming rights.
The only money Olympia will have to pay in the deal is 188 million dollars to the State of Michigan to pay off bonds the State will issue for the initial construction on the property.
The city of Detroit will receive ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in return for handing over the land which it took over through tax liens and doing all of the work to condemn, clear, and prepare it. The City Council cannot even claim any longer that the deal will provide any long-term jobs, since it chose to leave out any requirement for Olympia to hire Detroit residents for those positions.
People living in the city of Detroit will, however, be asked to pay back the costs paid by the city to acquire the land it just handed over and for services the city provides to the arena–all so that the greedy, grasping, vulture billionaire Ilitch can reap the profits from it. It’s criminal!
Feb 17, 2014
Last week the Washington, D.C. government massively expanded its “safe streets” program, with the addition of 100 new ticketing cameras.
Do all these cameras make the streets any safer? Authorities point to a reduction in fatalities since starting the program, but that’s been due to improvements in emergency medicine and in automotive technology.
In fact, as people learn the locations of the cameras, they do modify their driving–at least near the cameras. So each camera tends to generate less revenue as it ages. The city’s “solution” to this problem is simple–just keep adding more cameras and more types of infractions! They started with “just” a handful in 1999–and now they’re up to nearly 300 cameras with even more already being planned. And those cameras ticket everything, from speeding as little as “1-5” miles per hour over the limit, to stop sign violations, to not stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks.
Even more insane is a recent study done by University of Tennessee traffic engineers. The study showed that under “budget” pressure, municipalities with red light camera programs were shaving time from yellow lights, removing “signal ahead” warning signs, and increasing the number of green-red cycles so that so that more people are placed in danger of running a red. Yes, these so-called crash preventers are actually crash generators!
Well over 100 million dollars have been raked in from camera tickets. THAT is what city officials care about–not safety.
Feb 17, 2014
The Democratic Speaker of the Illinois House, Mike Madigan, introduced a bill at the end of January cutting the corporate tax rate in half. This will cost the state about $1.5 billion a year. A week later, his good buddy John Cullerton, the Democratic President of the Illinois Senate, announced that Chicago teachers will have to accept big cuts to their pensions because the state can’t afford to put in its share.
We can tell right there whose interests the Democrats serve!
Feb 17, 2014
On Thursday, January 16th, the stock price of Citigroup, the third largest bank in the United States, fell by 3.87%. And yet, the bank had just announced profits of 13.9 billion dollars for 2013, representing an 84% growth. Its Chief Financial Officer even celebrated the “most profitable year since 2006.”
Very nice, but … the financiers were hoping for even more, and their disappointment registered in a drop in the share price.
It’s not easy to satisfy Wall Street and the sharks of finance!
Feb 17, 2014
16-year-old Ethan Couch had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and had Valium in his system when he plowed his pickup truck into a group of people helping a woman whose car had stalled. He killed four people and severely injured two more, one of whom is paralyzed and can only communicate by blinking. Yet he was sentenced to no jail time. Instead, he got probation and was ordered to go to a country-club rehabilitation facility paid for by his parents.
His legal team pulled a new trick out of their, ... er, hats: They hired an expert to testify that Couch had “affluenza.” He was so rich and so coddled by his parents, they said, that he never learned how to be responsible. And the judge bought it!
Sounds like a sickness our whole society needs to be cured of!
Feb 17, 2014
After years of organized pressure and lawsuits from victims and their families, the Governor of Florida finally allowed children’s bodies to be exhumed on the campus of what was once the U.S.’s largest “reform school” for boys, in rural Marianna in the Florida Panhandle.
Forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida announced in January that 55 bodies had been discovered and sent for DNA testing. In February, a wider search for bodies began. State, school and historical records indicate at least 98 deaths occurred at Dozier Reform School between 1913 and 1960. In addition, researcher Andre Puel identified admission records for 169 “escaped” boys where records show “they were not discharged.” There is no record of what happened to them.
Over 300 black and white former residents from the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s–now senior citizens–have stepped forward to describe life at this “campus.” Most were from very poor families and were taken there–some with no legal hearing–for the “crime” of not being at school.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Dozier had more than 100 year’s history of problems. “The first scandal came in 1903, a mere three years after the school opened. Investigators found children [as young as age 6] ‘in irons, just as common criminals.’”
According to a press release by the Black Boys at Dozier Reform School, “Some of the black boys were taken to local farms and plantations to work from sunup to sundown planting and harvesting crops.... Over the years, the facility operated as a farm and made millions of dollars off the free labor of the boys at Dozier.”
Survivors issued more statements in a gripping press conference on August 4, 2013. One former resident, John Gaddy, told of being 11 years old when police sent him to Dozier. He said that guards would send dogs after boys who tried to escape, and runaways were not seen again.
He told how when he and a friend were taking kitchen scraps to the hogs on one occasion, he looked into the garbage pit. “That looks just like a boy’s hand right there,” John said. His friend said, “Don’t ever say that again. If you don’t want to be like that, don’t ever say that again.”
Another former resident, Richard Huntley, who was an orphan, testified: "You speak of injustice. What do you think when children are beaten, raped, abused and worked like slaves in the milk area. What do you think when you get beat until the blood runs down your legs and your lower body feels numb, knowing that at any given moment at Dozier you could become one of the boys buried there in the woods."
Another former resident, John Bonner, says that by the late 60’s, the school was being integrated, so Bonner lived on both sides of the campus during his stay.
"This was a living hell for many boys, black and white. This school destroyed the lives of many boys, black and white. I am back today seeking justice and closure. I will not abandon these boys buried here for they have been forgotten and denied far too long and justice is near."
The state of Florida closed the school–but not until 2011! The state now wants to sell the 1400-acre property. However, family members of deceased boys were able to get a judge to stop the sale until bodies can be identified.
Florida is not alone. Other states have stories similar to Dozier, but Florida is the first case of organized victims and families pressing for justice. May it be the first of many fights!
Feb 17, 2014
The Good Lord Bird is a new novel by James McBride, a black author of historical fiction. It tells the story of the fight against slavery, leading up to the Civil War.
The narrator is a 12-year-old-child, liberated from slavery by abolitionist John Brown. He ends up traveling with Brown’s rag-tag band of fighters. The child humorously tunes out John Brown any time he starts his long-winded preaching of the Bible, but he sticks by John Brown none-the-less.
The child, “Onion,” is a whopper of a good story teller, but because of his lack of life experience, he often gets the wrong idea about what is going on right in front of him. The goofball humor of the narrator allows very serious topics to be explained, explored and digested by the reader.
The book is a wild adventure about the fight against slavery. Before you know it, the humor and the satire help you understand the common sense way ordinary people could decide it was time to risk their lives to fight slavery. Real people from the Underground Railroad, such as Harriet Tubman, come to life in this book.
Underneath the author’s Mark Twain-like humor lies a deep respect for John Brown and the fighters against slavery. As the novel progresses and the narrator grows up, the child learns to fight in ways that he never knew he had within him.
The book fleshes out John Brown, with his strengths and weaknesses, as well as giving human portrayals of other fighters against slavery—with both their heroism and their human foibles. If you stick with this book to its end, you will be glad you did.