 We spent our first night in the Los Angeles area at the Barton Hill Community Center in San Pedro. Organizers from the Barton Hill Neighborhood !
Association, Inner City Struggle, the Labor Party, ACORN, the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, and other groups all welcomed us warmly as the freedom riders poured out of the bus singing. There at dinner, we met for a discussion with the organizers of our stop. Speakers painted a picture of California and Los Angeles that sounded all too familiar: huge cuts in welfare and general assistance programs, dozens of new prisons, and increasing poverty and homelessness. It is estimated that by the year 2000, two out of three children in California will be hungry.  The next morning after breakfast, showers, and packing, we left to march through San Pedro housing projects with Dee Petty, of the Ba!
rton Hill Neighborhood Association, and other local organizers. At noon the Freedom Bus joined protesters at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors building. As they blocked the street, we joined them protesting the general relief (GR) cuts that will cut 48,000 people off GR in Los Angeles County alone. With no other options, it's expected that many of these people will become homeless. We stood and sang and chanted with protesters for an hour, then filed on; later we heard that police in riot gear had arrested these freedom fighters after the bus left.
Next we marched through a poor neighborhood in Long Beach with members of the Labor Party. We talked with residents about our campaign and invited them to the tribunal that after!
noon. Finally we ate lunch and travelled to our last event of the day, a human rights tribunal at First Congregational Church in Long Beach. Secretary/Treasurer of the local Oil, Chemical and Atomic workers union Dave Campbell started the tribunal and set the stage. "We live in a society where the almighty dollar rules over all other values," he said. "Your campaign will shift the focus of the debate in this country." The judges for the tribunal included multiple pastors involved in social justice, mebers of the Coalition to End Homelessness in Long Beach, Dee Petty of the Barton Hill Neighborhood Association, and Dave Campbell. The tribunal included some of the!
most moving testimony we have heard. Maria Texeira works with Inner City Struggle and helped bring the Freedom Bus to Los Angeles; she testified about her father. He contracted bone cancer as a result of hazardous working conditions, and couldn't get the prescribed medications needed to ease his suffering because his medical coverage wouldn't pay for them.  We heard from a woman whose welfare was cut and who is now working two jobs and playing catch-up on bills. She was without gas for two and a half months.
We heard from a woman whose brother didn't get treatment for an overactive thyroid because the bill from a his first cl!
inic appointment was $155. He died at age twenty-eight of Grave's disease. He left a six-month old daughter, a pregnant wife, and a mother who as a result of the stress and grief of this painful loss of a son. And we heard from a man who had worked for Johnson Control since 1982, until the head of his factory discovered automation. First the two rotating shifts were cut, then the third shift, then the second shift, and then they cut the first shift, leaving just a fraction of the workers and robots doing the work. He has been in and out of work since 1996, and on and off of general relief. But the general relief cuts leave him praying that his next job interview pans out.  The judges decided unanimously that the United States was guilty of violating articles 23, 25, and 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
After the tribunal we went to the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers local 1-675 union hall, where we were able to eat dinner and sleep overnight. We were glad to be hosted by this union - OCAW is a major union in the Labor Party. OCAW, like the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, is committed to building the Labor Party as a party of all working and unemployed people in this country. We took off early for the long trip to El Paso, Texas. [Next] [Pr!
evious] |
