Our trip to Houston was planned to coincide with the Bertha Capen Reynolds Society (BCRS) National Conference. The BCRS is a national organization !
of social workers seeking a better way to practice and becoming politically involved. Fred Newdom and other BCRS members helped make the Freedom Bus an integral part of the conference, recognizing the importance of uniting with poor people leading the movement to end poverty. The society fed us and helped organize our rally.
The Freedom Bus arrived in Houston late Friday night. Saturday morning the bus took us to the University of Houston, where Cheri Honkala and the Freedom Riders were welcomed at the conference's plenary session. Afterwards the Freedom Bus and conference attenders went to a rally the Freedman's Town housing projects, originally a colony for freed slaves. Today, the projects are threatened to be closed.
At the rally, residents of local housing projects told of their struggles against demolition of their homes -- the same story in Houston as we heard in Chicago. Former residents of the Allen Parkway Village projects, which had been forcibly emptied for demolition, were on hand to help other poor people from Freedman's Town. The area was clearly under attack - in addition to the destruction of public and low-income housing, education, health and youth programs, like Headstart, had all been shut down. One local leader who had been through many of these struggles spoke passionately - if they have studied our community, then systematically moved in and destroyed our community with military precision, we need to do the same, "!
we need to build an army" of people in these communities who can fight back. Also at the rally were suporters from the Houston Imigration and Refugee Coalition, Houston ACORN, and the Houston National Organization for Women (NOW). Immigrants, we heard, are not accessing prenatal or other health care for fear of the INS. We heard many more moving testimonies, even from children who were subject to these human rights abuses.
After the rally we headed back to the conference for lunch, provided by the BCRS. Then Cheri, Willie Baptist (KWRU education director), Dr. Mary Bricker-Jenkins from the Temple University school of social work, and Barbara Kasper and underg!
raduate students from SUNY Brockport presented a workshop at the conference. They talked with BCRS members about how social workers could effectively play a role in this growing movement to end poverty. SUNY Brockport students had linked up with poor people in Rochester; their effort grew from documenting human rights abuses to relationships which laid the groundwork for a stop of the freedom bus. Willie emphasized the fact that the struggle is not one of "those people's problems;" in recent downsizing in Philadelphia, hundreds of social workers have lost their jobs. "In the end, all we have is each other," he continued, "so more important than the victories we might win - housing for this group of people, !
etc. - is the real organization we build."
After the workshop, we said goodbye to the BRCS and boarded the bus at 3:00 pm. The trip from Houston to Washington, D.C. was our longest drive of the month: 30 hours. We didn't arrive in Washington until 9:00 pm the next day.
Our trip to Houston was planned to coincide with the Bertha Capen Reynolds Society (BCRS) National Conference. The BCRS is a national organization !
of social workers seeking a better way to practice and becoming politically involved. Fred Newdom and other BCRS members helped make the Freedom Bus an integral part of the conference, recognizing the importance of uniting with poor people leading the movement to end poverty. The society fed us and helped organize our rally. 
At the rally, residents of local housing projects told of their struggles against demolition of their homes -- the same story in Houston as we heard in Chicago. Former residents of the Allen Parkway Village projects, which had been forcibly emptied for demolition, were on hand to help other poor people from Freedman's Town. The area was clearly under attack - in addition to the destruction of public and low-income housing, education, health and youth programs, like Headstart, had all been shut down. One local leader who had been through many of these struggles spoke passionately - if they have studied our community, then systematically moved in and destroyed our community with military precision, we need to do the same, "!
we need to build an army" of people in these communities who can fight back. Also at the rally were suporters from the Houston Imigration and Refugee Coalition, Houston ACORN, and the Houston National Organization for Women (NOW). Immigrants, we heard, are not accessing prenatal 
or other health care for fear of the INS. We heard many more moving testimonies, even from children who were subject to these human rights abuses.
movement to end poverty. SUNY Brockport students had linked up with poor people in Rochester; their effort grew from documenting human rights abuses to relationships which laid the groundwork for a stop of the freedom bus. Willie emphasized the fact that the struggle is not one of "those people's problems;" in recent downsizing in Philadelphia, hundreds of social workers have lost their jobs. "In the end, all we have is each other," he continued, "so more important than the victories we might win - housing for this group of people, !
etc. - is the real organization we build."