In Message from the Grassroots, perhaps his most powerful speech, Malcolm X reminded us that "you don't catch hell because you're a Methodist or Baptist, you don't catch hell because you're a Democrat or a Republican, you don't catch hell because you're a Mason or an Elk... You catch hell because you're a black man.... All of us catch hell for the same reason." Malcolm could just as easily have said that we don't catch hell because we're Haitian or African American. A white supremacist system sees us as Black people. Abner Louima was not tortured because he was Haitian, nor was Amadou Diallo gunned down by the police because he was from Guinea. The offending officers saw no difference. In their eyes they were inferior, scorned Black men. Malcolm saw Black unity/ solidarity as the counter and corrective of racism and white supremacy.
While Local 355 will continue to accept support from organizations and the community at large for the new initiative in the upcoming months, one of its first actions will be to formally request that Broward County commissioners implement a "worker retention policy" to ensure that concession workers at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport do not lose their jobs, even as their employers' contracts are being evaluated, [Jay Mehta] said. "The survey shows us that the best way to express our solidarity is to...continue to fight," said UNITE HERE Local 355 organizer Romane Petit Joseph, referring to the union's original purpose, which includes working toward quality jobs, workers' rights, immigration reform and living wages.
107 p., Stephanie St Clair was born in 1897 on the island of Guadeloupe. In 1923 she created and ran a highly-lucrative policy bank in Harlem. By 1926, the operation earned a quarter of a million dollars To this day, she remains the only black female gangster to run a numbers bank of that size St Clair also contributed generously to the community and advocated for racial uplift. This thesis explores some of the factors that influenced her decision to become an entrepreneur who would create and run her own enterprise; and, paradoxically, become an activist within her community. Also implicit, and therefore a component of the inquiry, was St. Clair's decision to describe herself as a lady when the definition would not have applied to her in that era.
68 p., A collection of poems that explores the immigrant experience, detailing three worlds that forge a Caribbean-American voice. All three sections of the manuscript examine an identity that comes directly, almost solely, from her surroundings. In the tradition of Louise Bennett, the use of dialect aside, Section I attempts to comprehend a narrow Caribbean existence by scrutinizing a life that is tied to nature, family, and country. Section II sees the world slightly more broadly, but there the speaker is also acutely aware of her identity and the complexity in bridging the two worlds she now finds herself simultaneously occupying, one immediate, the other existing only through reflection.
