The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio, April 16, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 The Columbus Dispatch
The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

Distributed by Knight/Ridder Tribune News Service

April 16, 2006 Sunday

SECTION: STATE AND REGIONAL NEWS

HEADLINE: Civil-rights veterans laud recent marches

BYLINE: Sherri Williams, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

BODY:
Apr. 16--By raising their voices and taking to the streets, millions of marchers advocating immigration reform in recent weeks have given birth to an extension of the civil-rights movement, some observers say.
Immigrant-rights activists learned an important lesson from 1960s civil-rights activists: Get in the streets to be heard, said the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a veteran civil-rights activist and Cincinnati resident.
"Marches bring attention to a cause," said Shuttlesworth, 83, who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham and Selma, Ala. "If you are not in the streets, you don't interest the average politicians of the day."
But among the sea of marchers for immigrants' rights across the country, few black faces and voices have been prominent.
"It's human nature. When you get yours, you've got it and you try to do anything to keep it," Shuttlesworth said.
However, "all people who believe in justice and righteousness should be part of this," he said.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson told The Dispatch that black leaders have been preoccupied with Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts and the Iraq war, but they will support immigrants.
"As they begin to demand citizenship and the right to vote and organize, it could be the salvation of the workers' movement in this country," he said. "The other reason why blacks would be sensitive to this is because, for 246 years, we were undocumented workers without citizenship."
Jackson said he attended an immigration rally, as have black civil-rights leaders such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and Bruce Gordon, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Immigrants borrowing tactics from the civil-rights era is questionable, said Horace Neal II, an adjunct faculty member at Columbus State Community College. Neal, 41, who is black, said some immigrants don't respect blacks but use the movement's strategies for their own gains.
Blacks shouldn't be expected to ally with immigrants, because the immigrant-rights movement is pushing undocumented workers into the mainstream and in direct competition with blacks for jobs, said Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University labor-economics professor.
"No group has benefited less from immigration than the black community," said Briggs, a contributor to the 2004 book Impact of Immigration on African Americans. "Most of the low-wage workers are black. Jobs are already being outsourced. Low-wage jobs are rapidly vanishing."
But Jackson said that argument wrongly pits blacks against Latinos, many of whom are of African descent, and takes attention away from legislation that has created a hostile job market.
"They didn't take our jobs; the corporate policy did that," Jackson said. "That's the invisible hand behind all of this, exporting capital and labor and jobs."
Now that immigrants are mobilizing, they are positioning themselves to be a powerful ally to blacks, said Ezra Escudero, executive director of the Ohio Commission on Hispanic/ Latino Affairs.
"The civil-rights concerns of the black community and the immigrant community can come together and strengthen each other," he said. "We've got to try to work together on this and not let people try to polarize black and brown and all the other colors of the rainbow."
Immigrants stand on the shoulders of blacks who paved the way for rallies such as the one at the Statehouse on March 26, Escudero said, and have learned persistence and peaceful protest from blacks.
Mayor Michael B. Coleman, Columbus' first black mayor, spoke at the rally because embracing the city's newest residents is important to him, spokesman Mike Brown said.
"It's not a black-and-white issue, it's not a black-andbrown issue," he said. "It's about what is the right way to treat people with respect. It's the American way."
Ruben Castilla Herrera, local Latino activist, helped organize the immigration rally with the Ohio Immigrant Network. Black leaders were not in on the planning because it was a time for the immigrants to mobilize themselves, he said.
However, black, Asian and white allies will be brought into the local movement, he said.
"In Columbus, if we are to move forward, we have to move together."
sherri.williams@dispatch.com
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