Labor Day calling for Reparations

This is a time of collective reckoning, a time when those not part of the essential work force have been sent to their rooms, a time when we, as a nation, are called to reckon with the roots of this ever diminishing democracy having been built on stolen land from Indigenous peoples and constructed through 246 years of free labor of enslaved black bodied peoples.*

This year has put my calling to reconcile with my own history on steroids. As a white bodied Jewish woman nearing the close of her 50’s I have been sheltering in place in my one bedroom apartment in the company of my furry companion, Molly, inherited from my father, along with a couple of his file cabinets filled with his life long work as a commercial artist. My father died in the summer of 2018. Four months earlier, my mother died.

My mother was a life long trade union activist. She had a brief stint of factory work during her teens. I think my father may have as well, having both been encouraged through their involvement in the Communist Party. They met in the Sacco and Vanzetti Labor Youth league in Coney Island. Sometime in the late fifties, they went to Chicago to set up a safe house for communists during the McCarthy period.

Sometime in the 1980’s, my mother received her FBI file through the Freedom Of Information Act. It’s then that I learned what “redaction” meant, as pages were filled more with marked out words than revealed print. My mother’s file began when she was 16 years old with her name appearing in the communist paper, “The Daily Worker” after she got 1,000 signatures in support of the Stockholm Peace Treaty. We also found out that my parents were followed during their time in Chicago, while my mother was pregnant with my older brother. I feel almost sentimental for those old fashioned ways of surveillance given today’s capacity for state repression.

My mother was able to stay home with her two young kids and continued with her political activism. After my father left when I was nine, my mother re-entered the paid work force and worked her way up in the auto industry through the United Auto Workers union from shop steward to sub-Regional director in New York as International staff member in the union itself.

I sit here, in my main room that is a living room, dining room and workspace (thank you, Zoom) accompanied by her many awards. She followed in the footsteps of her father, my maternal grandfather, in solidarity, trade union work and a life long dedication to social justice.

I am proud of my people. I want to honor them and the people who built and now keep my community alive. I want to praise up the working class, the under employed, the underpaid and undervalued. And with this, praise up the call for reparations for labor never paid and exacted in blood, devastation of family bonds in the long, harrowing legacy of slavery continuing through the prison industrial complex, through public murders of young black lives at the hands of police, through white militias and through dog whistle politics in present day elections.

May we deepen the honoring of labor in this country with Reparations.

* 246 years was time given by Dr. Ron Daniels of IBW/ NAARC during teaching yesterday.