Vasha Hunt/AP Photo
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, stands atop the Edmund Pettus Bridge, May 8, 2021, in Selma, Alabama.
A cross-country bus caravan, led by Black Voters Matter and the UNITE HERE hospitality workers union, hailing from 21 states, converged on the U.S. Capitol on June 26 to fight back against a resurgence of voter suppression bills nationwide and advocate for federal voting rights legislation, as well as statehood for Washington, D.C.
“It’s a shame that 60 years later after the last Freedom Ride, we still have to fight for the right to vote,” said José Maldonado, president of UNITE HERE Local 100, standing in front of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx Saturday morning as members—predominantly Black and Latino—filed into parked buses. The union, representing restaurant and food service workers in New York and New Jersey, had roughly 300 members travel on ten buses to participate in the 1,500-strong rally.
“If they don’t do the right thing, the unions in the community are going to vote these guys out,” said Maldonado. “It’s fundamental to our organization that we stand for civil and immigrant rights and stop discrimination and racism.”
Gerard Cerda, a worker at Madison Square Garden who sits on the local’s executive board, provided a mini lesson on coalition building and the freedom struggle, speaking in Spanish to monolingual members about the links tying the struggles of African Americans to those of Latinos.
“What affects Black folks traditionally affects us as well, because we tend to be in a lower economic end,” said Cerda. “So we need to stick together. If you’re gonna suppress my brother’s vote, you are suppressing my vote as well.”
The caravan, “Freedom Ride for Voting Rights,” departed from Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, on June 19 as part of the 60th anniversary commemorating the original Freedom Rides of 1961 to the Jim Crow South. That kickoff date also marked the Juneteenth holiday when on June 19, 1865, enslaved African American workers got word in Galveston, Texas, of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freeing them from the plantation yoke of their enslavers. This year, Juneteenth became the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Day was established in 1983.
For UNITE HERE’s new freedom riders, that struggle includes holding Biden himself to the bold agenda he was elected to enact.
The bus caravan comes as lawmakers have introduced 389 bills in 48 states to restrict voting rights and preserve minoritarian rule by Republicans. To snuff any potential resistance to their power, Republican lawmakers have also sought to criminalize protest with an additional 34 anti-demonstration bills, including measures that would make it easier for drivers to mow down protesters in vehicular attacks.
“When does it stop?” asked McKinley Jefferson, a concessions worker at Madison Square Garden and member of UNITE HERE Local 100’s executive board.
“When I used to travel from New York to South Carolina and Georgia, I never understood why we couldn’t eat in certain restaurants,” Jefferson said, recounting an experience from his childhood. “My mother cooked chicken, and we’d always sit in the car and eat. I didn’t understand at the time that only certain people could sit in restaurants.”
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In his first address to Congress, President Biden charged that insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol “desecrated our democracy,” and put it to the “test of whether our democracy could survive.”
“But the struggle is far from over,” he concluded.
For UNITE HERE’s new freedom riders, that struggle includes holding Biden himself to the bold agenda he was elected to enact. Mark Richmond from UNITE HERE Local 100 says that the president is wasting his time with bipartisan efforts.
“Unfortunately, the other side, they’re not interested in that,” said Richmond. “While we have the ability to go ahead and pass the regulations that we need and want, we have to do it. Because if the situation gets reversed, they’re not gonna be looking for bipartisanship. They’re gonna bring a gun to a knife fight.”
“Coming on this freedom ride and stopping at places like the lynching museum [the National Memorial for Peace and Justice] and seeing where Martin Luther King was murdered brought the surrealness of what’s going on to my mind and reminded me that the filibuster, a Jim Crow relic, needs to be gotten rid of completely,” said Air Force veteran Marilyn Wilbur of UNITE HERE’s bistate Local 11 and a worker at Arizona State University.
For Wilbur, the battle lines are close to home. In Arizona, she notes, “they’ve passed a bill that takes off thousands of people from a permanent early-voting list, which has worked for years. Now all of a sudden, it doesn’t work.”
“My senator says John Lewis was her mentor,” Wilbur added, referring to Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who with her West Virginia colleague Joe Manchin stands athwart abolishing the filibuster. “She needs to pass the For the People Act by any means necessary.”
The act would nullify the state-level voter suppression bills, restore teeth to the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, and rebalance the disproportionate influence of the rich through campaign finance reform.
Arizona’s voter suppression bill comes as UNITE HERE members like Wilbur mobilized in the thousands to knock on three million doors to drag Joe Biden over the finish line, going door-to-door, at a time when hardly anyone else was, in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
“We did so well in the presidential, they called us back for the Senate,” said Tembi Hove, a UNITE HERE banquet server at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, who canvassed voters for Biden and then for successful Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock.
Hove rode the bus from New Orleans, and related how the original Freedom Riders were supposed to end up in Louisiana but didn’t make it, as they were routed by racists who bombed their bus.
“They don’t teach that in school,” she noted.
“We are not going to stand by and let our voting power be taken away,” she said, with a resolve instilled in her by her parents’ struggles against colonialism in the former British colony of Rhodesia, or modern-day Zimbabwe.
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“We are the ones most affected,” she added, referring to workers of color. “That’s why I jumped on that bus to New Orleans and rode for nine days.”
