Time To Shut It Down! A Day Of Action & ILWU Juneteenth At Port Of Oakland

The ILWU on Juneteenth 2020 stopped work and thousands rallied at the Port of Oakland on June 19, 2020. Speakers talked about the fight against police terror and systemic racism. They then marched to Oscar Grant Plaza in downtown Oakland for another rally.

The Committee To Stop Police Terror and Systemic Racism initiated by the ILWU organized the rally and all West Coast ports including Vancouver, B.C. Canada were shutdown in protest against the murder of George Floyd and the thousands of other Black and Brown people who been brutalized and murdered. Speakers also talked about the effort to privatize and destroy the port by billionaire John Fisher who owns the GAP and the A's.

Additional media:
Angela Davis At The Port Of Oakland: Speech to ILWU Juneteenth Work Action On June 19, 2020
https://youtu.be/WH_J1BcULIg

Shut The World Down! Boots Riley At 2020 Juneteenth At Oakland Oscar Grant Plaza
https://youtu.be/s0D6oGzChlg

ILWU Locals 10 Trent Willis & 34 President Keith Shanklin On Democracy, Labor/Politics & Juneteenth
https://youtu.be/6bVkOYvDEp8

All Out On Juneteenth! "An Injury to One Is An Injury To All" ILWU Juneteenth Press Conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWYn9GuByWg

ILWU Local 10 & 34 Leaders Speak Out On Juneteenth & Fight Against Racism & Worker Action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auWwn_Sg3BM

The rally and march was sponsored by
The Committe To Stop Police Terrorism and Systemic Racism
https://www.juneteenthspt.com

Production of Labor Video Project
http://www.laborvideo.org

Bay Area Juneteenth Event Includes Protest Against Right Wing Billionaire Fisher Family: Taking Public Space from Minorities in SF and Oakland

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/18/bay-area-juneteenth-event-includes-protest-against-right-wing-billionaire-fisher-family-taking-public-space-from-minorities-in-sf-and-oakland/

JUNE 18, 2020
by ANNA M. HENNESSEY
“San Francisco and the Bay Bridge” by ATIS547 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Doris Fisher, who is a KIPP Charter School founder, and her sons (Robert, John, and William) are currently using their money to dismantle the public school system in San Francisco and take public land in Oakland. The main people affected by the Fisher’s privatization are low-income minorities.

The billionaire Fisher family from San Francisco is part of a dark money group known as “Americans for Job Security” that supported Republicans with millions of dollars in the 2010 midterm elections and the 2012 presidential election. Other prominent donors to the fund include right-wing supporter, Charles Schwab, who has donated significant funds to back Donald Trump and pay Trump’s legal fees, as well as the DeVos family. Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, is well known for her strong support of the charter school movement across the country.

This month, KIPP sued the already cash strapped San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), with officials stating that they want more space at Malcolm X Academy, a K-5 public school in San Francisco. In 2018, KIPP Bayview Elementary began appropriating space for transitional kindergarten and now seeks to overtake more space for second, third, and eventually fourth grade classes, a move that takes resources from students at Malcolm X. Malcolm X Academy is a school historically devoted to serving low-income students (95% of the school population), including African American, Latinos and Pacific Islanders. Like other charter schools, KIPP drains the public school system, depleting funds and physical space for students most in need at Malcolm X.

Both the Black Lives Matter and the NAACP have raised alarms about charter school growth in California and elsewhere, emphasizing how charter privatization of schools in the US is a deep problem for social justice.

In the meantime, Doris Fisher’s son John is head of a movement to turn the Port of Oakland into thousands of $1 million dollar condos to finance a project known as the Howard Terminal Project. That project includes construction of a new ballpark for the Oakland A’s. John Fisher owns the A’s. The Port of Oakland includes miles of waterfront property with public parks traditionally serving Oakland, a city and community with a large minority population.

The Juneteenth event in Oakland this coming Friday 6/19 is devoted to stopping police terror and ending systemic racism, as well as to stopping privatization of our public spaces, including the Port of Oakland.

Racism is about physical violence to human bodies. But it is also about the insidious ways in which the wealthy steal land and resources from minority populations.


\ANNA M. HENNESSEY
Anna Hennessey is a writer, scholar, and book author in San Francisco.