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The following are excerpts from a speech given by Mike Alewitz at the dedication ceremonies for the mural at the Communications Workers of America Local 9000 Building in Los Angeles, August 26, 1993. The mural was dedicated to the victims of police violence, in the aftermath of the Rodney King Rebellion, which began on April 29, 1992.- - - - - - - - - - - -...The immediate cause of the Los Angeles rebellion was the brutal beating of Rodney King. What we saw on television was not new to the labor movement. We have seen these same police during the P-9 strike. We saw them during the Pittston miners strike. We saw them right here in Los Angeles during the Justice for Janitors strike. We have seen these swaggering cops before, in South Africa, Birmingham, Selma, and in El Salvador. They are all trained to protect private property and defend inequality.
The underlying cause of the rebellion in Los Angeles was racism, unemployment and poverty. Those conditions will continue to exist until we build a society that respects labor. It will continue until there is recognition of the particular contributions of African-American labor, slave and black wageworker, to the building of our society.
Until that happens, nothing is going to be done to rebuild Los Angeles. They have not done anything about Newark, and that's been over twenty years. It will only begin to happen when labor has some power. Then we can use our power to create jobs. We could use our power to reduce the workweek. We could use our power to organize all workers into unions.
To do this we must rebuild our own movement. Until there is a union movement strong enough to lead sit-downs and strikes, workers will be driven to unorganized destruction. Until a labor party exists to challenge the Democrats and Republicans we will be voiceless in Washington D.C., in Sacramento and in Los Angeles. People will feel that they must burn down their own city to get a simple act of justice.
To rebuild our movement we must relearn our traditions, like what a picket line is for, or how to stop production. We must also relearn our cultural traditions. The cultural and spiritual concerns of workers are a union issue. That is what the Labor Art and Mural Project is about, the real tradition of a singing and painting movement.
This mural came from the contributions of many, to say that we are in solidarity with the victims of racism, unemployment and police violence. I am dedicating this work to those victims. I do this with the confidence that the justified rage, which fueled this explosion, will find expression in a reborn, militant labor movement that will organize the unorganized to rebuild this city and the entire country.
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ABOUT THE MURAL:
...Alewitz returned a year later, after the Rebellion of May, 1991 (during which the Southern California Library wall remained unscathed, although in the heart of one of the most riot-torn areas) to paint another mural. While many decried the violence and futility of the rebellion, Alewitz saw the willingness of people to respond to injustice, despite the failures of their leaders, as essentially positive. How different might the outcome of the struggle have been if the labor movement had taken the lead in mobilizing the population against the beating of fellow worker Rodney King. It had the potential to forge a powerful alliance between labor and the African- American and Latino communities not only in Los Angeles, but throughout the country.
Alewitz decided to organize the mural project to raise that issue within the movement. He arranged for the initial support from the Industrial Union Council. He then approached the actors’ union, AFTRA, and its first vice-president, the film, television and theater actor John Connolly. Together the pair organized support within AFTRA, and procured the endorsement of a number of Hollywood luminaries, including Charles Dutton, Debbie Allen, and Edward Asner. The Los Angeles Federation of Labor agreed to host the project, while the Labor Heritage Foundation acted as the fiscal sponsor.
Throughout the project, Alewitz and his allies worked to promote the idea of independent political action, at a time when building a labor party was actively being discussed in the labor movement.
Created for the Communications Workers of American building in Los Angeles (and dedicated, most unusually for any AFL-CIO building, “to the victims of police violence”) this mural instantly recalls the famed IWW banner for the Paterson Strike benefit in 1913, with the “advancing proletariat” stepping from a mill-town background into the scene, toward the viewer. This time it was a Third World worker with a background (and foreground) far more hideous, including Ku Klux Klansmen, cops slugging downed African Americans’ with clubs, fire in the hills alongside the famed “Hollywood” sign, and, a weasly judge (like the one who set the beaters of Rodney King off virtually scot-free), further revealed as a maggot crawls from under his robe.
Most subtly, the keys of a computer keyboard have been rearranged so they spell out ORGANIZE, EDUCATE, AGITATE (after the old IWW clock that spells out “Time to Organize,” this time with a Delete button hovering above CAPITS). Overhead, the angels include Mother Jones, Malcolm X and Emilio Zapata, holding up the banner slogan “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All.”
Paul Buhle
Insurgent Images
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