Black and Brown Together, David Bacon, February 25, 2008

In Mississippi, African American leaders are the foremost champions of the state's growing Latino immigrant population. Some day soon, they hope, the new alliance will transform the state's reactionary politics.

In 1991, seeking to boost its never robust economy, the
state of Mississippi passed a law permitting casino
gambling. In short order, immigrant construction
workers arrived from Florida to build the casinos, and
the casinos themselves began using contractors to
supply immigrants to meet their growing labor needs.
Guest workers, eventually numbering in the thousands,
were brought under the H-2B program to fill many of the
jobs the developments created.

Throughout the 1990s more immigrants arrived looking
for work. Some guest workers overstayed their visas,
while husbands brought wives, cousins, and friends from
home. Mexicans and Central Americans joined South and
Southeast Asians and began traveling north through the
state, finding jobs in rural poultry plants. There they
met African Americans, many of whom had fought hard
campaigns to organize unions for chicken and catfish
workers over the preceding decade.

It was not easy for newcomers to fit in. Their union
representatives didn't speak their languages. When
workers got pulled over by state troopers they were not
only cited for lacking driver's licenses but also often
handed over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Sometimes their
children weren't even allowed to enroll in school.

"We decided that the place to start was trying to get a
bill passed allowing everyone to get driver's licenses,
regardless of who they were or where they came from,"
says Jim Evans, the AFL-CIO's state organizer and
leader of the black caucus in the state legislature. In
the fall of 2000, labor, church, and civil-rights
activists formed an impromptu coalition and went to the
legislature. At the core of the coalition were
activists who had organized Mississippi's state workers
and a growing caucus of black legislators sympathetic
to labor. Evans, a former organizer for the National
Football League P_layer_s Association, headed the group
on the House side, while Sen. Alice Harden, who had led
a state teachers' strike in 1986, organized the vote in
the Senate.

Harden's efforts bore fruit when the driver's license
bill passed the Senate unanimously in 2001. "But they
saw us coming in the House and killed it," says Bill
Chandler, at the time political director for the casino
union, UNITE HERE. Nevertheless, the close fight
convinced them that a coalition supporting immigrants'
rights had a wide potential _base_ of support and could
help change the state's political landscape. In a
meeting that November, the Mississippi Immigrants
Rights Alliance (MIRA) was born.

One day soon, that black-brown-labor coalition might
just be able to transform Mississippi's politics.

In big u.s. cities African Americans and immigrants,
especially Latinos, often are divided by fears that any
gain in jobs or political clout by one group can only
come at the expense of the other. In Mississippi,
African American political leaders and immigrant
organizers favor a different calculation: Blacks plus
immigrants plus unions equals power.

Since 2000, all three have cooperated in organizing one
of the country's most active immigrants' rights
coalitions, the MIRA. "You will always find folks
reluctant to get involved, who say, it's not part of
our mission, that immigrants are taking our jobs,"
Evans says. "But we all have the same rights and
justice cause."

Evans, whose booming basso profundo comes straight out
of the pulpit, remembers his father riding shotgun for
Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader slain by racists in
1963. He believes organizing immigrants is a direct
continuation of Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Poor
People's March on Washington. "To get to peace and
freedom," Evans says, "you must come through the door
of truth and justice."

Both Evans, who chairs the MIRA, and Chandler, who is
now its executive director, believe social justice and
political practicality converge in the state's changing
demographics. Long before World War II, Mississippi,
like most Southern states, began to lose its black
population. Out-migration reached its peak in the
1960s, when 66,614 African Americans left between 1965
and 1970, while civil-rights activists were murdered,
hosed, and sent to jail. But in the following decades,
as Midwestern industrial jobs began to move overseas
and the cost of living in Northern cities skyrocketed,
the flow began to reverse.

From 1995 to 2000, the state capital, Jackson, gained
3,600 black residents. In the 2000 census, African
Americans made up more than 36 percent of Mississippi's
2.8 million residents-a percentage that is no doubt
higher today. And while immigrants were statistically
insignificant two decades ago, today they comprise more
than 4.5 percent of Mississippi's total population,
according to news reports. "Immigrants are always
undercounted, but I think they're now about 130,000,
and they'll be 10 percent of the population 10 years
from now," Chandler predicts.

That's still less than in the four states (California,
Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas) and the District of
Columbia where some combination of blacks, Latinos,
Asians, and Native Americans already make up the
majority. But MIRA activists see one other big
advantage in Mississippi. "We have the chance here to
avoid the rivalry that plagues Los Angeles and build
real power," says Chandler, who left East L.A. and the
farm workers' movement decades ago to come to the
South. "But we have to fight racism from the beginning
and recognize the leadership of the African American
community." Eric Fleming, an MIRA staff member and
former state legislator who recently filed for the
Democratic nomination to replace Sen. Trent Lott,
believes, "We can stop Mississippi from making the same
mistakes others have made."

The same calculus can also apply across the South,
which is now the entry point for a third of all new
immigrants into the U.S. Four decades ago, President
Richard Nixon brought the South's white power
structure, threatened by civil rights, into the
Republican Party. President Ronald Reagan celebrated
that achievement at the Confederate monument at
Georgia's Stone Mountain. "[Progressive] funders and
the Democratic Party have written off much of the South
since then," says Gerald Lenoir of California's Black
Alliance for Just Immigration. But MIRA-type alliances
could transform the region, he hopes, "and change the
politics of this country as a whole." The MIRA is the
fruit of strategic thinking among a diverse group that
reaches from African American workers on catfish farms
and immigrant union organizers in chicken plants to
guest workers and contract laborers on the Gulf Coast
and, ultimately, into the halls of the state
legislature in Jackson.

Chandler, who had been organizing state employees for
the Communication Workers, went to work for the hotel
union, UNITE HERE, and helped win union recognition in
three Mississippi casinos. In 2005 in Las Vegas, the
union was renegotiating its contract covering Harrah's
Las Vegas operations. Harrah's also owned two
Mississippi casinos in Tunica and one that was
destroyed and later rebuilt in Gulfport. With the
threat of a Nevada strike in the air, Harrah's agreed
to a card-check process for union recognition in
Mississippi, and eventually signed contracts covering
the three casinos there at the end of that year,
although temporary, contract, and H-2B workers were not
covered.

To build a grassroots _base_, MIRA volunteers also went
into chicken plants to help recruit newly arrived
immigrants into unions. Mississippi is a right-to-work
state, and union membership is not mandatory in
workplaces with union contracts. Frank Curiel, a
Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA)
representative who worked with the United Farm Workers
for many years, says, "MIRA put the LIUNA business
manager and a UFCW [United Food and Commercial Workers]
rep on the board because we wanted them to understand
the role of the union in representing Latinos-they had
contracts in chicken and fish plants." In one plant,
Curiel signed up 80 percent of the newly arrived
immigrants, while in two others, an MIRA student
volunteer from the University of Texas signed up every
Latino worker in two weeks.

The unions' work wasn't confined to fighting grievances
or recruiting new members; immigrant workers had much
bigger problems. "There was a pretty repressive system
in Laurel, Collins, and Hattiesburg," Curiel recalls.
"Plants had contracts with temp agencies, and all the
workers were undocumented. It was very hard to get a
new contract because of the surplus of Latino labor and
low membership." But by building a combined membership
of immigrant and African American workers, union
negotiators in one plant forced the company to get rid
of the temp service and hire employees directly. "That
meant that African Americans gained access to those
jobs, too," Curiel emphasizes.

In the casinos, MIRA volunteers worked with UNITE HERE
organizers. In Jackson, the coalition got six bills
passed the following year, stopping schools from
requiring Social Security numbers from immigrant
parents, and winning in-state tuition for any student
who had spent four years in a Mississippi high school.
Then Katrina hit the Gulf. Vicky Cintra, a cuban
american with a soft Southern accent, was the MIRA's
first full-time organizer and got her baptism of fire
on the Gulf Coast. After the hurricane blew through
Biloxi and Gulfport, contractors began pouring in to do
reconstruction, bringing with them crews of workers.

Cintra handed out 10,000 flyers with the MIRA's phone
number, and the calls flooded in. Thirty-five workers
abandoned by their contractor in dilapidated trailers
received blankets and food. When two Red Cross shelters
evicted Latinos, even putting a man in a wheelchair
onto the street, the national news media reported on
Cintra's efforts on behalf of the immigrants. "For the
next year we were just reacting to emergencies," she
recalls. The MIRA fought evictions and the cases of
workers cheated by employers. "When we threatened
picket lines, the contractors would sometimes offer to
pay Latinos, but we said everyone had to be treated
equally, and got money for African Americans and
whites, too."

The MIRA eventually recovered over a million dollars.
"And this was while the federal government had said it
wouldn't enforce labor standards, OSHA, Davis Bacon, or
any other law protecting workers," Cintra says.
"Really, it had been like this for years, but Katrina
just tore the veil away." The key to the MIRA's
success, she believes, was that "we engaged workers in
direct action. Eventually the contractors and companies
settling in Mississippi got the idea that workers have
rights and were getting organized."

MIRA volunteers also began to hear that guest workers
were being recruited in India, not for reconstruction,
but for the main industry on the Gulf-ship building.
Working in the shipyards has always been dirty,
dangerous, and segregated. Jaribu Hill, an MIRA board
member, accuses the yards of putting "hundreds of black
women into the worst cleaner jobs in the bottom of the
ship. And when we get organized and outspoken, the boss
starts looking for people who are more grateful, and
more vulnerable."

In late 2006, 300 guest workers arrived at the
Pascagoula yard of Signal International, which makes
huge floating oil rigs for the offshore fields in the
Gulf. They'd been hired in India by a labor recruiter
and given H-2B visas, good for 10 months. Signal
charged the workers $35 per day for the privilege of
living in a labor camp located within the shipyard.
"Twenty-four of us live in a small room, 12 feet by 18
feet, sleeping on bunk beds," Joseph Jacob, one of the
worker leaders, says. "There are two toilets for all of
us, and we have to get up at 3:30 in the morning to
have enough time to use the bathroom before going to
work."

Signal put the Indian guest workers to work in the yard
alongside U.S. workers doing the same job, and claimed
it paid them the same wages. The guest workers say they
were promised $18 an hour, but many were paid only half
that after the company said they were unqualified.
Signal CEO Dick Marler admits the company reclassified
some workers after they had arrived, from first- to
second-class welders, and then reduced their wages.
Signal deemed six of the workers incapable and
announced that it would send them back to India-a move
that portended financial ruin for the workers.

The MIRA asked a Hindi-speaking organizer from the New
Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, Sakhet
Soni, to come to Pascagoula. Together they helped
workers organize Signal H-2B Workers United. Jacob was
fired "because I attended the meetings," he says.
"That's what the company vice president told me."
Marler denies this.

On the day the six workers were discharged, company
security guards locked them in what they call the TV
Room and wouldn't let them leave. The MIRA went to the
Pascagoula Police Department, and the police went out
to the yard and eventually freed the workers. Outside
the yard, dozens of workers and activists denounced the
firings and mistreatment. The MIRA organized picket
lines, and its attorney, Patricia Ice, started a legal
defense campaign with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The company said it had used the H-2B system because it
couldn't find enough workers after the hurricane. Other
contractors have used the same rationale. "We've
learned about case after case of workers in
Mississippi, Louisiana, and all along the Gulf in these
conditions," Chandler says. "There are thousands of
guest workers who have been brought in since Katrina
and subjected to this same treatment. Mexican guest
workers in Amelia, Louisiana, were held in the same
way. They also got organized and came to Pascagoula to
support the workers here when they heard what
happened."

Organizing guest workers is part of an effort to build
an MIRA membership among immigrants themselves. MIRA
members get an ID card and agree to come to
demonstrations and help others. When the national
immigrant marches began in the spring of 2006, MIRA
members and volunteers mobilized thousands of people
for a rally in Jackson and even a march in Laurel, a
poultry town of 18,881 people with a progressive black
mayor. "There's still a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment
here," Cintra says, "but when people give the police
their ID card they get treated with more respect,
because they know their rights and have some support."
Curiel says the same thing: "In Kentucky, outside of
Louisville, Latinos are afraid to go out into the
street. In Mississippi it's different."

Not always that different, however. In Laurel and many
other Mississippi towns, police still set up roadblocks
to trap immigrants without licenses. "They take us away
in handcuffs, and we have to pay over $1000 to get out
of jail and get our cars back," says chicken plant
worker Elisa Reyes. And the way the state's Council of
Conservative Citizens demonizes immigrants is
reminiscent of the language of its predecessor-the
White Citizens' Councils. Its Web site urges, "The
CofCC not only fights for European rights, but also for
Confederate Heritage, fights against illegal
immigration, fights against gun control, fights against
abortion, fights against gay rights etc. ... so join
up!!!" The state's chapter of the Federation for
Immigration Reform and Enforcement brought the
Minutemen's Chris Simcox out from California to recruit
at anti-immigrant meetings.

During the 2007 Mississippi elections for governor and
state legislators, the Ku Klux Klan held a 500-person
rally in front of the Lee County Courthouse in Tupelo.
They wore the old white hoods and robes and carried
signs saying, "Stop the Latino Invasion." Their
presence was so intimidating that Ricky Cummings, a
generally progressive Democrat running for re-election
to the State House of Representatives, voted for some
of the anti-immigrant bills in the legislature. When
MIRA leaders challenged him, he told them that
Klan-generated calls had "worn out his cell phone."

The Klan's Web site says, "Its time to declare war on
these illegal mexican's. ... The racial war is among
us, will you fight with us for the future of our race
and for our children? Or will you sit on your ass and
do nothing? Our blissful ignorance is over. It is time
to fight. Time for Mexico and Mexicans to get the hell
out!!!" The Web site also has _link_s to the site of the
Mississippi Federation for Immigration Reform and
Enforcement directed by Mike Lott, who sits in the
state legislature, and the state affiliate of the
Federation for American Immigration Reform.

In 2007 Republicans introduced 21 anti-immigrant bills
into the Mississippi Legislature, including ones to
impose state penalties on employers who hire
undocumented workers, English-only requirements on
state license and benefit applicants, to prohibit
undocumented students at state universities, and to
require local police to check immigration status. Mike
Lott sponsored many of these bills. The MIRA,
however, defeated all of the proposed laws. "The black
caucus stood behind us every time," Evans says proudly.
There are no immigrant or Latino legislators. Without
the caucus, all 21 bills would have passed in 2007, as
would have 19 similar bills in 2006.

The caucus didn't just wage a "vote no" campaign. It
also proposed a series of pro-worker measures that
would have abolished at-will employment (the doctrine
that says employers don't need any justification for
terminating workers), provided interpreters, and
established a state department of labor (Mississippi is
the only state without one). While these bills didn't
pass, either, the difference between the caucus' and
the Republicans' agendas is as clear as black and
white, or perhaps, black/brown and white.

Although the political coalition in which the MIRA
participates is powerful enough to stop the worst
proposals, it isn't yet powerful enough to elect a
legislative majority. Changing demographics is one
element of a strategy to change that political terrain,
but numbers alone aren't enough. Chandler describes
three factions in the state's Democratic party-the
black caucus at one end, white conservatives hanging on
at the other, and "liberals who will do whatever they
have to do to get elected" in the middle.

After some Democratic candidates campaigned in 2007 on
an anti-immigrant platform, the MIRA wrote a letter in
protest to Howard Dean, national chair of the
Democratic Party. Those tactics, it said, were
undermining the only strategy capable of changing the
state's politics. "The attacks on Latinos, initiated by
Republican Phil Bryant a year and a half ago, and
joined by other Republicans, are now being echoed by
Democrats like John Arthur Eaves [the party's
gubernatorial candidate] and Jamie Franks [its
candidate for lieutenant governor]," the letter said.
State party leaders who "would go along to be accepted,
rather than show the courage necessary for positive
change ... are peddling racist lies against immigrants
that violate the core of the party's progressive
agenda. We do not need politicians whose only concern
is getting elected. We need leaders who will represent
the best interests of all the working people of
Mississippi."

Despite their anti- immigrant rhetoric, both Eaves' and
Franks' campaigns were unsuccessful. Conservative
Republican Haley Barbour was returned to the governor's
mansion and Phil Bryant was elected lieutenant
governor. Democrat Jim Hood, however, was re-elected
attorney general, with a higher vote total than either
Eaves or Franks. He was the only Democratic statewide
candidate who did not mount an anti-immigrant campaign
and who had earlier been convinced by the AFL-CIO's Jim
Evans not to support anti-immigrant bills in the
legislature.

In December 2007, Trent Lott suddenly resigned his U.S.
Senate seat only a year after being re-elected to a
fourth term. Barbour appointed conservative Republican
Rep. Roger Wicker to fill the vacancy, and set the vote
to choose a permanent replacement for the November 2008
general election

"We can't rely just on the demographic shift to win,"
says MIRA's Fleming, who plans to run for the seat. He
notes that a winning majority in Mississippi would
require about 80 percent of the African American vote,
20 percent to 25 percent of the white vote, and all of
the growing vote of immigrants and other people of
color. "But demographics makes it a viable race. We
live in a conservative state where people don't accept
new ideas easily, so the challenge for progressives is
that we have to campaign and educate people at the same
time. If we want people to move out of their comfort
zone, we need a powerful message."

In Mississippi, that message focuses on jobs, health
care, affordable housing, and the basic economic issues
affecting working people in a state with one of the
nation's lowest standards of living and lowest levels
of social services. Immigration issues, Fleming says,
are not some toxic topic to be avoided at all costs.
"If we talk about it in the context of protecting jobs,
wages, and rights for everyone, it's something that can
bring us together."

Finding common ground among immigrants, African
Americans, and labor is the pillar of the MIRA's
long-term strategy. Jaribu Hill of the MIRA and
executive director of the Mississippi's Workers'
Center, has launched her own bid for election to the
legislature as a Democrat and argues that winning in
the South requires open discussion of race and civil
rights, even if it makes established
institutions-including unions-uncomfortable. Before she
can start any campaign in the fish plants where the
workers' center is active, she says, "we have to talk
about racism. The union focuses on the contract, but
skin color issues are also on the table."

To organize a multiracial workforce, the divisions
between African Americans and immigrants need to be
recognized and discussed, Hill insists. "We're coming
together like a marriage, working across our divides,"
she says. Rhetoric calling the current immigrant-rights
movement the "new civil-rights movement" doesn't
describe those relations accurately, however. "Our
conditions as African Americans are the direct result
of slavery. Immigrants have come here looking for
better lives-we came in chains," Hill says. "Today
Frito Lay wages in Mississippi are still much lower
than [in] Illinois-$8.75 to $13.75 an hour. This is the
evolution of a historical oppression."

Immigrants, when they, too, are paid that lower wage,
are entering an economic system that reproduces
discrimination and tiers of inequality originally
established to control and profit from black labor.
They inherit a second-class status that developed
before they arrived.

Jean Damu, a writer and member of the Black Alliance
for Just Immigration, also warns that drawing a
parallel between the situations of blacks and
immigrants has its limits. "After all, who would want
to claim that deporting someone to Mexico is the same
as returning them to slavery?" he asks. "But the
similarities are powerful enough to convince many
African Americans that it is in their best
self-interest to support those who struggle against
black people's historic enemies."

For all the differences, Hill still sees a common
ground of experience. "We're both victims of
colonialism, we're both second-class citizens denied
our rights. If people could see how African American
people live here, they'd see it's like Bolivia or
Jamaica. On the other hand, it's important for African
Americans to understand why people come here-because of
what's happening in the countries they come from. If
people had a choice, if they could live like human
beings, they wouldn't have to risk their lives to get
here. I don't believe any human being can be illegal."