Latino activists reach out to blacks with invitation to join immigration march
Immigration-march organizers hope to form coalition of Latinos, blacks
By Antonio Olivo
chicagotribune.com
Tribune reporter

12:24 AM CDT, May 1, 2008

The choir had just finished raising the roof inside St. Basil/Visitation Catholic Church in Englewood when a visitor, Mauro Piñeda, stepped up to the pulpit with an unexpected invitation.

March with us on May 1, Piñeda urged the mostly black parishioners, invoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s call in 1963 to "lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice."

As another Immigration march is scheduled to wend through Chicago on Thursday—now an annual rite of political passion for some and traffic frustrations for others—such pleas to African-Americans represent a new experiment in the fight for immigrant rights.

Organizers predict Thursday's march will be much smaller than the 2006 and 2007 marches that attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and galvanized a movement.

Chicago police decided to allow Thursday's event to culminate in a rally at Federal Plaza, betting they would not need sprawling Grant Park to hold the marchers.

Should the turnout exceed the few thousand demonstrators that are expected, the march's endpoint could be switched to Grant Park, where the massive rallies of recent years finished, said Beatrice Cuello, a deputy police superintendent who oversees patrols.

This year organizers are battling the fear created by a government crackdown on illegal immigrants. Some activists, meanwhile, have diverted their energy toward the presidential campaign.

So local organizers are seeking to re-energize their movement, trying to transform a predominantly Mexican-immigrant campaign into one that joins communities of color with a broader working-class agenda.

They are pinning their hopes on the creation of a new "Black-Latino coalition" in Chicago that hearkens back to the 1980s partnership that helped elect Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor.

"You might ask: 'Why should we join your cause?' " Piñeda challenged his skeptical church audience. "My answer is because racism affects all people of color. If we don't join together, we will be defeated."

Yet, building that alliance has, so far, been awkward and elusive—despite what leaders in both communities say are common problems, such as increasing home foreclosures, neighborhood violence and consistently bad schools.

As Latino leaders seek to identify with African-Americans—pointing to the marches as the latest incarnation of an ongoing national struggle for civil rights—they have turned off as many people as they've attracted, some observers say.

Many African-Americans resent the civil rights comparison, noting that blacks during the 1960s faced fire hoses, snarling police dogs and lynchings while marching for simple rights such as sitting in the front of a bus, said Michael Bennett, a DePaul University sociology professor who directs the school's Egan Urban Center.

"You've gotta be real careful because there are still some old folks around who remember the dogs and, if they didn't experience it, they knew about it," said Bennett.

He added, however, that there's also been sympathy in the black community with Latinos who've been targets of ethnic hatred in the Immigration debate.

Some critics dismiss the movement as a Latino, largely Mexican cause that has overshadowed the struggles of other immigrant groups.

"I can't stand with you on May 1 until you start talking more about Darfur and Haiti," Rev. Janette C. Wilson, a Chicago-based cable TV host, told a group of religious leaders during the recent launch of a new black-Latino coalition effort called "Together We Are The People's Majority."

March organizers have grappled with that image from the beginning and made many attempts to reach out beyond the Latino core.

The religious leaders' group, which also includes labor unions, is one of the latest efforts. The group's agenda features a menu of working-class issues that includes Immigration reform, job opportunities for ex-offenders and an end to gun violence.

Leaders hope Thursday's march will pull African-Americans into what they predict will be a long, sometimes painful road to mutual understanding.

In some instances, the challenge can be seen in simple gestures.

Inside the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition headquarters, a recent news conference announcing the effort was preceded by Rev. Jesse Jackson's usual Saturday morning service.

Jackson talked to his mostly African-American audience about the legacy of King. He nodded to the possibility of a broader coalition, but the only call to action that day was an announcement of new Spanish classes at PUSH.

Then the black congregants filed out, nodding politely to a mostly Latino crowd that waited until Jackson was done to come inside for their talk about coalition building.

Creston McKenzie, 37, was among the few African-Americans who stuck around.

What he heard, McKenzie said, convinced him this march might be worth checking out.

"The way I see it, we've both been in the same position for years," he said. "That's at the bottom."
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