Tag: Cheryl LaBash

As pressure builds for the Dec. 12 West Coast port shutdown, the capitalist owners and their media have begun a battle of ideas to blunt this powerful threat to their profits and control. But ILWU member Clarence Thomas says: "We don’t cross community picket lines. These ports are the people’s ports. Ports belong to the people of the Pacific Coast."

On July 16, 1934, the four-day San Francisco General Strike began as strikers and National Guard battled for control of the shut-down city. Longshore strike leader Harry Bridges went to Black churches on both sides of San Francisco Bay to beg the congregation to join the strikers on the picket line and promised that when the strike ended, Blacks would work on every dock on the West Coast.

“Cuba has the lowest [infant] mortality rate in the Americas, in spite of the economic blockade imposed against it by the U.S. for more than five decades,” announced Granma newspaper on Jan. 3.