Educator Susan Van Gelder breaks down the difficulties and political realities of what happens to school children, teachers, and others trying to educate children during the crisis caused by the pandemic and Donald Trump’s and Betsy DeVos’ attempts to destroy public education.
Detroit resident Susan Van Gelder recounts a tense confrontation between Detroit citizens and police and quotes a Black resident about the need to defund the police and fund conflict resolution instead.
Detroit is still struggling with the pandemic as water is still shut off to over 3,000 residents. Funerals and hospitalizations are the most difficult for families because they can’t be together in a meaningful way.
Excerpt from the pamphlet ‘Black Mass Revolt,’ issued in October 1967 following uprisings in Detroit and Newark: “Has Whitey got the message?” asked one of the Black militants. “Have our own leaders? The system has got to go.”
Readers’ views on American civilization on trial, coast to coast; Cops in schools; Police and power; Style and meaning; Sports fans speak; Revolt: where to now? and Health workers speak
Detroit dispatch #7 saw a multiplicity of daily Black Lives Matter protests, in both city and suburbs, illuminating revelations of and resistance against systemic racism. Art flourishes while evictions loom, Fiat-Chrysler workers walk out while speed-up of workers continues and social distancing and mask wearing fall by the wayside.
In Detroit most people have been practicing social distancing, enforced by the police who recovered from their own COVID-19 outbreak. The most difficult situations are hospitalizations and funerals, and sadly, Detroit’s “Right to Literacy” case was short-lived, overturned by the full panel of judges. Plaintiffs are regrouping to resume the struggle.
Susan Van Gelder reports on Detroit including: a Supreme Court ruling saying Detroit children have been “deprived of access to literacy”; how children are faring in obtaining internet access so they participate in distant learning; and how “individualism” needs to be framed in relationship to society as a whole.
Many in Detroit are concerned about the rush to reopen and the false dichotomy between “the economy” and health. The death rate is still high.
Most Detroiters were dismayed by the “reopen” rally at the state capital, where hundreds of people got out of their cars to flout social distancing guidelines, scream conspiracy theory propaganda, and flaunt assault weapons.
Two weeks of chilly weather—including a little late-spring snow—combined with increasingly dangerous Presidential “leadership,” a quarter of Michigan’s workers claiming unemployment, and more deaths of friends and relatives has cast a pall over the city and state.
As elsewhere, in Detroit numbers of cases and deaths continue to rise, the lockdown is intensified, school is on hold, Black citizens are sick and dying in large numbers, and unemployment grows.
The battle against the COVID-19 pandemic is a battle over how society will change, mirroring the battle over how to confront and adapt to the climate and extinction crisis. Strikes are erupting across the world.
Most Detroiters are adjusting to new habits of sanitation and social distancing required because of the coronavirus, but the response of city government has been mixed.
A coalition of students and workers at Wayne State University in Detroit have been conducting a campaign since November 2019 for the elevators on campus to be repaired. It is a disability, safety, and working conditions issue.
Readers’ Views on youth climate strike; Socialism and ecology; counter-revolution and revolution in the Middle East; auto and teacher strikes, and Brexit and labor
On the first day of the third Global Climate Strike, Sept. 20, 2019, millions of people, mostly teenagers, marched across the world—the biggest climate action ever. Hear the voices of youth and adults in Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco.
Susan Van Gelder reports on a rally of youth, workers, and native people in Detroit demanding ”Make Detroit the Engine of a Green New Deal.”
Readers’ Views on rising threat of the Right; corruption of the criminal injustice system; abortion bans attack women; support Maâti Monjib!; nursing home blues; why read ‘N&L?’; and support Crimean Tatars!
Participants at Detroit’s Motor City Pride March were shocked and horrified to confront 15 armed Nazis protected by a cordon of mostly Black police officers.
An in-person report of the Jan, 19, 2019, “sister march”–sponsored by Women’s March Michigan, a separate organization from the National Women’s March–which brought nearly 1,000 women to a rally at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History.
Participant report from Detroit’s 16th Annual Martin Luther King Day Rally.
A Detroit, Michigan, resident reports on the harm that predatory lending is doing to the city and its residents.
Participant report of how women in Detroit celebrated the Women’s March by highlighting diverse women fighting for fundamental changes and challenging racism, sexism, and capitalism.
Report from Detroit about the Michigan legislature passing bills to reverse the results of the election, and about plans to oppose from below the suppression of democracy.
Report of Planned Parenthood’s “Power of Pink” volunteer training conference, which drew over 2,000 young women to Detroit July 27-29, 2018.
The journal “Labor Notes” published a special issue on organizing strategies which aims to guide members of public sector unions to a concept of an inclusive, participatory unionism.
Readers’ Views on: Fighting Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Hysteria; Women’s Liberation; Attacks on Gays; Support Restaurant Workers; Swords into Plowshares; Human Rights Struggles in Iraq…; …And in Russia; Arthur Gursch in Memoriam
Participants at the March for Our Lives against gun violence in the Bay Area, Calif., Detroit, Mich., and Chicago, Ill. report on the militancy and humanism in the marches in their areas.
Public school teachers, historically underpaid as “women’s work,” have been striking or threatening strikes from West Virginia and New Jersey to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado and Arizona.
While over 200 girls and women gymnasts testified against long-time sexual abuser Dr. Larry Nassar, less has been heard of the hundreds of MSU students who marched against their university.
Excerpts from the introduction to the new French edition of Charles Denby’s book “Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal.”
On Feb. 12, workers across the country marched in Fight for $15 demonstrations held to commemorate the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and Dr. King’s visionary, multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign. It is a struggle to realize labor’s full potential.
The #MeToo movement, with roots in the 1960s, is part of a humanist revolutionary red thread that shows in a visceral way that revolution must deepen at every point in order to finally make the relationships we have with each other into actually human relationships.
A diverse crowd at Detroit’s Martin Luther King Day rally and march was even larger than last year’s turnout, proving that we refuse to acquiesce to the blatant anti-humanism of the 45th president.
Black voters in Alabama, led by Black women, overcame blatant voter suppression—including discriminatory voter ID laws—to flood the polls and block Roy Moore from the Senate seat he expected that God would anoint him to.
Report on the Oct. 27, 2017, Women’s Convention in Detroit, Michigan, one of the followups to the Jan. 21 Women’s March on Washington, D.C. .
News and Letters Committees lost a wonderful comrade when Dan Perron (Oct. 12, 1959-Sept. 7, 2017) died. Dan was a lifelong activist for freedom and justice.
Readers’ Views on: Puerto Rico:Trump’s Katrina; LGBTQ in Australia; Transgender in Texas; Women’s Liberation; Racism in Canada; Detroit and “Detroit”; Labor and Robots; Haitian Revolt; Why Read N&L?; and a Correction.
Detroit activists reviews the film, “Detroit,” and finds it insulting to actual history and a “brilliantly filmed wasted opportunity.”
Readers’ Views: facing far right’s threat; don’t scapegoat; Canadian strike; Transgender troops; women’s liberation; homeless in Los Angeles; defend dissidents; why read N&L.
On the 50th anniversary of the Detroit rebellion, “The Origins Of The Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit,” written in 1996 by Thomas Sugrue, is again timely.
Detroit police invaded our neighborhood, indiscriminately stopping people and impounding cars.
Does housing in Detroit in 2017 mean large tracts of vacant land and substandard houses ripe for development and easy slumlord profit, or a focus for community organizing to take back our city? .
Retired teachers and community residents have come to the aid of Detroit high schools abandoned as failing by the State of Michigan and the Detroit school system.
“12th and Clairmount” is a new movie created by the Detroit Historical Museum from primary sources and tells the story of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967.
Report of the pro-choice Feb. 10 rally in Chicago, a day before anti-abortion fanatics planned to mob Planned Parenthood clinics across the U.S.
Report on the resistance against the closure of “low quality” schools in Detroit, Michigan.
Report of the “Emergency Community Meeting on School Closings” in Detroit, MI, taking up and condemning Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to close 38 schools, most of them in Detroit.
Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
