Labor Organizer Used Scanner

And you watch the condescension. Well, that's the way my grandparents

were treated. That's the way my aunts were treated. And that was in

the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. The folk singers were singing

protest songs. I learned and gleaned everything that I was hearing.

And so I went to volunteer for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality

in Cleveland, Ohio.

And I lived in a tenement house with an African American family. And

my job was to ride shotgun with another man with a police scanner in

the car. And our job was to respond to police calls and document

police brutality cases in the black neighborhoods. Well, I go home

every night to that tenement house. And I'd sleep on this guy's couch.

Well, one morning he asked me, "Son, I've got to ask you a question."

I say, "Yeah, go head." He says, "Well, you're the only person I've

ever had here as a volunteer that hasn't complained about the rats.

Why is that?" So I told him my rat story, that I grew up with the rats

in labor camps and the old farmhouse we lived on the county line in

Northwest Ohio. There was the couch that in the living room was my bed

and my brother's bed. He slept on one end. And I slept on the other

end. And there was, that couch was pushed up against a window

overlooking the front porch. And there was a crack underneath the

pane. And that's where the rats would come in at night.

So at night, you'd hear the scratching along the back of that couch.

And we knew there was a rat going to get up on the top up there. And

we knew that the rat had to jump on the seat where we sleeping before

he got on the floor. So when we'd hear the scratching on the back of

that couch, we'd kick each other and pull the blanket taut. To make

kind of like a trampoline for the rat.

And the rat would jump down on the blanket. And when we'd hear that,

we'd go with our fists underneath, boom, like that, to see how far we

could make the rat fly. And that was our game, to see how far we could

make the rat fly.

But the man says, he looked kind of stunned, and he said, "Good Lord,

son, why aren't you doing something for your own people?" And that's

what provoked the thought, "I need to go back and start organizing the

migrant workers and try to follow the lessons of the Civil Rights

Movement to speak for people and organize them so they can speak for

themselves."

' Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees ' - great

quote found later on in the article