By Roy Rydell and Tim Wheeler

People's Weekly World

www.pww.org

COLUMBIA, S.C. - In a powerful display of labor and multiracial unity in the Deep South nearly 10,000 union members, civil rights leaders, elected officials and community activists marched to the statehouse here June 9, chanting, "Free the Charleston 5."

They had come from across the nation and around the world to protest the frame-up of five Charleston, S.C. longshoremen on felony riot and conspiracy charges trumped up by South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon.

Four of the Charleston 5 - Kenneth Jefferson, 42; Elijah Ford Jr., 40; Peter Washington Jr., 48; and Rick Simmons, 38 - are African-American members of Local 1422 of the International Longshore Association (ILA).

The fifth, John Edgerton, 23, is white and a member of the Checkers and Clerks Local 1771. They have been under house arrest for 17 months and face up to five years in prison for protesting the use of scab labor.

On Jan. 20, 2000, some 600 heavily armed state police in riot gear attacked less than 150 union members as they peacefully picketed Nordana Shipping Company for hiring non-union workers.

The police beat and tear-gassed the workers and arrested eight on trespassing charges.

A judge dismissed the charges for lack of evidence.

But, as Local 1422 attorney Peters Wilborn told the demonstrators, "Taking a page from Kenneth Starr's playbook, Condon impaneled a grand jury - a secret, rigged proceeding - to hand down an indictment." The trial begins next month.

Condon, who headed the Bush campaign in South Carolina and was part of his transition team, now wants to use the Charleston 5 case as a stepping-stone to become governor of this right-to-work (for less) state. Less than 4 percent of South Carolina's workers are organized.

Evelina Alarcon is the head of the campaign in California that won a paid state holiday honoring Farmworker union founder Cesar Chavez. She is also a leader of the Los Angeles Charleston 5 defense committee.

In brief remarks before the march, she made a strong appeal for mass circulation of a petition addressed to Condon demanding that he drop the charges.

"The citizens of South Carolina should not be used as political pawns and their right to organize must be protected," the petition states.

A member of the Cherokee Nation gave an invocation in his native tongue. He said there were 25,0000 Cherokees living in South Carolina and they also need jobs and union representation.

An honor guard from the West Coast Longshore union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), dressed in their distinctive white dockers' caps, black chinos and gloves, led the marchers up the hill to the capitol.

There, ILA members held poster-sized photos of each of the Charleston 5 as South Carolina AFL-CIO President Donna DeWitt welcomed the crowd. "We're here to tell Attorney General Charles Condon, 'Free the Charleston Five,'" she said. The crowd erupted in cheers and took up the chant.

Rep. Joe Neil, chair of the South Carolina Black Legislative Caucus and co-chair with DeWitt of the Progressive Network, one of the sponsors of the march, said, "We're fighting a mighty battle. We know the difference between right and wrong, justice and injustice.

"We're going to keep fighting until the Charleston Five are free, until workers in South Carolina have a right to belong to a union and earn wages and benefits high enough to live on."

Ken Riley, Local 1422 president, said, "This is not the end of the struggle. It is one step in the struggle."

He then issued a warning to Condon. "You saw a small local down there in Charleston and you decided to attack us. You didn't know that the rest of the world is watching."

AFL-CIO Executive Vice-President Linda Chavez-Thompson stressed the importance of this case for the entire labor movement.

"[This is] a struggle for all American working people from Maine to Honolulu. Plenty of working people in other countries, from Denmark to Australia and Chile, are giving the Charleston longshoremen all the help they can," she said.

"We're going to stand alongside them and give them all the help they need until the union-breakers of South Carolina go down to defeat."

The presidents of both the West Coast and East Coast Longshore unions addressed the crowd.

"We are here like family," ILA President John Bowers said. "If the shipping companies can get away with it here, it's just the start of destroying the labor movement."

The crowd cheered and chanted, "Shut the port down!"

ILWU President Jim Spinosa reminded the crowd of the 1934 San Francisco general strike.

"In 1934, we fought the good fight. That's why we're here today, to let Ken Riley and the Charleston Five know they are not without friends. The ILWU stands at the ready to do whatever we need to do."

One of the most important speeches was given by Bjorn Borg, president of the Swedish Dockworkers' Union and European coordinator for the 30,000-member International Dockworkers Council.

A dockworker for 30 years, Borg said that longshoremen in Spain had refused to unload scab-loaded ships from Charleston and that if the Charleston 5 are not set free, that will not go unnoticed on the docks in Europe.

"Long live solidarity," Borg said.

Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, gave a rousing speech in which he called the Charleston 5 "blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh" and vowed to use Dr. Martin Luther King's non-violent strategy of filling the jails with protesters "to turn this system upside down and inside out" to win their freedom.

Quoting King, Roberts said, "Free at last, free at last ... We won't stop fighting until the Charleston Five are free at last."

Edgar Medina, director of the Hispanic Community Resource Center, said South Carolina's Hispanic population has mushroomed to more than 60,000 in recent years, most of them workers in need of union protection. He called for a progressive coalition that embraces people of color, women's organizations and organized labor.

Anne Marie Johnson, a representative of the Screen Actors Guild, drew cheers as she recounted her union's recent strike victory. Johnson introduced the families of the Charleston Five. The crowd fell quiet as young Franklin Washington expressed anger that his father, Peter, is under house arrest.

"He taught me that if I fall, get up and try again," Franklin said. " My father can't attend church get-togethers with us. It hurt when my father couldn't attend my grandmother's memorial service." Ashley Ford said of her father, Elijah, "He is very precious."

Other speakers included Rev. Joseph Lowery, founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; State Rep. Gilda Cobb Hunter; William Lucy, international secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and Coalition of Black Trade Unionists president; Clayola Brown, vice president of the needletrades union, UNITE; and Kwang Jun Yu, a representative of the Daewoo Motor Workers Union in South Korea. Daewoo workers have been in their own bitter and bloody battle with General Motors.

The South Carolina state capitol was also the site of a Martin Luther King holiday protest in January 2000. At that demonstration, 50,000 people gathered to demand removal of the Confederate flag flying over the statehouse.

Public pressure eventually forced the state to remove the flag permanently, although, in a compromise approved by the state legislature, it stands on another part of the grounds.

Today Nelson Rivers, president of the South Carolina NAACP, glanced toward the flagpole atop the capitol dome and hailed the victory "in taking down that rag."

"I have a message for Mister Charley!" he said. "Those days are dead and gone. They will never come back. We're here to tell you we are with the Charleston Five."

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Walking around as the marchers assembled, I was impressed to see locals from the various sea-going unions because they are a very important section of the movement in solidarity with the Charleston 5.

On the bus coming down from New York, I met Phillip Clegg, secretary-treasurer of the American Radio Associates, now an affiliate of the ILA. They sent a delegation of five brothers from New York. There were also members from the Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association.

The Seafarers' International Union had a delegation from Jacksonville, Florida. Jack Jackson said, "We are here to support the Charleston Five because it's so important to organizing the South."

The ILA was well represented. Waiting for the march to start, Phillip Garcia, president of Local 1575 of San Juan, Puerto Rico, said his group had come a long way to back the Charleston 5.

Another ILA local was Local 1416 of Miami. Berraro Owens told me, "We are here to support the union and the Charleston Five and will continue to do so." Elizabeth Davis from Local 1426 said, "We're here to help."

Local 1359 was there from Ft. Pierce, Fla., as were members from the Great Lakes District and from Local 1291 in Philadelphia.

Willis Trent of ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco, secretary of the Charleston 5 Defense Committee, said, "I'm here because an injury to one is an injury to all."

Benny Holland, ILA general vice president for the South Atlantic and Gulf Coast District, said, "The unions are here to stay" and thanked the ILWU for their solidarity.

Father Patrick Riley, a member of the International Dockers' Council from New Brunswick, Canada, said that the experiences of the Liverpool, England dockers in 1998 "taught us that courage is not enough. We need international solidarity."

- Roy Rydell, a retired merchant seaman

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Dan Bailey, business agent and organizer of Local 1778 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, based in Columbia, was marching with a large contingent of building trades workers.

"This is a right-to-work state," he told the World. "Most carpenters in South Carolina are working without union protection at substandard pay with no pensions or health benefits. We're here marching in support of the Charleston Five to show the people of this state that there is a better way than the open-shop system."

"If they succeed in busting our Charleston local, it will spread up and down the coast," said Raymond Rideaux, president of ILA Local 1349 in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

"They are trying to drive all the unions out, force on us a system of cheap labor with no benefits. That is George W. Bush's whole agenda. If it is up to him, there will be two classes of people: the rich and the poor."

Larry Pugh, a 42-year veteran of United Steelworkers Local 169 from Mansfield, Ohio, said members of his local have been locked out by AKSteel for 21 months.

"We are suffering from the same kind of corporate greed as the workers here in South Carolina," Pugh said, "and we came to show our sympathy and solidarity."

Jim Wilkerson, a member of Operating Engineers Local 513 in St. Louis and chair of the Missouri-Kansas District of the Communist Party USA, was just one of the members of the CPUSA and Young Communist League from around the country who rode buses to the demonstration.

"It is so important that organized labor and its community allies have shown a united face here in Columbia," Wilkerson said. "This case exposes the naked greed of capitalism."

Frank Kennedy, a retired longshoreman, who worked for 50 years on the docks in Vancouver, B.C., carried a placard, "Canadians Support the Charleston Five." He had flown in with a large delegation of ILWU members.

"This attack on the Charleston dockers is a deliberate attempt by the shipping lines to set back the gains we have made over the past 50 years," he said. "This demonstration shows that the Charleston Five have the wholehearted support of workers throughout the U.S. and Canada as well."

Mattie Goff was one of several thousand marchers from Charleston. Her son-in-law is president of one of the ILA locals there. "Charlie Condon is running for governor and he thinks he can get votes by breaking the unions," she said.

"He's doing everything he can to take rights away from these union workers. But we don't want to go backward. We want to go forward."

- Tim Wheeler