The amnesty petition is going pretty well, he said, but we need to work on it in a more organized way. We had wanted to force the presidential candidates to take up this issue. We took the petition to England recently, asked workers to circulate it. We are also thinking of bringing it to the 2001 UN world conference on racism in South Africa. Migration has been an issue before and after slavery for African Americans, who have moved from the south to the north.
Many people don t realize that.
The right to migrate freely is real, and there are important lessons in that. Go into the neighborhoods as well as the workplace. The message has been, we ll give you a piece of the action, we ll give you programs but without getting to the heart of the matter. There is upper-crust competition, including Latinos, for pieces of the pie, and that fosters divisions. We saw the need for an initiative that would come from the grassroots level of the African American communities.