http://themilitant.com/2016/8032/803201.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 32 August 29, 2016
(lead article)
Socialist Workers Party: ‘Defend voting rights!’
Campaigning for working-class voice in Tennessee
Militant/Carole Lesnick
Hair stylist Renee Perron, left, talks with Socialist Workers Party
campaigner Ellen Brickley in Nashville. “I’m happy to hear we have an
alternative,” Perron said. SWP is campaigning across Tennessee, one of
states where officials are putting up obstacles to workers voting.
BY JOHN STUDER
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — “People are waking up to the reality that the
two-party system in the U.S. is really a one-party system,” Samuel
Smiley told Lisa Potash when she knocked on his door here to introduce
the Socialist Workers Party, the working-class party taking on the
capitalist bosses’ Democrats and Republicans.
“We need our own party to mobilize workers to fight against the
brutalizing effects on our class of the deepening crisis of the
capitalist system, to organize solidarity with all those who fight back,
and to forge a mass movement strong enough to overturn the bosses’
rule,” Potash said. “That’s why we’re campaigning in Tennessee and all
across the country and why we’re working to put the Socialist Workers
Party’s presidential ticket of Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart on the
ballot here.
“Our class has the power and potential to change history,” Potash said.
“Look at the victory over Jim Crow segregation won by the mighty
working-class fight for Black rights and the sit-down strikes and labor
battles that led to the building of the industrial unions.”
Smiley, a 23-year-old musician who is African-American, had joined the
discussion Potash began with his two roommates, who are also seeking to
break into the music business in Nashville, the home of the Grand Old Opry.
The three were among 27 workers who got a copy of Are They Rich Because
They’re Smart? by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, 18 who got
subscriptions to the Militant and 353 who signed to put Kennedy and Hart
on the Tennessee ballot over the last four days.
On Aug. 8 the party filed 569 signatures, more than twice the required
number. But state officials told Daniel Horwitz, the party’s attorney,
that only 32 percent were valid and the SWP needed 95 more “good”
signatures.
So party supporters from Atlanta, New York, Washington, D.C.,
Philadelphia and elsewhere joined people in Tennessee to do just that
and more, to campaign, win more support and build the party here.
Tennessee is one of a number states, especially in the South, where
governments have campaigned to limit voting rights for working people,
disproportionately affecting those who are Black. A 2011 law requires
anyone who wants to register or vote to have one of a handful of
“acceptable” government-issued photo IDs.
In addition, the ballot is only available in English and, while you are
permitted to have an interpreter, you are legally forbidden to get one
from your trade union.
Over the past few months, legal challenges have overturned or weakened
such restrictions in North Carolina, Texas and other states. Similar
challenges were unsuccessful in Tennessee in both 2013 and 2015.
For the same reasons, SWP lawyer Horwitz said, the government here
conducts aggressive purges of the voter registrations rolls, denying
thousands the right to vote. That is a major reason why so many workers’
signatures weren’t counted on SWP petitions.
The fight for the right to vote has a long history — to end property
requirements after the Revolutionary War; to extend the franchise to
Blacks after the Civil War and again as part of the fight against Jim
Crow; to win women’s suffrage and the vote for 18-year-olds.
“We find widespread disgust with the capitalist candidates among workers
here and real interest in the SWP,” said John Benson, party organizer in
Atlanta and director of campaigning here.
“We’ve campaigned among auto workers who would like to have a union at
Nissan and other plants, rubber workers at Bridgestone/Firestone and
workers in smaller towns devastated by shut-down coal mines and
factories,” he said.
“We find solidarity with Anna Yocca, a 31-year-old woman from
Murfreesboro who was indicted on attempted murder charges for attempting
a self-induced abortion,” Benson said. “The anti-abortion laws are harsh
here. Sixty-three percent of women in the state live in counties without
a doctor that provides abortion services. The charges against Yocca were
lowered to aggravated assault in March, but she is still in county jail
because she couldn’t meet the outrageous $200,000 bail.”
The party will file the additional signatures by the Aug. 18 deadline.
Related articles:
‘Glad to hear SWP will be on ballot in Utah’
SWP candidate Hart meets Calif. farmers, farmworkers
Fla. workers discuss reality in US, Cuba
Join Mine Workers protest Sept. 8!
Stop attacks on Muslims, mosques
Contribute to Socialist Workers Party $30,000 campaign fund
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