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The
Columbus Dispatch...
Jackson: Go
back to the streets
Civil-rights leader calls on Ohioans
to battle recent, proposed changes
By
Jennifer Smith Richards
Monday
August 8, 2011
The
Rev. Jesse Jackson speaks about
Senate Bill 5, House Bill 194, health care and other Ohio issues during
a news
conference at Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church.
Ohioans
must mobilize and fight for
voting rights, the right to bargain as a group and health care, the
Rev. Jesse
Jackson urged yesterday.
“It
is time now for mass
demonstrations,” the civil-rights and political activist said at a news
conference on the Near East Side. “We must now have an American summer,
an
American fall of activity.”
Jackson
met on Saturday night with a
group of Columbus pastors about what he views as the state’s
legislative
attacks on the poor and middle class and on civil liberties.
He
spoke to reporters in front of
Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church yesterday and targeted Senate
Bill 5,
the state’s challenged collective-bargaining law; House Bill 194, the
contested
election-reform law; and attempts in Ohio to overturn federal
health-care
reform.
“We
need to go back to the streets in
great numbers,” Jackson said. “We need the commitment to fight back.”
Some
fights already are taking place,
but more people should join in, he said.
A
coalition of progressive groups,
unions and voting-rights advocates are trying to repeal the new
election-reform
law scheduled to take effect on Sept. 30. The new collective-bargaining
law
will be on the November ballot for voters to kill or keep. And
activists are
challenging efforts to invalidate a portion of the new federal
health-care law.
Jackson
spoke out on the issues
because he’s an “elder statesman” of civil rights, said Brian
Rothenberg,
executive director of the liberal-activist group ProgressOhio and a
spokesman
for Fair Elections Ohio.
“The
fact of the matter is, there is a
link between attacks on workers’ rights and attacks on health care and
attacks
on the ability to vote,” Rothenberg said. “All of those put a certain
section
of our society in a very difficult place.”
Jackson
is “a living reminder of the
struggles we could be faced with by losing these rights.”
Local
pastors are trying to spread the
word about the issues, said the Rev. Joel L. King Jr., associate pastor
at
Union Grove Baptist Church. He works with other ministers and pastors
on civic
matters.
“We’re
still trying to get the
community to understand why SB 5 is important,” he said. “We’ve got to
get back
to basics and strengthen the middle class. It affects all of us.”
It’s
time for the community to pay
attention, King said.
Such
issues now are “all because we
went to sleep during the last election,” he said. “You can’t fight the
fight until
you get out of bed.”
Jackson
covered other topics, too,
attacking states that are pushing for less involvement from the federal
government, calling for a revamp of federal trade policies and taking
lawmakers
to task for their recent debt-ceiling negotiations. He called for peace
abroad.
But
mostly, he called for people to
care about the issues being debated in statehouses and in Washington.
“We
fight wars on democracy abroad and
cut democracy at home,” he said. “We must preserve unions, preserve
health care
and protect our right to vote.”
Read
it at the Columbus Dispatch
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