Black History Month: Afscme and Martin Luther King

Richard Mellor

This is a Black History Month piece from the Afscme Activist. I hope you can enlarge it and read it. The Afscme Activist was an opposition newsletter that I started in Afscme in the 1990’s.

 

I was a member at the time of a left group and we published a US paper called Labor Militant. I had attended a few of the Afscme National Conventions and at one of them, I think it was in San Diego, I distributed a one-page statement titled, Let’s Be Realistic I think it was. I was just going through old copies cleaning out the garage so I haven’t gathered all the info for this with the intention of writing a historical piece. 

 

We had discussed this in our Oakland Branch and thought it was worth testing the waters.  The reception was very positive and we decided to publish a regular newsletter with the with the intention of building a rank and file caucus if things went well.

 

My union, Afscme Local 444 helped with a donation and after time ended up with subscriptions form unions in 10 states and around 250 subscribers. I think I sent each union 50 copies each. At the Chicago Convention in 1996 we had a public meeting with some 100 people attending. We were hoping to run candidates by the next convention from Afscme Members For a Stronger Union as we formed an editorial board in Chicago. 

 

Unfortunately the newsletter was sabotaged by the left group I was a member of that decided the publication was a Labor Militant organ not the publication of a broad left or rank and file caucus; they wanted to control it for factional reasons. At my hotel room where we voted to form an editorial board which meant including many of the people that helped the paper grow and sent articles for it, many of them women, two of my comrades voted against the proposal. The other rank and file members were somewhat shocked. But I was not going to lie to them and I told them what was going on and refused to hand over the subscribers list to the organization when they demanded I do so.

 

I was expelled for violating Democratic Centralism. It was worth it.

You can read about the Afscme Activist and my experience here.