CHICAGO—Between them, a Chicago teacher and a union president and preacher energized a pro-worker crowd on the last day of the NAACP convention in the Windy City.
The teacher was Chicago Teachers Union President Stacey Davis Gates, usually a history and social studies teacher in the city’s public schools, when she isn’t defending her students, her colleagues and her union against vitriolic attacks from President Trump and congressional Republicans.
The preacher turned union president was Government Employees (AFGE) chief Everett Kelley, whose union is Trump’s prime target for destruction. He even calls AFGE an “enemy.” It responded with a myriad of lawsuits, most of which AFGE has won in lower courts.
And in the end their messages melded: The rights workers and African-Americans fought so hard to win over the last century—and especially in the 1940s, 50s and 60s—are under the worst fire they’ve faced since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
Kelley said there must be massive unity and solidarity all over the nation to win this new war Trump, his followers and MAGA launched and are waging against both labor and people of color.
Earlier, Auto Workers President Shawn Fain hit those themes in a brief speech to the full convention.
“The billionaire class is getting richer while we are in a struggle to survive,” he declared. “The same forces that murdered the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are still out there.” While leading a movement in Memphis for union rights for Black sanitation workers, King was gunned down by white nationalists James Earl Ray.
“We the people must rise up for humanity and not let the bosses and the billionaires divide us…When we stand together, we can move mountains.”
The context for Davis Gates’s and Kelley’s speeches at the NAACP’s closing labor luncheon is the looming November election and the 2028 balloting beyond it. That includes the possibility Trump would literally try to steal the results by sending troops into the streets to intimidate voters, seize ballot boxes, or worse.
And that flies in the face of U.S. history, especially the African-American history Trump and his regime are busily erasing.
“You are in a moment of history right now,” said Davis Gates, one of organized labor’s most outspoken critics of Trump and his policies, and particularly of their impact on and threat to African-Americans.
“We often learned that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves,” she remarked about Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, starting her history lesson.
She explained how the freedom resulted from much more than just the proclamation. Black workers left the plantations, and a plantation is a corporation, so their departure shut those companies down.
“And the federal government’s first diversity, equity and inclusion initiative was the Freedmen’s Bureau,” right after the Civil War, Davis Gates said. It brought jobs, pay and most importantly education to the newly freed, formerly enslavde people.
It also brought them legal protection in the 13th, 15th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, she elaborated. But all that was withdrawn, first when the last Federal troops left the occupied South and then when the Supreme Court legalized Jim Crow in 1896.
“But all this doesn’t happen if the workers don’t leave the plantation.” During the Great Migration, they left for better working conditions and the prospect of more rights—a prospect sometimes unfilled even north of the Mason-Dixon line. Chicago had something to do with that, she added. Its Black-owned newspaper, the Daily Defender, carried messages South about “the battle against fascism” in the old Confederacy and the better opportunities for jobs, rights and respect, however limited, in Chicago, Detroit and other industrial cities.
Then Davis Gates fast-forwarded to labor and civil rights icon Bill Lucy of AFSCME, “who said every picket line is a civil rights line.” Which is where AFGE President Kelley took up the thread, putting on his preacher’s hat in addition to his union cap—after receiving an award named for Lucy.
“Their target is federal workers,” Kelley said of the Trump regime. Trump has erased 37 union contracts covering a million federal workers, including 317,000 African-Americans, he noted.
“And now there are more than 500,000 people out of work” thanks to Trump, his Budget Director Russell Vought, hacksaw-wielding trillionaire Elon Musk and Trump War Secretary Pete Hegseth, though Kelley didn’t cite the four by name.
“They want to strip our union rights, fire people without cause and for ‘efficiency.” The fired include food inspectors, Social Security workers who handle claims, complaints and checks “and anyone who keeps this country running every day.”
“It’s not only economically wrong, but morally and spiritually wrong,” starting from the time of Moses and Jesus, Kelley preached.
The response must be from the ground up, he declared. ”Our power never came from a contract or a politician. It came from you,” he said, pointing to the crowd.
“We cannot sit this one out,” he said of the coming election. “We have to reach out and grab our freedom.
“Because if they can come after us federal workers, they can come after you.”
Indeed, that plan was included in comments from Trump’s White House staffers—during his first term.
And that’s where CTU’s Davis Gates and AFGE’s Kelley converged. “If Blacks can leave the South, we can get those 317,000 jobs back,” the CTU president declared. “What are we waiting for?!”
“Change is coming. Let’s stand together. Let’s win together,” Kelley concluded.
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