‘When we fight, we win’

It's 11 a.m. on September 12, a hot, late-summer day, and several hundred union organizers and economic justice advocates have arrived at the north steps of the state Capitol to stage a Unity Rally against intolerance, economic injustice and racial division. At the height of the rally, they’ll number 500.

Some carry banners reading “Child Care Teachers Fighting for $15.” Others wear purple SEIU T-shirts to proclaim allegiance with the Service Employees International Union; still others red “union now” shirts. Several hold placards stating “McDonald’s Low Wages are a Matter of Life and Death,” a reference to Myrna de los Santos, a 49-year-old McDonald’s worker in Kansas City who, lacking health insurance, had recently died of untreated diabetes.

In dozens of state capitals around the country, similar rallies were held that day as an opening salvo in a series of national protests to highlight the gaping divides in American society.

Midway through the event, several organizers peeled off and headed up to Gov. Jerry Brown’s office. Brown had, that day, already signed two key pieces of legislation into effect: one that protects the domestic workers’ bill of rights, and one extending overtime pay protections to farmworkers. Now, Unity coordinators wanted to present him with what they called a “moral declaration,” a set of policy goals that protestors all around the country were handing in to governors and state legislators. These goals included a $15-an-hour living wage—which California has already begun moving toward—as well as protecting the right to organize into unions; increased investments in affordable housing, and bulked-up protections against evictions; tuition-free public higher education; guaranteed universal health care access; and a slew of criminal justice reforms.

“When we fight, we win,” Fabrizio Sasso, head of the Sacramento Central Labor Council, told the crowd. “Sí, se puede,” the crowd, many of whose members were Spanish-speaking, responded.

With the event winding down, those left on the capitol’s steps participated in a call-and-response closing chant:

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” an organizer shouted into a megaphone.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” the crowd answered back. “It is our duty to win. It is our duty to love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

As politics have heated up over the last year, and as the scale of progressive protest has ramped up in response to the threats facing the polity—be it disenfranchisement laws in North Carolina and police brutality or Donald Trump’s grotesque and inflammatory race-and-religion-baiting—this is a chant heard at protests around the country in recent months.

Similar sentiments will likely be expressed with increasing urgency as the election nears; in Sacramento, as around the nation, people of good conscience are raising their voices against what Trump represents—to make clear that his bigotry is not ours.

Sacramento’s Unity Rally came out of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement, which came to national attention over the past couple of years through protesting many of the far-right policies implemented by that state’s tea-party dominated state legislature. The Moral Mondays protests are classic civil rights-style activism, combining stirring oratory with nonviolent civil disobedience. Now, with the country as a whole at a crossroads, facing an election in which the Republican Party has nominated a presidential candidate who approvingly retweets Benito Mussolini quotes and can’t bring himself to fully denounce support from a one-time Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and with a rising tide of racial and religious bigotry among a large part of the electorate, organizers have decided to broaden their work.

While speakers at Sacramento’s Unity rally didn’t specifically mention the election, the themes they repeatedly touched on—economic justice, racial inclusion, diversity—are clearly of vital import in the weeks leading up to November 8.

“We have to recognize wrong when wrong is done, and call it out,” says Pastor Les Simmons, of the South Sacramento Christian Center, on Stockton Boulevard. Simmons is sitting in one of the center’s conference rooms, a trim man in jeans, a T-shirt emblazoned with a logo reading “community not violence.”

The weekend before the Unity Rally, Simmons and many other local faith leaders, working as a part of a group called Area Congregations Together, were involved in an intensive voter registration drive, based, he explains, “on our faith tradition of love, respect, dignity for all life.”

ACT has also launched a series of local efforts to focus attention on the dangers of racism, on the need to reform the criminal justice system and on the importance of improving police-community relations. How we vote come November will determine how we, as a society, deal with these huge problems, he says.

“This election is pivotal,” Simmons says.

Make no mistake, this presidential election is like no other election in American history. In Donald Trump we see the quintessential demagogue—a manipulator of emotion; an alchemist with the seemingly effortless power to turn a crowd into a mob; a purveyor of bigotry and of conspiracy theories; a man who knows the raw, seductive power of violent imagery, be it through his fetishization of torture or his hinting at taking up arms against his political opponents. No American demagogue has climbed so high; none, at least since Joe McCarthy more than 60 years ago, has posed such a clear and present danger to democratic, enlightenment values.

Nationally, as this man of hate has taken over the Republican Party, there’s been a response from across the political spectrum with activists protesting Trumpism, that ungodly hodgepodge of hatreds, fears, insults and authoritarian “solutions” to complex problems. Since spring, there have been large demonstrations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, the Bay Area, Phoenix and many other cities.

In New York, in April, many thousands of protestors, brought onto the streets by a broad coalition of activist organizations, lined 42nd Street across from the Grand Hyatt Hotel, where the state’s GOP was hosting Trump. They carried placards depicting Trump, a red “no” slash through the center, and the words “No Fucking Fascist.” They called out his racism and denounced his anti-immigrant message. They slammed the businessman for, among other things, his Muslim and Mexican bashing; for his misogyny; for his stated longing during the primary season, in front of an array of Southern crowds, for the good old days when protestors would be roughed up to the point that they had to be removed from political gatherings on stretchers.

In many cities, Trump rallies have been met by sizable protests. During these events, protestors have been beaten, Maced and otherwise brutalized by Trump’s supporters.

Sacramento, to date, hasn’t seen thousands marching in protest, although there were some demonstrators present when the presidential candidate spoke at Sacramento’s airport in June shortly before the California primary, including members of the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, who, recalls BLM organizer Tanya Faison, were accosted by shouting, jeering, spitting Trump supporters and told to “go get a high school diploma.”

But the lack of large-scale anti-Trump rallies doesn’t mean that, in its own, somewhat quieter way, the region hasn’t generated its fair share of activities meant to highlight the toxicity of Trump’s language and policy proposals, and also create counternarratives around economic and social justice.

Over the last year, more locals have come to realize that something deeply unsavory has been let loose on the political system. And, in the low-key way that is one of Sacramento’s traits, its citizens have crafted their responses.

“My background has always been policy, making government work more effectively,” says Jeannine English, a Sacramento resident, and one-time national head of the AARP.

But Trump seems uninterested in policy and systemic change, English adds, and ultimately, his boorish behavior and bullying may be his undoing.

“We have a candidate who has no respect of people who really understand policy, he’s one of those candidates who sparks fear,” she says. “Instead of bringing people together and solving problems, he’s done the opposite.”

Increasingly, those concerned with social justice in Sacramento have concluded that election passivity isn’t a viable moral option. This is, after all, a city that saw a violent neo-Nazi rally on the steps of the capitol in late June, where fascist skinheads and anti-Nazi anarchists brawled and several people ended up hospitalized after being stabbed and beaten with sticks and concrete blocks.

As a result, Sacramento knows firsthand—as does Anaheim, which saw a violent KKK rally, and many other locales around the country that have witnessed an uptick in white supremacist actions since Trump announced his candidacy—the dark powers unleashed when a candidate for a mainstream party gives a nod and a wink to extremist organizations and ideas.

Around Sacramento, large numbers of individuals and groups are focusing on Trump, and on ways of building opposition to him at the ballot box. From now until the election, the local labor council, for example, is sending out numerous organizers to Reno, since Nevada is a key swing state, to register people to vote and to canvas households on political issues. Others, bound by 501(c)(3) restrictions, the IRS tax designation that gives organizations nonprofit, charity status but prohibits them from overtly endorsing or opposing individual candidates, are instead focused on creating counternarratives to the kind of racist and Islamophobic rhetoric that Trump has moved center-stage.

“Locally, we do have a counternarrative to Trump, but it’s issues-based” says Lynn Barker-Baskin, who works with the Sacramento Jewish Federation and the social justice group Bend the Arc. “Prior to Trump’s rising, the issue of racial justice became huge to the community after Trayvon [Martin]. The ability to organize became possible. We had the juice.”

Focusing more on issues than elections, whether it be the economic justice motif of the Fight for 15 campaign, or the broader social justice themes of the Moral Mondays Revival, these organizers nevertheless find themselves on the front line of a political battle uglier and more impassioned than any in decades.

“I worry each day of my life about my children’s children’s future,” says one of the Unity Rally organizers, the Rev. Ken Chambers, whose church in Oakland helped catalyze the local Moral Mondays movement. “There’s so much work that has to be done in the nation as a whole, to take the message from Martin Luther King 50 years ago and make it real. The message is equality. We’ve come a long way, but got a long way to go.”

Over the past year, BLM organizers have protested police violence in town, in particular the October 2015 killing by sheriff’s deputies in Carmichael of 36-year-old Adrian Ludd following a traffic stop and standoff between Ludd and deputies; as well as the July 11 fatal police shooting of Joseph Mann, a mentally ill black man, in north Sacramento and a rash of deaths inside county jails. The group also organized protests against an Elk Grove gun shop that displayed the Confederate flag in the aftermath of the racially-motivated killing of African-American churchgoers in South Carolina in June 2015.

More recently, a local chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national group mainly made up of white anti-racist organizers, convened an inaugural meeting in August at Belle Cooledge Public Library in south Land Park, which more than 100 people attended. While SURJ in Sacramento does not have a specifically anti-Trump focus, nationally its members have been instrumental in some of the bigger demonstrations against the candidate.

Immigrants rights groups have also become more vocal, speaking up in defense of the DREAM Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, pushing for implementation of its sister-policy, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, and encouraging those who can to apply for citizenship and vote in the upcoming elections. Meanwhile, on university campuses, organizers are working on teach-ins in the weeks leading up to the election.

Trump is, says Jeannine English’s husband Howard Dickstein, a one-time professor and a lawyer with a long career representing California’s Native American community, “a danger to the Republic and the constitution and our international standing —because of his incredible ignorance and simplicity, and his use of volatile terms that bring out the most reactionary elements.”

Both English and Dickstein have been using their large social networks to reach out to people to explain what is at stake.

“I felt a duty to speak out whenever I could,” Dickstein says of the last few months. “I kept thinking how critical I’ve been of Germans living through the Nazi era, the ’good Germans’ who were quiet and said very little to stop the rise of fascism. I saw this as analogous.”

Among local Muslim organizations, in particular, an awareness is growing that this is a peculiarly dangerous moment.

A few months ago, a Muslim woman was walking outside of an area Wal-Mart when a man tried to run her over with his car, recalls Basim Elkarra of the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. While there does not seems to be a police report on this incident, such events are occurring more frequently than in the past: Late last year a pre-med student at the University of Cincinnati was targeted by a man who tried to run her over. In Oklahoma, a man recently killed his Lebanese Christian neighbor, mistaking him for a Muslim. In San Leandro, in July, the media reported on a woman in a hijab being pelted with eggs. And last December, a mosque in southern California was set afire, one of roughly 50 mosques nationwide to have been attacked over the past few years. And, routinely, with Trump running a campaign that demonizes an entire religion, local Muslim parents report to CAIR that their children are being bullied in school.

In response, CAIR has begun holding public safety trainings, in which police officers speak with members of the community about how to deal with such attacks. The group has also encouraged members of the community to get involved in the political process, from talking in community forums to voting on Election Day.

“Parents are having to have talks with their children,” says Elkarra. “Children are asking, ’Why is [Trump] saying these mean things? Why doesn’t he want Muslims to come here?’ We have to vote, to make sure that people who respect diversity win.”

CAIR, in conjunction with an array of other ACT-coordinated faith-based groups, will be participating in large voter registration drives over the coming months. During Ramadan, CAIR organizers fanned out to mosques around the Central Valley, talking about the importance of voting. A subcommittee of ACT, Live Free, is set to launch a social media drive to challenge white supremacy and to push for a more inclusive vision of community.

All of these efforts, however focused on a singular element or cause, add up to something bigger, something poised to enact real change.

“Organizers are going to be put [to] their finest moment right now,” Simmons, of the South Sacramento Christian Center, says. “To be able to engage their communities for an awakening to base their vote on the moral obligation of love and respect. With America as a free place for everybody, an open place for everybody, a democracy.”

Elkarra agrees. He says he’s been cheered by the fact that, in addition to local religious leaders standing up against bigotry, many local political figures have made their opposition to race-and-religion-baiting rhetoric clear as day.

On May 18, for instance, three weeks before the California primary, as Trump was marching toward the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Sen. Richard Pan coordinated an event at the Railroad Museum to decry Trump’s inflammatory language. It was 2016’s Day of Inclusion, a date progressive groups have long celebrated as a way to celebrate the state’s diversity and to highlight the injustice of the Chinese Exclusion Act. And a day with particular resonance given Trump’s flirtation with the idea of internment as a tactic in the fight against ISIS, and his pledge not only to keep Guantanamo Bay open but to dramatically expand the number of prisoners held there.

“With the rise of Mr. Trump and his rhetoric,” Pan told SN&R, “we decided we should make this a broader conversation, especially when he was calling for the barring of Muslims from entering the United States, and with people saying the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II was justified.”

CAIR participated in the event, as did the Japanese-American Citizens League and the local chapter of the Jewish Federation.

“We wanted to remind people,” Pan says, “that this kind of rhetoric leads to injustice and terrible things.” Trump’s unempathetic language toward Syrian refugees, for example, has parallels to the dehumanizing language used to bar shiploads of German-Jewish refugees from entry into the country in the run-up to war more than three-quarters of a century ago.

Other senators have held press conferences denouncing Trump’s statements on Mexican immigrants. Some have called for investors to divest from Trump’s businesses as a response to his racially charged statements.

Speaking out against Trump and his rhetoric is key, Pan adds.

“Reminding people that this is not what our country is about; these are not our values—this goes beyond the usual Democrat-Republican thing.”

Certainly it goes beyond politics as usual.

Elkarra tries to put on a brave face when asked what he thinks will happen if Trump becomes the next president, but he’s clearly rattled by the prospect.

“We’ll continue seeing an uptick in violence against minority communities throughout the nation,” he predicts. “It’s not that it scares me. The question is how do we challenge that?”

Regarding the perils of the moment, longtime Republican and one-time Reagan White House staffer Doug Elmets agrees.

Elmets, a longtime Sacramento resident who runs a public relations firm out of the U.S. Bank tower on the Capitol Mall, watched in horror throughout the spring as his party was taken over by Trumpites. Finally, he’d had enough. In late July, he flew out to the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia, and on prime time, the same evening that Hillary Clinton gave her acceptance speech, he endorsed the Democrat for president of the United States.

It was a biting piece of oratory. Standing in front of the thousands of conventioneers, Elmets laid into the GOP nominee.

“President Reagan famously said ’tear down this wall,’” he reminded his audience —referring to Reagan’s challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to remove the Berlin Wall as a symbol of a divided Europe.

“Trump says, ’build that wall.’” Elmets then said. The billionaire politician was, he argued, “a petulant, dangerously unbalanced reality star who will coddle tyrants and alienate allies. I shudder to think where he would lead our nation.”

In the days following his speech, Elmets says he was bombarded by furious tweets and emails from Trump supporters—more than 1,500 by his count. He was taunted by promises of extreme violence against him, and his wife and daughter were also threatened. He was called a progressive prick, a communist, a friend of ISIS. Each irate message, each overheated reaction, only made him more certain in his views. Trump had unleashed something terrifying, he believed, and was empowering the very worst forces in the country.

“They are going to lose their dignity,” he says of fellow Republicans, some of them his longtime friends, who reluctantly endorsed their party’s nominee.

“How do they look at their grandkids? How will history judge them for supporting a xenophobic racist who represents the underbelly of America?”

Over the coming months, Elmets intends to push this message, to urge people to think of “country over party” when they go to the polls in November.

Meanwhile, the issues for the Rev. Chambers, one of the Unity Rally organizers, are clear—and both embody and go beyond Trump.

“It’s moral value, it’s having humanity on the forefront,” he argues. “Working together. We’re putting out a message. … Being realistic, the election is a grand opportunity to focus attention on [issues]. We’re going to address love, togetherness. ’Different’ does not mean ’deficient.’”

In the year 2016, such a sentiment ought to be a given. After all, we like to think that our history has, embedded in it, an arc of justice, a march toward progress on such issues. And yet, in 2016, astoundingly a candidate is making a viable bid for the presidency on a platform that panders to the crudest, most nativist forms of ethnic tribalism and supremacist ideology.

“When you have David Duke [ex-Klan leader] saying he hopes to ride Trump’s coattails into the U.S. Senate, that sums up the state of the Republican Party and politics in America,” says Elmets.

“It’s more than party. This is the heart and soul of our country. He will be the embodiment of the worst that America has to offer.”