Datelines
al., Mary Jo McConahay et.
The Soil of Rebel Support CHALATENANGO PROVINCE, EL SALVADOR The first mortar round hit at mid-morning. Delia and Martino, the peasant couple with whom I was staying in a mountain farming hamlet...
...In that year, the Carter Administration tried to prevent this magazine from publishing an article about H-bomb secrecy...
...Suddenly, around 4:30 in the afternoon, adults and children scattered again...
...I found a better job," says Mowry with a laugh...
...This settlement," suggests Montgomery, "has shown that it's possible, even in the Reagan era, to win very significant gains for clerical and technical workers...
...Lents seems to help some young get through their maturing years...
...And this is more so for people who move every three years, which is the national average...
...It does a lot to end discrimination," says Local 34 negotiator Cathy Meyerson...
...Many saints were guerrillas, like St...
...The Yale victory may prove to be a valuable precedent for others involved in the growing drive to unionize "pink-collar" workers...
...Proctor and Covington were eventually able to votehundreds of others became discouraged and left the polling places...
...A police officer told us, "I have personally seen thirty to forty people walk out of the Hall of Records because the windows [where clerks process voters] don't tell people where to go...
...The peasants are deeply religious, and that's another reason they stay...
...A Republican poll watcher near San Antonio "was falsely dressed like an INS agent—all in green," says Andrew Hernandez, deputy director of the South West Voter Education and Registration Project...
...Yale also agreed to paternity as well as maternity leaves...
...Other participants suggested that even traditionally conservative constituencies have reason to abandon support for the Administration...
...Jackson predicted that the poor will increasingly move into the progressive camp as the gap between the upper and lower classes widens...
...They killed him as Concepci?n clamped her hands over the mouths of her infant and another of their five children who was about to scream...
...Steak restaurant, with ambition to move up into the chain's management...
...One victim, partially paralyzed, had not been able to crawl around a large rock to hide with others, and was shot at close range with an automatic weapon...
...Members of the faculty had formed a barrier to protect demonstrating students from the kind of police violence that had occurred at other campuses...
...It's dark," he conceded, "but morning comes...
...Now, the council says, there are only about 3,000...
...What are we going to do...
...There was no way to escape, no exit...
...It was one of the many times his integrity set him apart...
...But the numbers hide another reality: Thousands of citizens were denied the right to vote...
...Ninety thousand corporations made a profit and paid no taxes last year, and 100,000 individuals made $100,000 or more and paid no taxes," he declared...
...Minh Van Lam, a former student and Vietnamese immigrant, was charged with murder...
...That was my goal," he recalls...
...Whether one is white or black or brown, hunger hurts," Jackson said...
...Such tales point to the need for election-law reform...
...Farmers facing mortgage foreclosures, blue-collar workers left jobless by corporate flight, women worried about the Administration's efforts to outlaw abortions—all are groups ripe for courtship, speakers said...
...Most important, the three-and-a-half year contract gives a financial boost to the lowest-paid workers, a disproportionate number of whom are female and black or Hispanic...
...The average salary for current employees will go from $13,318 a year to about $18,000 by 1988, Meyerson says...
...We learned that there is absolutely no uniformity in voting laws and procedures city by city, county by county, state by state...
...A-37...
...The Administration's reluctance to enforce certain laws and its withdrawal from the World Court could spur further disillusionment, he added...
...One who stays in his own place is a protagonist of the truth...
...I'm going for the canyon...
...It's like throwing rocks at a flock of birds...
...Another, a fifty-year-old woman named Juana Alas, had crawled under an overhanging rock...
...This is our own...
...the Special Clerk at Westside High School couldn't break through the busy phone line at the Hall of Records to inquire about her registration status...
...Students and poor people suffer the most since they move more frequently still...
...By stepping forward, they broke ranks with much of the scientific establishment...
...They're not being told...
...Many have drug problems, almost all are poor, few live with both parents, and some are victims of domestic violence...
...One of the primary functions of education is to teach the skills necessary to get by in the world," says Mowry...
...Delia and Martino, the peasant couple with whom I was staying in a mountain farming hamlet in this rebel-held area, ran from their house with three children and a fifty-eight-year-old man named Pedro...
...Last October, Cooperman was shot and killed in his office...
...Some days you hit one...
...Years earlier, during a protest against the Vietnam war, Cooperman showed his courage in an even more dramatic way...
...I like the program," says Dale Badrick, a parole officer with the Multnomah County juvenile court...
...Residency requirements are antidemocratic," maintains Sonia Jarvis of the Citizen's Commission on Civil Rights...
...Students who attend Lents Education Center have dropped out, been expelled, or otherwise gotten lost in public school...
...The hope of those in attendance was that there will be opportunity in adversity...
...His peace-making activities brought him some renown—and they may have contributed to his death...
...Lents tries to strip that veneer away...
...A Different Kind of Schooling PORTLAND, OREGON When Martin Luther King Jr...
...I've seen kids take hold of their lives there...
...It brought smiles and sighs of relief, melting away the icy bitterness that comes from spending cold days on the picket line...
...In New York City, as in many other cities throughout the country, at least 62,000 of the people who showed up to vote as registrants on election day were turned away from the polls, mostly in low-income and minority neighborhoods," says Beth Degrasse, coordinator of the National Student Campaign for Voter Registration...
...He also aided the families of American soldiers classified as missing in action, worked for the release of Vietnamese in "re-education" camps, assisted Vietnamese students in adjusting to Cal State, and interceded for those expatriates who wanted to return to Vietnam...
...But tempered optimism pervaded the crowd of 500 attending a combination Counter-Inaugural Ball and benefit for the Center for Constitutional Rights...
...The clerks just say, 'We can't find your name.' People don't understand they can see a judge [to appeal for the right to vote...
...Keturah Proctor, a sixty-year-old grandmother, did know how to appeal, but the process took more than two hours...
...After all, the Reagan Right seems to have political momentum on its side these days...
...The old, classic union tactic of simply shutting the place down and waiting for the boss to get hungry wouldn't work here," says labor historian David Montgomery, a Yale professor...
...Dittman says his friend was a "scientist of conscience," borrowing the description from an article in the May 1979 issue of The Progressive...
...After a while, I crawled out of the tunnel and watched mortar rounds fall on planted fields and the nearby river bank...
...When you negotiated a spectacular contract for the 2,700 people here, you also negotiated a spectacular future for university workers everywhere...
...Water seeped into the floor of the black and muddy pit, which was big enough to hold four or five people...
...Mowry stresses teaching a sense of self-worth, instilling confidence and pride in the students, who attend for three to eighteen months before they move on to more traditional schools...
...I joined others behind a stone wall, where we huddled as a second explosion rocked the air and seemed to suck it up at the same time...
...Women who have spent a lot of years here have been kept down...
...No one died that day, but the terror was palpable, even for the peasants, who by their own account had often experienced such...
...Out back is a mound of television carcasses, abandoned by an appliance repairer...
...On the day we reached the cave we were resigned that they were going to kill us...
...I made a mark for every round (there would be between eighty and ninety by late afternoon) and noted what others said: "Well, they hit the bean field again," said a neighbor with machete in hand, arriving breathless up the trail...
...When Morris enrolled at Lents, he says, he continued with the old disruptive habits...
...That kind of spark of excitement is so rare in their lives," says Miller...
...Carole and Paul Bass (Carole and Paul Bass are New Haven-based free-lance writers...
...Television ads in El Paso told viewers, "If you're not sure you're registered to vote legally, don't risk breaking the law...
...Alan Zox and Cyrus Mehri (Alan Zox and Cyrus Mehri are staff members of The Difference in '84, a nonpartisan voter education project launched by Ralph Nader...
...Not everyone continues, though...
...Albert L. Huebner (Albert L. Huebner is a freelance writer in Canoga Park, California...
...At the cave we found two skulls, bits of a third skull, human bones apparently scattered by animals, and near the rock where Juana Alas hid, long twists of human hair...
...He credits the Center with helping him along...
...He wanted to use science and technology to ameliorate the human condition, and his concern was particularly with those on the bottom of the ladder, with those whom Frantz Fanon called 'the wretched of the Earth,' " notes Roger Dittman, a fellow California State physicist who knew Cooperman for seventeen years...
...Local 34 members, many of them single mothers who had no previous exposure to unions, used an innovative strategy to ensure victory...
...The third was named Carlos, husband of Concepci?n Delgado...
...Women who take time off to have children—or who shift to new university jobs when grants expire—will no longer have to start over in accumulating seniority...
...While some of the most blatant barriers to black registration and voting have been overcome," he says, "there are still many subtle and structural barriers that discriminate against blacks and other minorities...
...We call them the papayas of Duarte," said Pedro, after a run of eight mortar shells...
...Still, the activists recognized that they face an uphill struggle...
...Press offensives focused attention on the university administration's hiring of a union-busting firm and on the role of the unseen, out-of-town directors of the Yale Corporation-such major figures as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and, ironically, civil rights activist Eleanor Holmes Norton, theretofore a proponent of comparable worth...
...Francis j. Flaherty (Francis J. Flaherty, a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a reporter for the National Law Journal...
...Voters: The Privileged Class...
...While the courts try to determine the circumstances of Cooperman's death, his friends are spreading the lessons of his life...
...Wait until someone else comes in and liberates us while we are lying down in bed...
...It establishes a new salary structure that will enable workers to advance upward from previously deadend jobs...
...In those states where same-day registration exists, few problems have been created for county clerks or boards of elections...
...His project, underwritten by UNESCO, was intended to benefit Americans and Vietnamese alike, but "some refugees—most of whom are bitterly anticom-munist—considered Cooperman a sympathizer with the communist government in Hanoi," according to the Los Angeles Times...
...Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan has, on his watch, put six million more people into poverty...
...One reason to have a Counter-Inaugural Ball is to search for a counter-direction," said former Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, the guest of honor...
...Many who withstood the heat for years have left, died, or been forcibly removed since the Salvadoran government's attacks escalated in mid-1984...
...We're not going to get a kid into Harvard," says Mowry...
...Delia and I jumped into a tunnel that had been dug into the side of a hill...
...It takes its name from the corner of Portland in which the school is located, the Lents community, a depressed area since it came into existence some seventy-five years ago...
...Many other districts had similar stories," he adds...
...By the time the bomb hit, I was running too...
...The resulting contract is a "down payment" on pay equity, according to Local 34 leaders...
...We feel the bombs in our own flesh," Martino said...
...Some of his parishioners were upset, and they became increasingly uncomfortable when Mowry began encouraging blacks to attend their church...
...Yale Teaches a Valuable Lesson NEW HAVEN A sudden thaw swept through this city in late January...
...Clerical workers have been watching every single day and every single step," Jim Braude, a United Auto Workers organizer from Boston, told the Yale unionists...
...One day it occurred to Morris that the instructors at Lents were there to help...
...They stay because they are tied to the land itself in an intimate and passionate way that is difficult for an urban dweller to understand...
...Still others found promise in a wave of voting-rights lawsuits, the flowering of socially responsible investment companies, and the multiplying U.S...
...I'll try too...
...Today, they continue to see themselves bearing a kind of Christian responsibility...
...A mortar shell flew so close we heard it whistle, and when it hit on the other side of the hill, the damp dirt of the tunnel walls vibrated against our shoulders...
...Not sure enough yet to emerge from under the trees, they nevertheless began to talk aloud...
...Delia rocked back and forth, holding her knees and chanting: "I am very afraid...
...This has no end but the destruction of people," said Martino, sitting on his haunches and becoming angry...
...They believe the rebels and their organizations—not the Duarte government and the military—best represent their interests as peasants...
...Beware those locked out of the inn...
...Cooperman and Dittman were among the first scientists to swear out affidavits supporting The Progressive's position that there was, in fact, no secret...
...Sherman cites the purging of registration rolls without adequate notification to those on the lists, the insufficiency of minority deputy registrars, and the complex construction of ballots in some areas...
...They always cared," he says...
...Today, he is head cook at a Mr...
...James," says Martino...
...That job is designing and directing programs for alienated youth, first in Pittsburgh, then in Houston, and now at the Lents Education Center in Portland...
...One of the major issues of the next four years is going to be whether this Administration can be made to abide by the rule of law," said Morton Stavis, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights...
...Seventy-two-year-old George Covington had to wait five hours because his form had been misplaced at the polling places where he had voted for more than fifteen years...
...Three years ago, Tom Morris was a chronic troublemaker who had dropped out of school...
...The kids we get have fallen through the cracks...
...That's when the soldiers spotted him, says Concepci?n...
...As lines dispersed and regrouped, the professors drifted away until Cooperman remained—alone —facing a squad of police, face-shields in place, batons drawn...
...Local 34 of the Federation of University Employees—a predominantly female union of clerical and technical workers—had reached its first labor contract with Yale University...
...In August, about fifty civilians—including infants—were massacred by government infantry not far from the hamlet...
...Fully three-fifths of last year's students successfully transferred...
...Upstairs from a cabinet shop and second-hand store, the school stands on a busy street where traffic streaks off the freeway...
...said Neris, forty-one...
...Local 34 waged the country's first major private-sector strike for pay equity, successfully arguing that "woman's work" should be valued on the same basis as traditionally male jobs...
...As the A-37 jet fighter whined over for another pass, I hunched my shoulders and pressed my face into the soil...
...In Georgia, an estimated 16,000 blacks cast invalid votes in the Presidential race because of confusing directions on ballots, according to Brian Sherman, research director of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project...
...Run...
...The comparable-worth strike was over...
...Within a year, Mowry and his congregation had parted ways...
...These are the times that try men's souls," commented Stavis...
...Classes at the Center are informal and individually paced...
...And though they do not bear arms themselves, they say they contribute in other ways to the armed fight, which they now see as the only way to improve their situation...
...We left here on a guinda [flight into the mountains] because there was bombing on all sides," recalls Concepci?n...
...Miller tells of one student who became enthralled with a project on earthworms and sat fascinated as the worms burrowed through the dirt behind the glass...
...I found myself biting the dirt...
...Martino's hamlet, which counted 105 persons in late summer, contained only thirty-two in November...
...The peasants above ground seemed to feel a cocky relief...
...I stay because I feel involved in this fight," says Pedro, "and I farm because St...
...In the 1970s, peasants formed Christian base communities throughout these hamlets...
...The others are so frightened they fly away...
...put out his call in 1965 for people to march on Selma, Alabama, a young minister from Pittsburgh named Richard Mowry responded...
...We, too, witnessed administrative obstacles—particularly for first-time voters, but even for long-time voters—in Newark...
...So I figured, why not...
...Over the years I've referred a number of kids to Lents, many of whom I did not expect to stay in school, and they did...
...Mary Jo McConahay (Mary Jo McConahay, an associate editor of Pacific News Service, wrote "On the Margins of War" in the September issue...
...Acting on his beliefs, Cooperman, a physics professor at California State University in Fullerton, helped found the U.S...
...One woman, for example, a single mother with seventeen years' experience, will see her annual salary rise from about $11,000 to $19,000 over the course of the contract...
...NEWARK, NEW JERSEY Politicians, pundits, and pollsters are celebrating the fact that almost ninety-two million Americans cast ballots last November 6. The turnout slightly reversed a twenty-year trend of declining participation in Presidential elections...
...They stay because they continue to harbor a fear of the government and military so deep that it is untouched by the show of elections or civic programs...
...His theory may not be unfounded: A group calling itself the Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation has claimed credit for killing others in this country suspected of being "pro-Hanoi...
...There's a dull veneer that lies over everything in these kids...
...We're excited as hell when one goes to community college...
...Cooperman's family and close colleagues say the professor had been receiving mysterious death threats for several months before the shooting...
...This corner of the war zone had about 5,000 residents six months ago, according to the "popular power" governing council, which is the civilian authority here...
...Simeon Dreyfuss (Simeon Dreyfuss, a former editorial intern at The Progressive, is a free-lance writer in Seattle...
...Hey, it's small, it doesn't look like much, but it's got a lot of heart...
...In Texas, an unknown number of Hispanic citizens stayed away from the polls for fear of being collared as undocumented immigrants...
...The peasants who remain represent the hardest core of civilian support for the guerrillas...
...Even as the picket signs were being put away in New Haven, organizers at Harvard and Columbia universities were preparing for their own battles...
...Cooperman periodically visited Vietnam to study the lingering effects of Agent Orange...
...Police say they have "no verifiable indication" that Cooperman's death was politically motivated...
...I point it out to friends when we drive by: I went there...
...Since they couldn't close Yale completely, the strikers leveled their fiercest attack on one of its most valuable assets: its reputation as an enlightened, liberal institution...
...I didn't want to do anything...
...That was Mowry's last pastorate...
...Our workers observed a myriad of problems on election day," reports Donald Ha-zen, staff member with another voter registration organization, Human Serve...
...one shouted...
...One afternoon, I visited the site where three unarmed villagers had been killed by members of the elite, U.S.-trained Atlacatl battalion...
...You've never seen such lack of enthusiasm," says Joyce Miller, a teacher of English, mathematics, and social and natural sciences at the Center...
...A Death in the Family TuLLERTON, CALIFORNIA "Scientific exchange," Edward Cooperman once wrote, "leads to mutual respect, then to trust, and eventually is im-pprtant towards establishing peace between nations...
...demonstrations against South African apartheid...
...Tony Russo, a member with Cooperman of the U.S.-Vietnam Friendship Association, is nevertheless convinced that his associate was assassinated for working toward normalized relations...
...She was killed when soldiers threw in a grenade...
...And the neighborhood movie house is nailed shut...
...Heather Booth, co-director of Citizen Action, a public-interest political organization, says, "The real scandal is that there is not universal voter registration as there is for the draft or Social Security or anything this country cares about...
...When their infant cried for something to drink, Carlos stepped out of the cave to retrieve a water container...
...Locked Out of the Inn NEW YORK CITY "Can't Stop Us Now" was, at first blush, an odd title for a gathering of progressive activists...
...But we witness too, by not leaving...
...But we are determined to continue in our own territory...
...But the teachers didn't play...
...There is another America, a locked-out America," he observed...
...Paul says the right to eat belongs to those who work...
...Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam...
Vol. 49 • March 1985 • No. 3
