Enlaces News (January 2004)

A Report from Nashville on the Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride 2003

Spring Miller

At the end of September, bus caravans of immigrant workers and community allies departed from nine cities and began making their way across the country to call public attention to the need for immigration policy reform. These caravans stopped in nearly a hundred cities for rallies, vigils, and public events, before converging in Washington for a Lobby Day and then going up to New York for a rally that drew a hundred thousand people. This Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride (IWFR) was sponsored by a coalition of labor, religious, immigrant’s rights and civil rights organization. In planning the Freedom Ride, organizers aimed to re-spark the political momentum for major immigration policy reform which was lost after September 11. The Freedom Ride draws its name and inspiration from the 1961 civil rights Freedom Rides, and aimed to frame the current struggle for justice and citizenship for immigrant workers in the context of the legacy of civil rights movement in the US.

While the visibility and political pressure generated at the national level by the events in Washington and New York were significant, and served to alert public and political officials to the power and energy of constituencies demanding immigration policy reform, perhaps the most exciting aspect of this campaign was the cross-sectoral local-level dialogues it engendered in cities across the U.S. that hosted the Riders. The IWFR planning process in Nashville, proved to be a rich exercise in dialogue and coalition-building.

Remembering the Civil Rights Movement

The IWFR events were particularly meaningful for Nashville because of its history of civil rights organizing and the role that Nashville-based activists played in planning and sustaining the 1961 Freedom Rides. Rev. Jim Lawson, a chief architect of this IWFR campaign and one of the most prominent African-American civil rights leaders advocating for justice for immigrant workers, got his organizing start in Nashville in the early 1960s. Rev. Lawson was the first leader to apply Ghandian principles of disciplined non-violent organizing for political change to the U.S. south. He came to Nashville in the late 1950s at the urging of Martin Luther King and began organizing non-violent training workshops for black students. Several of the Nashville students trained by Lawson, including Georgia Congressman John Lewis, went on to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961 and to plan and carry out the 1961 Freedom Rides.

Immigrant Population Increases in Recent Years

Like other parts of the Southeast, the middle Tennessee region has seen its immigrant population explode over the past decade. Immigrants – most of them from Mexico – have come to work in construction, poultry processing plants, factories, and in the service industry in and around Nashville. The city is also home to the largest Kurdish refugee population in the country, and to a growing number of East African immigrants and refugees. So far, however, the city’s immigrant communities have not been able to translate their rising numbers into political power or even visibility. Local power struggles and conversations about race in the city are still framed almost exclusively in black versus white terms. There are several organizations dedicated to providing services to Nashville’s immigrants, but there are few institutions that represent immigrant communities in political dialogues or public conversations.

The Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride planning process represented a significant opportunity for Nashville immigrant community leaders to relate meaningfully to powerful local institutions with potential common interests – notably, labor unions and prominent African-American churches and community organizations. In the course of the planning process labor, religious, African-American, and immigrant leaders began to identify shared grievances regarding local elected officials and lack of access to governance of the city.

Nashville Welcomes Freedom Riders

The Freedom Riders arrived in Nashville September 29th, and were welcomed at the site of important African American demonstrations had occurred in the 1960’s. At a luncheon in an African American church , the Riders were joined by Rev. Lawson. His presence was particularly meaningful for organizers and attendees. He spoke movingly about the “apartheid” Nashville he knew in the late 1950s, the desegregation movement built by community and student leaders during the early 1960s, and about the current need for solidarity with immigrant workers as an integral part of an ongoing struggle for citizenship and democracy in the US. He compared current immigration policies and immigration law enforcement bureaucracy to the “apparatus of apartheid” embodied by Jim Crow laws in the southern U.S. during segregation.

The events and the planning process that led up to them served to both honor and celebrate the city’s proud legacy of civil rights struggle and to focus local attention on Nashville’s growing immigrant communities. The five hundred plus turnout for the evening rally, which largely consisted of Latino immigrant workers and their families, surprised even local organizers and represented the first time that Nashville immigrants presented themselves as a visible, organized force in the city, capable of making their voices heard. The local IWFR activities generated significant press coverage in the days and weeks leading up to the event, and most observers agreed that the event marked an important step forward in the process of building power and visibility for immigrants in the city.

Looking Forward to Working Together

Members of the local planning committee are now exploring ways that they can build on the momentum generated by the Freedom Ride planning process. Though the IWFR planning process was a short-term exercise, it created a much-needed space to begin to forge local relationships among a variety of communities in Nashville. These budding relationships and the alliances that hopefully will evolve from them will be critical to the development of a broad-based local constituency capable of building on the legacy of Nashville civil rights struggle to advance full citizenship, justice, and dignity for all the city’s residents today.