WORKING-CLASS FOUNDATION: BAP identifies the Black working class as the main social force of any reconstituted Black Liberation project.

SOUTHERN ROOTS: The South is the base of U.S. military infrastructure. It is also where 55 percent of Black people happen to live. BAP identifies this region as a priority for collective learning, organizing, and mobilizing the power and influence of Black workers and the poor to oppose militarism, war, and imperialism. —BAP’s Principles of Unity

Led predominantly by Black workers, the struggle for worker dignity and power is at a critical stage in Bessemer, Alabama. That is where Amazon workers are voting to determine if they will be represented by the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU) against the behemoth transnational corporation.

Understanding the power of organization, these courageous workers formed the BAmazon Union over the last few months to fight back against the failure of the company to protect the elementary human rights of workers to a safe work environment and to be free of inhumane working conditions and treatment.

In the spirit of the militant Black working class, this fight promises to be a historic turning point in the efforts to organize the U.S. South.

As we stand in support of Black workers in Haiti fighting against U.S. imperialism, we must make the connections. We are in a life-or-death fight against the ravages of a vicious global colonial/capitalist system that will use whatever means it has at its disposal to maintain the ability to extract value from the land and labor of African/Black people and all who are forced to sell their labor just to put food on their tables. 

BAmazon workers and the Haitian people currently protesting U.S.-backed Haitian dictator Jovenel Moïse share in common their African ancestry and their struggles against colonial-capitalism. We are in solidarity with the BAmazon Union and Haiti's poor and working class.

For more information, please check out the Southern Workers Assembly Home and Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ), a BAP member organization represented on BAP’s National Coordinating Committee.

In the fight for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, self-determination, and social justice there will be No Compromise, No Retreat!

Photo: Demonstrators shout slogans and hold placards during a protest at the Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, Dec. 14, 2018. (Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)