LETTERS.

Civil Rights and Wrongs

Re: "Creating a Powerful, Broad-Based Moral Movement" (October/November issue): Days after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in housing on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. Decades later, Obama's "change" meant business as usual. Today, racism is not waning, forty million Americans live in poverty, the top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and "just one in ten Black Americans believe the civil rights movement's goals have been achieved in the fifty years" since King was killed, according to The Independent. And this, from Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, says it all (probably unwittingly): "All the issues that he raised toward the end of his life are as contemporary now as they were then."

--Robert Stafford

London, England

Of course, voting suppression is wrong and we should all have equal access to the ballot ("Creating a Powerful, Broad-Based Moral Movement"). But the work I have been involved in with the Community Rights Movement takes into consideration who controls which candidates and issues get on the ballots. We can work so hard to secure equal access to voting, but if we ignore the issue of who decides what we get to vote on or for whom, we will find ourselves right back in a box that hasn't given us any more power over decision making and self-governance as a people.

There are groups in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, and elsewhere fighting for this right. It is at the heart of the Community Rights Movement and is critical for the shift in power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent that needs to happen.

--Tish O'Dell

Cleveland, Ohio

Library Activism

Eleanor Bader's "Librarians to the Defense" (October/November issue) in-spiringly cites many examples of current library activism. Here are two more: a widespread campaign to limit police presence in libraries, and a nationwide fine-free movement to totally eliminate overdue charges for library materials. These fines have been fraudulently touted as a means to instill responsibility among borrowers and get the items back on time. But their actual purpose is to increase revenue, to the proven detriment of poor people and communities of color, who have been massively excluded from borrowing books, films, and CDs for failing to pay the punitive, money-raising fees.

--Sanford Berman

Edina, Minnesota

On Worker Co-Ops

I...