Revolution #015, September 25, 2005, posted at revcom.us
We received the following correspondence from Atlanta:
Dear Revolution,
The Party Statement: “Hurricane Katrina — The People Did Not and Do Not Have to Die,” and the special issue of Revolution on the hurricane are having an electrifying effect here. The response is tremendous and people are taking up bundles of them and joining with distribution teams.
A team of people went out and dropped five banners from overpasses around some core city neighborhoods and began taking out the statement ñ looking for the centers where evacuees from New Orleans were being sheltered and “processed.” People, very broadly, are so angry, frustrated and wanting to do something. It was very common for people to begin crying as they talked with us about the flyer and the horrors people had suffered and the needless deaths.
The statement and the special issue really struck a chord with people and there is a hunger to really talk about what the problem is in a deep way. One discussion grew a small crowd on a Black campus. Masses were using our statement and arguing with others, saying, “it’s the whole system, like they’re saying here, that’s the problem.” We ran into people who had seen the banners—which had the title of the Statement and the Revolution web site on it. A first run of 2,000 posters of the statement are getting up and out to people and getting a huge response, too.
Groups of evacuees started coming in over the Labor Day weekend. But reaching groups of evacuees at the shelters was difficult in the beginning as they were closed and guarded from everyone but medical and social services. We had better experience at the State labor centers, which in several counties were kept open all weekend for evacuees to register for jobs, apply for unemployment, etc., and we got out flyers in bundles to people who were taking them back either to the shelters or to the homes they were staying in. There were people in a large Red Cross-run shelter, in churches, and many in homes of relatives, friends or strangers who took people in. We were also able to get flyers in bundles out to evacuees in the many lines for social services.
Wherever we have reached our basic people — downtown, in neighborhoods, at the MARTA stations, farmers markets and grocery stores—we’ve had people taking them up.
Some Black churches have made our literature available to their congregations, which include folks newly arrived from New Orleans. And a manager of a major grocery store, part of a chain, in a solidly upper-middle class Black community of Atlanta, read our demands and said she’d put them at the checkout counter of every cashier for her customers.
When the statement was “hot off the press” we went to the annual Black Gay Pride parade in midtown Atlanta. Everywhere, everybody was talking about the situation in New Orleans with anger, sorrow and a profound sense that this affected everything—it even colored how other important issues were taken up. The BGP marchers took up the leaflets and several organizers thanked us for coming.
A group of Atlanta University students called for a march on the Wednesday after Labor Day, thinking it would draw hundreds of students because of how intensely everyone was following the situation and how enraged people were. When a group of comrades and friends showed up for the march there were only a couple of AU students (who had brought a petition they wrote to impeach Bush) and a couple of high school students. But we had tons of the statement, copies of the special issue, and posters. So the students took these up and marched through the campuses to draw some more students. There was a lot of debate and struggle over what to do and many people took up flyers and Revolution newspapers.
Some people went to the women’s campus where several young women took bundles of Revolution and World Can’t Wait flyers. Discussions broke out about what it would take to drive out the Bush regime and why this system is the problem. More than 600 copies of the Back to School Revolution issue got out during this march. We also met t-shirt vendors who want to print the WANTED t-shirt and help distribute it through their outlets.
Through all this, we have been meeting many people who want to know about communism and atheism and want to get deeper into the revolutionary program of the RCP and find out more about Bob Avakian.