APRI Banquet Was a Great Success!

PHOTO: Fletcher Jr. speaking at the APRI-Maine Banquet in Portland last Saturday.

About 60 people attended the A. Phillip Randolph Institute's Annual Banquet last Saturday featuring labor activist and scholar Bill Fletcher, Jr. About 25 people attended a workshop on immigration and labor preceding the dinner at the Irish Heritage Center.

"The speakers were really engaging and people were really excited to be there," said APRI-Maine President Garrett Stewart.  "Bill Fletcher was just tremendous."

Fletcher, who has written extensively on the intersection of race and labor, had prepared remarks for the event but the setting of the dinner inspired him to connect the Irish experience to the black freedom struggle in the United States. He described how the Irish were historically exploited and treated as second class citizens by the British. He spoke about how the English brought in planters to first colonize Northern Ireland and later North America.

As I have written, the colonizers saw the Scots-Irish as a perfect buffer against “the wild Indians” in Maine in the early 1700s. Like the English, the Scots-Irish began using the same dehumanizing terms to describe Indigenous people that they previously had reserved for the Irish, like “savages,” “heathens,” and “barbarians.”  

Stewart said APRI Maine is planning to hold other labor and immigration workshops for unions, including an event at the Eastern Maine Labor Council. He also invited everyone to attend a picket in support of farmworkers with the Milk with Dignity Campaign in front of Hannaford headquarters in Scarborough on April 9 to call on the company to commit to fair wages and safe working conditions for dairy workers.

"A lot of big bosses are going to be at Hannaford Headquarters on April 9, so If we have a hundred people in Scarborough protesting out front it would send a big message," said Stewart.