African Activist Archive

Memorandum by The Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee concerning the Coalition to Stop Rhodesian Imports. The Coalition and Philadelphia longshoremen have waged a struggle to close the Port of Philadelphia to Rhodesian goods for eight months, with a number of successes and failures. A unified strategy is needed, which this paper hopes to contribute to. The Coalition is explicitly both anti-racist and anti-imperialist. Longshoremen, and black longshoremen in particular, have been the leading element in New Orleans, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The memorandum says the working class in the U.S. has the most highly developed organizational forms of all the different strata of American Society: the trade unions. The memo proposes four priorities for direction, strategy, and tactics of the Coalition: 1) longshoremen, 2) the Black Community, 3) workers in the various plants in the city and their trade unions, and 4) students, the intellectual community, and activist communities, who have shown their interest and sympathy for the struggles in Africa. The memorandum also mentions monopoly capitalism, Richard Nixon, the military, international solidarity, slave labor, class consciousness, the ILA (International Longshoremen's Association), picket lines, and oppressed peoples.

African Activist Archive

To: Members of the Coalition

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