Let’s Hear It For Affirmative Action

About 1,000 Council 79 members joined a crowd of 20,000 in Tallahassee, Fla., to protest Gov. Jeb Bush’s initiative to eliminate the state’s affirmative action program.

Members from throughout the state — many of them riding buses overnight from Miami — rallied at the capitol to form the largest civil-rights march in Florida history.

Pres. Gerald W. McEntee was a featured speaker along with Sec.-Treas. Bill Lucy, and International Vice Pres. Jeanette Wynn. Among the other notables who spoke: the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the NAACP’s Kweisi Mfume, state AFL-CIO Pres. Marilyn Lenard and several members of Congress.

“One Florida,” as Bush calls his initiative, met with immediate opposition from labor and civil rights groups. It proposes that all agencies of state government exclude the consideration of race, ethnicity and gender in making contract awards. With the elimination of set-asides and price adjustments, minority businesses would be largely dependent on the good will of state officials.

Bush’s refusal to meet with representatives of the Florida State Legislature’s Black Caucus about his plan prompted two state senators to stage a sit-in at the lieutenant governor’s office. Their action drew national attention that resulted in the formation of the Coalition of Conscience, a group that opposes One Florida.

McEntee reminded the crowd that organized labor was responsible for including affirmative action in the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, “Affirmative action,” he said, “has always been, and will always be, a union issue.” – L.S.