In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. It is supported by Southern segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., speech to support sanitation workers on strike for union recognition in Memphis, Apr. 3, 1968

During this time of intensifying demonstrations and rallies for justice for black Americans, once again, there has been the charge of “outsiders” and “outside troublemakers” who are causing the problems and causing the damage and destruction that have occasionally occurred.

And it’s not only coming from the predictable Republicans; some Democrats are chiming in with the same charge. They claim that the demonstrations and marches would be more peaceful, if it were just local people involved. This, of course, is nonsense, as it is the same lie that has been perpetrated against American workers of every color, whenever they gathered together to form unions that made their lives on the job more tolerable and allowed their families and communities to have a decent standard of living.

There have been all kinds of charges made by those in power, from the heads of corporations, to the majority of politicians who are manipulated by corporate money and the rich, who live off the suffering and oppression of workers everywhere. Don’t think for a minute that there is not oppression. Just look at the statistics on safety and health on the job (which spills over into the communities in which the businesses and industries are located). Preventable deaths and deadly illnesses abound and the workers inside and the minority and poorer communities outside the plants pay the price of big business’ refusal to obey the laws. Their lobbyists are always at the same time working in Congress and the state legislatures to rescind those laws so that they can pretend to be “responsible corporate citizens.” For the most part, there is no such thing.

The current occupant of the White House is only too willing and enthusiastic to listen to the lobbyists and do their bidding, just like other politicians who are pliable and bend to the will of the rich. In fact, the president comes up with his own ideas about making life more difficult for workers and he finds his peers among the ruling class only too willing to carry out his mayhem. That goes for environmental issues, as well as workplace issues.

The “outside agitators” issue is something that is dear to the heart of President Trump and his fellows in the 1 percent. He has millions of cult followers who support and believe what he says and will support anything he does, even if such actions (cutting Social Security, food stamps, education funds, etc.) cut them and their families off at the knees. They’ll walk on the stumps and they’ll still vote for him.

Trump, just in the past week, suggested that the 75-year-old man who peacefully confronted Buffalo, N.Y., police officers and was pushed to the ground and was hospitalized suffering brain damage was somehow an “antifa,” or antifascist, and “fell harder than he was pushed” by the cops. When even his own staff and supporters pointed out how ridiculous his assertion was, he retreated to “it was just a suggestion.” In that manner, he was not really responsible for his comments on the assault by cops. He might have gotten it from one of his favorite “news” outlets, especially One America News Network (OAN), an outlet known for its conspiracy theories and unabashed support for Trump, making Fox News look like the valedictorian of Columbia Journalism School.

But it’s why Trump loves OAN, just as he once loved Fox. That was before Fox started asking him questions about his actions, his statements, and his motives, just as though they were one of the actual news outlets. He took their sudden journalistic bent as an assault and noted that they seemed not to be on his side, as if he did not know that reporters are not supposed to kiss up to public figures, especially politicians and most especially politicians who are incompetent and erratic like Trump.

The president, attempting to defend the cops in this instance, called up the old canard that both the old man who was seriously injured and the people who were demonstrating were somehow not supposed to be there. They were outsiders in some way: The old man a possible member of antifa and some who came from elsewhere, not Buffalo, or in other cities, not from those cities? Joining together for strength and melding of ideas is as old as the U.S.A. No one asked the continental soldiers where they came from; they gathered together from the various colonies to try to throw off the oppressor, to throw off the shackles of the monarchy across the Atlantic Ocean.

That’s how it has been for the labor movement and the union movement. People came together to form unions and build better lives for their members and their communities. Then, too, the powers that be always said that outside agitators stirred up their workers, as if those workers did not yearn to be free citizens, first in the workplace, and then in the nation at large. Outside agitators? Are they not all Americans, free to come to the assistance of brother and sister workers anywhere they face the immense power of capital? Capital, on its part, has used every trick in the book to convince the workers that they didn’t need “outside agitators” to help them, when the boss’s “door is always open.” That kind of trickery has worked since the beginning of union organizing and it is used to this very day in workplaces around the country. Some politicians have come to the aid of corporations to denounce unions and their organizers, starting with the charge that they are “outsiders,” when the politicians themselves could be seen as actual outsiders, since they are working without end to convince the working class that they and the ruling class they represent are the best thing for the workers.

It has always been the same song for black Americans, from the end of chattel slavery, through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, through mass incarceration today: They have been told that they don’t need outside support, that they should be able to deal with it on their own. There are even some public figures (elected and not) who believe that black folks were better off in slavery. And, that’s not something that was said or thought in the dim past. That sentiment is still expressed in 2020, that there is no need for “outside” help. Tell that to the fighters for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, when they welcomed the freedom riders from the north. And, were these not Americans making common cause with oppressed brothers and sisters? They were not “outsiders.” They never will be “outsiders.”

The continuing murders (although often called by other names) of black men and women by police has continued, with yet another killing in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks, within a few weeks of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. There needs to be something more than “police reform.” There needs to be a complete change of police culture and that doesn’t happen without changing the nation’s culture.

The reluctance of most politicians in Congress to even openly discuss reparations for slavery is an indication of how difficult it will be to change the nation’s culture, but it is vital that this be done. So, reparations would be a good start in changing the culture. Then comes education, followed by a growing jobs program and a low-cost housing program, and most importantly, a single-payer universal health care program or Medicare for All. Those things would be a good start, but only a start.

There’s no way that hatred and bigotry and greed can be removed from the hearts and minds of some of the most powerful politicians and corporate CEOs in whose hands all of the above could be initiated. There is some hope, however, from the actions of the younger generations, who have not absorbed the hate and the greed and who want to find ways to live together in peace. There is, however, no waiting another hundred years for those changes to take effect. The demonstrations that are ongoing in cities across the nation are an indication that change is possible, but the pressure for it must not stop.

At this time, some form of organization needs to be created that includes all of the issues that are represented in the street rallies and marches. There have been attempts to do that at other times, but there were too many and each group seemed to want their issues to prevail and, as a result, the overall group never took root. Although there are nationwide groups that are virtual, that is, they exist in lists of names and addresses of their “members,” they do not exist on the ground. Members of collective groups that have the possibility of forming a mass movement need to see each other, like they are doing in Black Lives Matter demonstrations and marches.

Louis Brandeis, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice, in his paper titled, “The Curse of Bigness,” said, “Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.” What he was saying was that, to be effective, labor (the working classes) must be as powerful as the ruling class or Capital. Under the U.S. Constitution, the people have the potential to be that powerful.

From the kind of contact among untold thousands of brothers and sisters as seen in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and rallies will come a movement greater than their own smaller groups. It must be as powerful as the ruling elite. All-encompassing solidarity is needed. Above all, remember that nobody is an “outside agitator,” because we’re all Americans and we’re all in this together.