On August 22, 2010 Ron “Slim” Washington, surrounded by his family with Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue playing, made his transition to join the ancestors. His death was a tremendous loss to the workers movement and the Black freedom struggle. While not well known to the mainstream media and civil rights movement, Slim was an important figure in the Black Student Movement of the early 1970’s, the African Liberation Support Committee and numerous struggles in the New York/New Jersey area.
Black Workers Take the Lead – For Brother Slim
(Statement presented by Saladin Muhammad)
Slim, as many here and around the country fondly called him; was a dedicated working class revolutionary and African American Freedom Fighter. If I fail to make this point clear, I have no doubts, that Slim will be organizing the other ancestors to call me a revisionist. Slim knew, felt and promoted the power of the working class. He understood and projected in his work and writings, the importance of the centrality of organized Black workers to developing the power, consciousness and vision for revolutionary change of the African American people, and wider US and international working class.
Slim understood that the struggle for African American self-determination was critical to shaping not only the national consciousness of the African American people, but also to shaping the class consciousness of the Black worker outlook about internationalism, and the need to build unity with the struggles of other oppressed peoples and nations. Slim was a founding and leading member of the National Black Workers Organizing Committee and the Black Workers Unity Movement, two efforts to build, further develop and promote the centrality of Black workers as a conscious trend in the African American people’s and workers movement. As part of Slim’s work in promoting this trend, he wrote a trend document called the Ten Task of the Conscious Black Worker. Slim understood that correct ideas have to be confirmed by practice.
His organizing of the Black Telephone Workers for Justice, a sister organization of Black Workers For Justice in North Carolina, brought new and young Black workers to activism within the trade union movement, and to levels of political consciousness that we need today, to carry out an organized challenge to the intensifying and racist attacks on the conditions of life for oppressed and working people.
Black Workers Take the Lead!; Black Workers Take the Lead!; Black Workers Take the Lead!: was Slim’s mantra. It also shaped his character, intellect and enthusiasm about jazz music. Slim’s drive to organize and promote the historical influence of Jazz as a genre representing the centrality of the Black working class, expressing the pain, suffering and struggles of the African American people, left its powerful mark in this New Jersey area. Today, as some Black activists are uniting to launch a national effort to engage the Black masses in developing a Black Manifesto Against Racism and for Human Rights, as a manifesto of national resistance, we will greatly miss your presence and leadership. However, we will always remember and be guided by your mantra – Black Workers Take the Lead!
Black Workers For Justice
August 28, 2010
