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No Time for Hate: Union Gears Up to Stamp Out Hate Crimes
In the wake of last September’s shooting spree in Roanoke, Va., which resulted in the death of CWA member Danny Lee Overstreet, union activists across the country have been reexamining hate crimes laws in their home states and at the federal level. What is apparent is that there are widely different statutes throughout the country.
While CWA lobbyists pursue comprehensive federal hate crimes prevention measures in Congress, members are being encouraged to do the same in their state legislatures.
The shocking murder of Danny Lee Overstreet in a Roanoke, Va., bar last fall served as a wake-up call for CWA and the nation to the need for state and federal legislation to protect everyone from violence based solely upon hatred of any particular group.
Overstreet, 43, was a member of CWA Local 2204 who frequented a pub known to be popular among gays and lesbians. He was killed and six other people were wounded Sept. 22, when Ronald Edward Gay, 53, a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran, sprayed bullets throughout the Backstreet Café.
The assailant, according to news reports, had a history of problems with alcohol and had been treated with anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs after the war. He reportedly set out for the café after announcing he intended to “waste” some homosexuals.
CWA’s top leaders roundly condemned Overstreet’s murder and joined with the AFL-CIO, its Pride at Work contingent of gay and lesbian union members, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other organizations, in an 11th hour push for legislation to strengthen existing federal hate crimes law.
“Hate crimes aren’t just directed at innocent individuals like Danny Overstreet, but against entire classes of people, and thus whole communities are victimized,” CWA President Morton Bahr stated.
CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen, who is responsible for the union’s civil rights programs, addressed a rally across the street from the White House in support of the legislation.
An amendment to the Fiscal Year 2000 Defense Department Authorization Bill, offered in the Senate by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and in the House by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), would have taken existing federal law, which already provides heightened penalties for crimes committed against individuals because of their race, religion, ethnicity or national origin, and added the categories of gender, disability and sexual orientation. The bill would also have removed the restriction that victims of hate crimes be on federal property or engaged in federally protected activities like working, voting or attending public school.
As CWA members mourned Overstreet in Roanoke, the bill died in Washington with adjournment of the 106th Congress. Born was the commitment to a much broader and sustained effort within CWA to promote awareness of hate crime and activism for its elimination, starting with the workplace and the local union.
Now a new bill, the Protecting Civil Rights for All Americans Act (S.19), has been introduced in the 107th Congress by Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschl. Co-sponsors include Kennedy, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). Similar legislation is expected to emerge in the House of Representatives.
The Senate bill’s first section is a federal hate crimes provision that includes gender, sexual orientation and disability. The bill also calls for a study that would explore the national problem of racial profiling. It would provide funding for legal representation of low-income individuals and families, outlaw discrimination based on genetics and ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. And it would increase funding for law enforcement agencies that deal with civil rights laws.
“This is a landmark bill that will pave the way for the introduction of important bipartisan legislation to protect Americans from hate crimes and job discrimination,” said CWA Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling. “The new Bush administration’s support or opposition to this bill will speak volumes about whether the president’s calls for bipartisanship, compassion, and representation of all Americans is rhetoric or reality. We are already working with our allies in labor and the civil rights community in support of this legislation."
Amendments are expected to improve the omnibus bill, said T Santora, CWA legislative representative, and related bills with bipartisan backing are expected to be introduced by Republicans, including Sens. James Jeffords of Vermont and Gordon Smith of Oregon.
CWA’s Hate Crimes Project will be featured at the union’s legislative-political conference in April, Santora said.
The Hate Crimes Project
Building upon the work of CWA’s Committee on Equity, the union’s Civil Rights Department has produced a 13-minute video, “No Time for Hate,” which will soon be made available to locals upon request. Through news footage of events surrounding the Overstreet murder and recent hate crimes against gays and African-Americans, as well as historical photos and illustrations from the days of slavery in the United States, the Holocaust in Europe and bombings of African-American churches in the South, the video presents a clear definition of hate crime. It explains the need for better hate crime legislation, refutes the arguments of opponents against such laws and encourages CWA members to work for their passage.
A valuable resource on its own, the video is part of the union’s broad, comprehensive program to combat hate crimes that includes cross-linked sections of the CWA website, created and maintained by the Civil Rights and Legislative Depart-ments, and efforts at the national, district and local levels to distribute information to as many CWA members as possible.
“What we would ask our locals to do, through their committees on equity, is to have special focus on this legislation, link it up to a core part of their political program, and to hold their elected officials accountable on this issue,” said Cohen, who previewed the video at the District 9 Conference in January.
“We can’t wait until it is a victim close to us to fight back. We have to actively promote diversity, tolerance and genuine love and respect for each other. To wait ‘til someone comes for you,’ is to wait too long.”
No Community Immune
Overstreet, who was white, worked as a customer service representative at Verizon’s Roanoke service center. When his union went on strike during bargaining last year, Danny frequently brought good cheer to the picket line, showing up with even his pet poodle decked out in red. He was well liked and respected by his brothers and sisters in Local 2204, including Sylvia Journiette, also a Verizon customer service rep.
“Being from a minority, I know what it is to be set apart or ostracized because of what you are, and people don’t know who you are,” Journiette, who is black, said in the aftermath of the shooting. “Danny was a great person, and anyone who had known who he was, would never have thought about anything else.”
“Within the local, there were just a lot of people upset because he was Danny, and we knew him, and he was ours,” said John Goodhart Jr., a Local 2204 steward.
Scores of Local 2204 members mourned Danny at a candlelight vigil outside the Backstreet Café and at his funeral, where they distributed roses to hundreds who attended, said Local 2204 President David Layman.
CWA’s “No Time for Hate” video picks up from Danny’s murder and makes abundantly clear that it was not an isolated incident. Statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center show that every hour someone in America commits a hate crime. Every day eight blacks, three whites, three gays, three Jews and one Latino become hate crime victims.
The video revisits examples such as the case of three white supremacists who in 1998 offered a ride to a man walking with a limp. Instead of driving 49-year-old James Byrd Jr. to a destination, they beat him to death, chained his body to a truck, dragged him until he was dismembered and bragged about it. Why? Because he was African-American.
In 1999, white supremacist Buford Furrow shot Joseph Ileto nine times because he was a non-white working for the federal government. About an hour before killing Ileto, Furrow shot and wounded five others — workers and children, in a nearby community center — because it is Jewish.
And in April 1995, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people by bombing the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City — because it was occupied mostly by government workers.
Hate Crimes in Cyberspace
CWA’s Committee on Equity, in its report to the union’s 2000 convention, recognized that the proliferation of hate crimes has spread to the Internet. “Modern telecommunications knows no boundaries and has few limits,” Local 1180’s Gwendolyn Richardson read from the committee’s report. Citing in particular one website operated by the Ku Klux Klan, she continued, “Hate mongers are no longer separated, they can hold hate rallies every night.”
The committee will play a key role in CWA’s anti-hate crime program, working with district civil rights coordinators and local committees on equity to get the video shown at local meetings, at work and at meetings of community groups, said Leslie Jackson, CWA’s civil and human rights director.
“Our country is like a mosaic,” Jackson stressed. “Hate is wrong. It doesn’t matter who you are or who is doing it, it is wrong.”
Jackson said the video will continue to be shown at CWA district conferences and that locals, working with district civil rights and legislative-political coordinators, are beginning to develop their own programs.
For example, Area Vice President Karen Kimbell-Hanson of Colton, Calif. Local 9588 planned to show the video to the local’s committee on equity this month and is already setting up appointments at Verizon, formerly GTE, locations to show it at health and safety meetings.
“I think the general public doesn’t realize that this problem is out there, how serious it is,” said Kimbell-Hanson, who is also a member of the national Committee on Equity. “And I don’t think people realize what we’re talking about with hate crimes legislation. When you break it down so that people understand it, they will support the legislation.”
Just a Click Away
Besides the video, CWA’s website, ga.cwa-union.org, is a prime source for understanding legislation to prevent hate crimes and to punish offenders. Just click on the red “STOP Hate Crimes” logo on the home page or wherever you encounter it on the website. You can arrive at the same place by clicking on the stop sign logo on the legislative-political home page, www.cwa-legis-pol.org. The sites offer a wealth of information on federal and state hate crimes legislation, plus a breakdown of the laws that exist in each state.
A total of 43 states plus the District of Columbia have provisions in their criminal codes that deal with some form of hate crime. The common denominator for all of these laws is some form of additional or heightened penalty for criminal conduct based upon bias against a class of persons.
Currently, 22 states and Washington, D.C., punish hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation, and four states plus D.C. include punishment for crimes based on gender identity.
Some states have freestanding hate crimes laws that define both the offense and punishment. Connecticut, for example, has a law against “intimidation based on bigotry or bias” in regard to physical contact with a victim or damage to a victim’s property.
Other states take offenses that already exist in their criminal codes, such as assault, robbery or murder, and add on to the prescribed penalty if the crime is motivated by bias against a particular group of people. In Nebraska, for example, a hate crime “shall be punished by the imposition of the next higher penalty classification than the penalty classification prescribed for the criminal offense.” In Washington, D.C., the penalty for “bias related crime” can be as much as 1.5 times the maximum sentence for the underlying offense.
About 24 states also permit victims to sue for monetary damages, and some allow prevailing plaintiffs to collect attorneys’ fees. One state, Arkansas, has no criminal provision for hate crimes but does allow victims to file civil suits for bias-motivated conduct.
Time for a Stand
To stress the importance of CWA action on hate crimes legislation, EVP Cohen closes the CWA video quoting from the words of Holocaust survivor, the Rev. Martin Niemoeller:
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I did nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.”
While CWA lobbyists pursue comprehensive federal hate crimes prevention measures in Congress, members are being encouraged to do the same in their state legislatures.
The shocking murder of Danny Lee Overstreet in a Roanoke, Va., bar last fall served as a wake-up call for CWA and the nation to the need for state and federal legislation to protect everyone from violence based solely upon hatred of any particular group.
Overstreet, 43, was a member of CWA Local 2204 who frequented a pub known to be popular among gays and lesbians. He was killed and six other people were wounded Sept. 22, when Ronald Edward Gay, 53, a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran, sprayed bullets throughout the Backstreet Café.
The assailant, according to news reports, had a history of problems with alcohol and had been treated with anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs after the war. He reportedly set out for the café after announcing he intended to “waste” some homosexuals.
CWA’s top leaders roundly condemned Overstreet’s murder and joined with the AFL-CIO, its Pride at Work contingent of gay and lesbian union members, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other organizations, in an 11th hour push for legislation to strengthen existing federal hate crimes law.
“Hate crimes aren’t just directed at innocent individuals like Danny Overstreet, but against entire classes of people, and thus whole communities are victimized,” CWA President Morton Bahr stated.
CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen, who is responsible for the union’s civil rights programs, addressed a rally across the street from the White House in support of the legislation.
An amendment to the Fiscal Year 2000 Defense Department Authorization Bill, offered in the Senate by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and in the House by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), would have taken existing federal law, which already provides heightened penalties for crimes committed against individuals because of their race, religion, ethnicity or national origin, and added the categories of gender, disability and sexual orientation. The bill would also have removed the restriction that victims of hate crimes be on federal property or engaged in federally protected activities like working, voting or attending public school.
As CWA members mourned Overstreet in Roanoke, the bill died in Washington with adjournment of the 106th Congress. Born was the commitment to a much broader and sustained effort within CWA to promote awareness of hate crime and activism for its elimination, starting with the workplace and the local union.
Now a new bill, the Protecting Civil Rights for All Americans Act (S.19), has been introduced in the 107th Congress by Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschl. Co-sponsors include Kennedy, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). Similar legislation is expected to emerge in the House of Representatives.
The Senate bill’s first section is a federal hate crimes provision that includes gender, sexual orientation and disability. The bill also calls for a study that would explore the national problem of racial profiling. It would provide funding for legal representation of low-income individuals and families, outlaw discrimination based on genetics and ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. And it would increase funding for law enforcement agencies that deal with civil rights laws.
“This is a landmark bill that will pave the way for the introduction of important bipartisan legislation to protect Americans from hate crimes and job discrimination,” said CWA Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling. “The new Bush administration’s support or opposition to this bill will speak volumes about whether the president’s calls for bipartisanship, compassion, and representation of all Americans is rhetoric or reality. We are already working with our allies in labor and the civil rights community in support of this legislation."
Amendments are expected to improve the omnibus bill, said T Santora, CWA legislative representative, and related bills with bipartisan backing are expected to be introduced by Republicans, including Sens. James Jeffords of Vermont and Gordon Smith of Oregon.
CWA’s Hate Crimes Project will be featured at the union’s legislative-political conference in April, Santora said.
The Hate Crimes Project
Building upon the work of CWA’s Committee on Equity, the union’s Civil Rights Department has produced a 13-minute video, “No Time for Hate,” which will soon be made available to locals upon request. Through news footage of events surrounding the Overstreet murder and recent hate crimes against gays and African-Americans, as well as historical photos and illustrations from the days of slavery in the United States, the Holocaust in Europe and bombings of African-American churches in the South, the video presents a clear definition of hate crime. It explains the need for better hate crime legislation, refutes the arguments of opponents against such laws and encourages CWA members to work for their passage.
A valuable resource on its own, the video is part of the union’s broad, comprehensive program to combat hate crimes that includes cross-linked sections of the CWA website, created and maintained by the Civil Rights and Legislative Depart-ments, and efforts at the national, district and local levels to distribute information to as many CWA members as possible.
“What we would ask our locals to do, through their committees on equity, is to have special focus on this legislation, link it up to a core part of their political program, and to hold their elected officials accountable on this issue,” said Cohen, who previewed the video at the District 9 Conference in January.
“We can’t wait until it is a victim close to us to fight back. We have to actively promote diversity, tolerance and genuine love and respect for each other. To wait ‘til someone comes for you,’ is to wait too long.”
No Community Immune
Overstreet, who was white, worked as a customer service representative at Verizon’s Roanoke service center. When his union went on strike during bargaining last year, Danny frequently brought good cheer to the picket line, showing up with even his pet poodle decked out in red. He was well liked and respected by his brothers and sisters in Local 2204, including Sylvia Journiette, also a Verizon customer service rep.
“Being from a minority, I know what it is to be set apart or ostracized because of what you are, and people don’t know who you are,” Journiette, who is black, said in the aftermath of the shooting. “Danny was a great person, and anyone who had known who he was, would never have thought about anything else.”
“Within the local, there were just a lot of people upset because he was Danny, and we knew him, and he was ours,” said John Goodhart Jr., a Local 2204 steward.
Scores of Local 2204 members mourned Danny at a candlelight vigil outside the Backstreet Café and at his funeral, where they distributed roses to hundreds who attended, said Local 2204 President David Layman.
CWA’s “No Time for Hate” video picks up from Danny’s murder and makes abundantly clear that it was not an isolated incident. Statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center show that every hour someone in America commits a hate crime. Every day eight blacks, three whites, three gays, three Jews and one Latino become hate crime victims.
The video revisits examples such as the case of three white supremacists who in 1998 offered a ride to a man walking with a limp. Instead of driving 49-year-old James Byrd Jr. to a destination, they beat him to death, chained his body to a truck, dragged him until he was dismembered and bragged about it. Why? Because he was African-American.
In 1999, white supremacist Buford Furrow shot Joseph Ileto nine times because he was a non-white working for the federal government. About an hour before killing Ileto, Furrow shot and wounded five others — workers and children, in a nearby community center — because it is Jewish.
And in April 1995, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people by bombing the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City — because it was occupied mostly by government workers.
Hate Crimes in Cyberspace
CWA’s Committee on Equity, in its report to the union’s 2000 convention, recognized that the proliferation of hate crimes has spread to the Internet. “Modern telecommunications knows no boundaries and has few limits,” Local 1180’s Gwendolyn Richardson read from the committee’s report. Citing in particular one website operated by the Ku Klux Klan, she continued, “Hate mongers are no longer separated, they can hold hate rallies every night.”
The committee will play a key role in CWA’s anti-hate crime program, working with district civil rights coordinators and local committees on equity to get the video shown at local meetings, at work and at meetings of community groups, said Leslie Jackson, CWA’s civil and human rights director.
“Our country is like a mosaic,” Jackson stressed. “Hate is wrong. It doesn’t matter who you are or who is doing it, it is wrong.”
Jackson said the video will continue to be shown at CWA district conferences and that locals, working with district civil rights and legislative-political coordinators, are beginning to develop their own programs.
For example, Area Vice President Karen Kimbell-Hanson of Colton, Calif. Local 9588 planned to show the video to the local’s committee on equity this month and is already setting up appointments at Verizon, formerly GTE, locations to show it at health and safety meetings.
“I think the general public doesn’t realize that this problem is out there, how serious it is,” said Kimbell-Hanson, who is also a member of the national Committee on Equity. “And I don’t think people realize what we’re talking about with hate crimes legislation. When you break it down so that people understand it, they will support the legislation.”
Just a Click Away
Besides the video, CWA’s website, ga.cwa-union.org, is a prime source for understanding legislation to prevent hate crimes and to punish offenders. Just click on the red “STOP Hate Crimes” logo on the home page or wherever you encounter it on the website. You can arrive at the same place by clicking on the stop sign logo on the legislative-political home page, www.cwa-legis-pol.org. The sites offer a wealth of information on federal and state hate crimes legislation, plus a breakdown of the laws that exist in each state.
A total of 43 states plus the District of Columbia have provisions in their criminal codes that deal with some form of hate crime. The common denominator for all of these laws is some form of additional or heightened penalty for criminal conduct based upon bias against a class of persons.
Currently, 22 states and Washington, D.C., punish hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation, and four states plus D.C. include punishment for crimes based on gender identity.
Some states have freestanding hate crimes laws that define both the offense and punishment. Connecticut, for example, has a law against “intimidation based on bigotry or bias” in regard to physical contact with a victim or damage to a victim’s property.
Other states take offenses that already exist in their criminal codes, such as assault, robbery or murder, and add on to the prescribed penalty if the crime is motivated by bias against a particular group of people. In Nebraska, for example, a hate crime “shall be punished by the imposition of the next higher penalty classification than the penalty classification prescribed for the criminal offense.” In Washington, D.C., the penalty for “bias related crime” can be as much as 1.5 times the maximum sentence for the underlying offense.
About 24 states also permit victims to sue for monetary damages, and some allow prevailing plaintiffs to collect attorneys’ fees. One state, Arkansas, has no criminal provision for hate crimes but does allow victims to file civil suits for bias-motivated conduct.
Time for a Stand
To stress the importance of CWA action on hate crimes legislation, EVP Cohen closes the CWA video quoting from the words of Holocaust survivor, the Rev. Martin Niemoeller:
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I did nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.”