Category Archives: Recent News

Recent News and Postings

LAC Salutes Howard Keylor

The following letter was distributed at the December 9, 2018 tribute at International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 10 for longtime Labor Action Committee member Howard Keylor.

Click here for a PDF of the letter

Dear Howard,

The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia (LAC) sends its revolutionary greetings to you, our comrade of many years and many struggles.

As you remember, in 1998 you participated in the picket of the Neptune Jade in the Bay Area in defense of 500 locked-out Liverpool Dockers. Mumia Abu-Jamal headed the list of endorsers of that successful expression of international labor solidarity. The Neptune Jade picket sparked off the blockade of the ship in three countries. It was the inspiration for creating the LAC, and you were there when it happened.

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Tribute to Howard Keylor by Eliot Lee Grossman

Click here for PDF of this document

Because Eliot’s remarks about Howard pertain directly to Howard’s work on behalf of Mumia, we reproduce them here separately from the rest of the tributes to Howard.

Tribute to Howard Keylor by Eliot Lee Grossman, Attorney-at-Law, Academic
Member of the Permanent Seminar for Chicano and Border Studies, National
Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico City.

I first met Howard Keylor in the San Francisco Bay Area around 1978, after I graduated from law school, was admitted to the California Bar, and started working with the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal defense organization politically supported by the Spartacist League (SL) just as the Militant Caucus in Local 10, of which Howard was a founder, was politically supported by the SL. Howard was an inspiring role model for a young “revolutionary” radicalized by the anti-Vietnam War movement and Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. I deeply respected, and continue to respect, Howard as a truly proletarianized intellectual with many years of political experience in the trade-union movement as a principled oppositionist raising unapologetically the Trotskyist “Transitional Program” from the demand of 30 hours work for 40 hours pay, to ousting the class-collaborationist trade-union “misleaders,” to the call for a Workers Party to fight for a Workers Government.

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Dec. 9, 2018: ILWU Local 10 Tribute to Howard Keylor

PLEASE JOIN ILWU LOCAL 10 IN HONORING HOWARD KEYLOR, LONGTIME FIGHTER FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, ON HIS 93RD BIRTHDAY:

Sunday, December 9th 2018, 2 – 4pm
ILWU Local 10, Henry Schmidt Room
400 North Point St, San Francisco (near Fisherman’s Wharf)

Click here for a PDF Announcement (Shortened Biography)

Local 10 Bulletin: Honoring Howard Keylor’s Contributions to ILWU and the Labor Movement

Letter from the MUA (Maritime Union of Australia)

Letter from the IDC (International Dockworkers Council)

Remarks by Henry Johnson, December 9, 2018

Letter from the Holt Labor Library

Letter from Labor Historian, Peter Cole

Letter from the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee

ILWU Local 10 Pays Tribute to Howard Keylor
Longshore Veteran of Bay Area Labor Struggles

Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in San Francisco is holding a public event to honor Howard Keylor. A veteran of the Battle of Okinawa, Howard opposed the atomic bombing of Japan, an experience that led him to become anti-militarist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist. He quit college to support Filipino farm workers in the 1948 asparagus strike and became a labor activist during the McCarthy period, joining the longshore union in Stockton in 1953.

Report on the Free Mumia Coalition Forum

The Free Mumia Coalition held a forum on “Government Repression, the National Prisoners Strike, and the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” on the 25th of October 2018, just days prior to the latest court hearing in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. 

At this up-coming court hearing, the question of throwing out all the tainted appeals rulings against Mumia in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was to be posed. These appeals rulings were tainted by the participation of Ronald Castille.

As a prosecutor, Castille aggressively fought (and prevailed) in getting the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to uphold Mumia’s conviction and death sentence in 1989. Then, as a Justice on the Pennsylvania (PA) Supreme Court, Castille participated in the PA Supreme Court’s deliberations, agreed with the arguments he had previously made as Philadelphia District Attorney, and denied the legal challenges raised in Mumia’s appeals from 1998-2012.

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Public Forum: Government Repression, the National Prisoners Strike and the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal

•   7 pm, Thursday, October 25th 2018   •

ANSWER Coalition Meeting Room
2969 Mission St. San Francisco
near 26th St., 2 blocks from 24th St. BART.

Also:
Tune In To Hard Knock Radio, KPFA, 94.1 FM
4 – 5 PM Wednesday 24th October!
Hear Jack Heyman and Clarence Thomas, both ILWU Activists (Retired)

 

Speakers:

Gloria La Riva, ANSWER Coalition

Yvette Felarca, BAMN

Gerald Smith, Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, former Black Panther

Clarence Thomas, former Black Panther, ILWU Local 10 Sec.-Treas. retired

Bilal Mafundi Ali, Leader of Bay Area National Prison Strike Solidarity Committee; Poor Magazine.

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