Hank Anderson
Template:TOCnestleft Hank Anderson is a North Carolina activist.
600 Local Activists Reclaim Dr. King's Radical Legacy
According to Will Jones, a graduate student at UNC and an activist with the Carolina Socialist Forum, Internationalist Books, and the North Carolina chapter of the Committees of Correspondence.
Chapel Hill - Six hundred people came out Monday, January 20, 1998 for a march and rally in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's dedication to radical social change. The Chapel Hill/Carrboro NAACP, in coalition with more than thirty other organizations, organized this year's march to mark recent gains by the UNC Housekeepers Association and the Chapel Hill/Carrboro Black Public Works Association. According to long-time Chapel Hill activist Joe Straley, this was the largest such event the town had ever seen.
The size of the march reflected two months of dedicated coalition work. The NAACP, the BPWA, and the HKA worked with the Carolina Socialist Forum, the Coalition for Economic Justice, the Lesbian Avengers, the Feminist Alliance and other groups to build a coalition to plan the celebration. Organizers sent over 800 letters and flyers asking community and work place organizations, churches, and campus groups to spread the word and to join the march. They spoke before congregations, on the radio, and local cable access television, and passed out thousands of flyers advertising the event.
The day before the march, Carolina Socialist Forum began the celebration with a panel discussion entitled Civil Rights for the 1990s: A Call for Economic Justice. Dr. Gerald Horne, director of the Black Cultural Center, began the forum with an historical view of the relationship between racism and economic exploitation in the United States. Lesbian feminist activist Mab Segrest followed by pointing out the need for a global perspective on social inequality in the present period. Lizbeth Melendez, who is helping Guatemalan poultry workers organize a union in Morganton NC, concluded with a local view of the relationship between racial justice and the union movement. All three speakers stressed the centrality of economic justice in civil rights struggles for people of color, women, lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals, and other targets of discrimination.
Martin Luther King Day began with a rally on the steps of the Chapel Hill post office. Dave Lippman warmed up the crowd with songs, and the Internationalist Bookstore displayed a selection of books on Dr. King and the civil rights movement. As the crowd grew from 50 to 75 to 150 people, Hank Anderson of the NAACP called them closer for a series of speeches.
Speakers included Joe Straley, John Herrera, Gerald Horne, and other Chapel Hill activists. Alley Murphey brought greetings from the Housekeepers Association at Eastern Carolina University, and Chris Smith of the UNC Housekeepers read a poem. By the time Ange-Marie Hancock of the Feminist Alliance and the Coalition for Economic Justice introduced the chants for the march, the crowd had grown to 400.
The march began with a short walk to Silent Sam, a confederate war memorial on the UNC campus. There NAACP president Fred Battle and Yonnie Chapman of the Internationalist Bookstore spoke of the need to acknowledge the history of racism at UNC. Silent Sam, they explained, represents the hypocrisy of a university fabled for its liberalism where many of the campus buildings are named for slave owners. One hall, Saunders, is even named for the founder of North Carolina's Ku Klux Klan. Chapman suggested that one way to rectify UNC's racist past would be to replace Silent Sam with a monument to the black workers who had built and maintained the University for 200 years. UNC student Courtney Scott then led the crowd in the Black National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."[1]