Linked to our presentation of HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY on January 30, 2006.
Linked also to our presentation of Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights on January 31, 2006.
And linked to our presentation of Economy and Human Rights – one on January 30, 2006.
Jaribu Hill – USA
She is the Executive Director and Founder of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights.
She writes: ‘By organizing, workers can defend their lives and humanity’: Bosses show contempt for workers through unsafe working conditions and sexist and racist behavior. By organizing, workers can defend their lives and humanity, declared Jaribu Hill, director of the Southern regional office of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The crusading civil rights attorney, who began and concluded her presentation in soul-stirring song (see video-link below), led delegates on a workplace-to-workplace tour of horrific attacks on workers’ rights, as the North Carolina poultry-processing plant where 25 workers lost their lives in a fire because the plant doors were locked; or the Mississippi poultry farm where women workers were fired for refusing supervisors’ sexual advances; or the Mississippi shipyard where management tolerates racist graffiti and threats and KKK activity, among others …
her text: « Back in the Day’ is Today: The Fight for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Deep South. »
The annual Valerie Gordon Human Rights Lecture (of the Northeastern University School of Law) brought her 2005 there as an international leader..
Out of ‘France Diplomatie‘: about Jaribu Hill, in ‘Against the impunity of those in power’:
« I wanted to become a lawyer to bring a different voice into the justice system and to speak for those who have no voice ». When, at the age of forty-two, she began her studies in law, Jaribu Hill had only to change register since, for almost twenty years, she had been a singer committed to the cause of the workers and her black brothers and sisters.
Today, she works in the state of Mississippi with the section of Amnesty International for the Southern United-States region. In 1996, her lawyer’s degree in her pocket, she organised the very first conference on human rights in the region, where, she says, « living conditions are in very many ways as bad as immediately after the abolition of slavery ». Her priority is to act against impunity « in cases of police injustice against citizens », and against the death penalty, which disproportionately affects black people.
She bears her name, Jaribu, with pride, a legacy of her East African ancestors, which in Ki-swahili means « she who tries »: « I have always been a rebel. »
links:
Video on Jaribu Hill’s, of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, spreaching for the Million Worker March, Washington, D.C., October 17, 2004;
other Videotapes;
US Human Rights Network (USHRN), The US Human Rights Network (USHRN) is organized around a caucus structure. Caucuses function as working groups that share information, identify strategies and capacity building needs, as well as explore potential collaborations;
the pdf-text Terror on the Plant Floor;
Congressinal Testimony of Jaribu Hill;
Southern Human Rights Organistion Network;
With the CRS Public Forum.