Sacco and Vanzetti must not die

80 years ago (on August 22nd), Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Their names reside in the very reaches of my memory of politicization. The Allen Ginsburg line (in the poem America) "Sacco and Vanzetti must not die" so plaintively yet so tragically recited, became part of me before I truly new what revolution meant.

Now many years later, I got to hear this Democracy Now broadcast that explains who these two men were, why they remain important figures today, and what they say about the era they lived in.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear Amy Goodman (the host) and Bruce Watson, the writer of Sacco and Vanzetti he Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind give an immigrant and working-class context to these radical activists. They were hard-working immigrants that like many of us and our ancestors, came full of hope for a better future and instead faced racism, urban ghettos, unequal schooling, subsistence wages, and xenophobic scapegoating from the 'native born.' As Vanzetti said while in prison, immigrants and working-class people lived “not in America, but under America.”

Although the trial that they received was unjust (the judge was obviously racist and anti-leftist as he hated Italian immigrants and anarchists), it was the first time that an international movement united to fight against the death penalty and judicial injustice and still serves as a model today. In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti were put in electric chairs and killed by the state.

Unfortunately, we still have the cruel and unjust system of state murder. As I write this, I do not know if Kenneth Foster, who the state of Texas acknowledges did not kill anyone or assist in any way (he was in the vicinity of a murder, which makes him a criminal under the 'Law of Parties'), has been killed. His death sentence is today.

80 years ago and not much has changed. The barbarity of the death penalty still exists and is used as a state tool to kill Blacks, Latinos, the poor, and those who fight against the system.
And immigrants are still used as scapegoats, only now the enemy is Mexicans, not Italians.

In this poverty and blatant disregard for our basic human rights- it is time for a new militancy to grow among us, the people that know what its like to work and receive oppression as our pay.