https://vimeo.com/253197998/
~~ posted for collectivist ~~
By way of background on Bill Fletcher, see:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/fletcher-bill-jr-1954
Some snips:
Political Activism Began in High School
Fletcher was born on June 21, 1954, in New York City. He and his sister grew up in a home filled with political discussion. As labor movement supporters, his parents, William G. Fletcher, Sr. and Joan Carter Fletcher, emphasized black liberation and the fight for desegregation within organized labor. His great-grandparents lived in a famous Harlem building that had been home to W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Walter White. In an interview with the Progressive, Fletcher recounted an incident that took place shortly before the start of the Vietnam War, when he was six or seven: “My great-grandfather [William Stanley Braithwaite] turned to me and asked me if I thought we should be interfering in the political life of another country. I had, of course, no idea of where or even what Laos was. But my father turned to my great-grandfather. ‘Just give him time,’ he said. ‘He’ll have an answer.”’
Fletcher grew up in the midst of the antiwar and civil rights movements. He read Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam, and was profoundly influenced by the Autobiography of Malcolm X. At his high school in Mount Vernon, New York, Fletcher was a student activist. Although at his father’s request, he refrained from joining the Mount Vernon chapter of the Black Panthers, he did help found a black student organization that was very close politically to the Panthers and the Young Lords (a Chicago-based organization of young Puerto Ricans). His group shut down their high school in May of 1970, to protest the war in Vietnam and the killing of students at Kent State by the National Guard, and again in October in support of Black Solidarity
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