Last night, clergy from four Nashville congregations and representatives of five others, as well as representatives from two university Student/Farmworker Alliance groups and other community groups, gathered to deliver this message to Publix Supermarkets:

Here in Nashville, our most valuable heritage is the faith that all people deserve self-determination and economic justice. Part of our work of keeping that heritage alive in our congregations, schools and neighborhoods, is to support the Campaign for Fair Food.

We first gathered at West End United Methodist Church to discuss the importance of this campaign to Nashville, make upcoming plans, and say farewell to the twenty workers, students, and community leaders from Nashville who will be joining the CIW for a portion of the march. We also heard from Willie Baptist and John Wessel-McCoy, visiting us from the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. John and Willie, both long-time supporters of the CIW, work to connect movements of the poor and dispossessed, with the mission to “raise up generations of religious and community leaders committed to building a movement to end poverty, led by the poor.” Their message of the importance of cross-pollination between movements led by the poor and dispossessed was particularly poignant, as members of Nashville’s low-wage workers center Workers’ Dignity prepare to march alongside the CIW.

Willie Baptist, a formerly homeless father who came out of the Watts uprisings and the Black Student Movement, with 40 years experience of organizing with the poor, also knows what it’s like to do farmwork. He told us that as a child he harvested cotton in Texas, and of all the difficult and painful jobs he has had since then, none of them match the trauma of that kind of labor.

Willie shared with us his thoughts about the most important strategy of the CIW: to break the stereotypes many have of the poor and dispossessed. What the CIW is teaching us, he said, “is that the poor can think for themselves. The poor can speak for themselves. And the poor can fight for themselves.”

We then caravaned down the road to Publix Supermarkets. There we were greeted by a familiar face: a representative from Publix’s corporate HR office, their “labor relations specialist.” He had flown all the way from Lakeland, FL, just to tell representatives from Nashville’s churches and synagogues that they couldn’t come inside the store.

Publix’s corporate representative quickly disappeared, and from the sidewalk in front of the store, we were able to speak with a Publix manager and deliver our letter. We told him that we are aware that Publix is expanding rapidly throughout middle Tennessee, and that as part of welcoming them to our community, we would like to emphasize the values of social and economic justice we hold dear here in Nashville. We told him that we hope their expansion through Tennessee soon brings with it an expansion of human rights in their supply chain.”