RIO DE JANEIRO, BRASIL - Yesterday, I found myself crying in a bar in Rio de Janeiro. I found myself crying as I watched a video from back home of ICE kidnapping a guy on Schoyer Avenue in Swissvale, the neighborhood where I grew up.
Just two blocks down Schoyer Avenue, I went to middle school at Dickson Intermediate. I have so many fond, pleasant memories of turning on Schoyer, excited to go to school and play with my friends. But as I watched the video, Schoyer Avenue meant something else: pain, terror, and fear, as a man desperately shouted his name to a bystander asking for help as masked gunmen took him away from the neighborhood.
As a veteran labor reporter, I’ve covered too many deportations, but something snapped in me and I cried about a deportation like I never cried before. I’ve been crying on and off for most of the day,
I found myself wondering if the man was going to my elementary school to pick up his kid, but no one knows. No one even knows his name.
As the bystander filming ICE asks him his name, ICE shoves him and pushes him along Schoyer Avenue in the direction of my school. Past the houses where I went to house parties in high school. Past the street where I walked holding hands with my ex-girlfriend, who lived in the neighborhood, just a year ago, in that very place
Being so far from home in Rio de Janeiro, I found myself thinking of Schoyer Avenue and all the important things that happened there. I go to therapy just two blocks down the street in the old Switch and Signal building, where my dad used to bargain for the United Electrical Workers (UE) union contract until the neighborhood factory closed in 1988.
Often when I go to therapy in the building, I find myself thinking of all the battles there in the decades past. I found myself thinking of Anne Feeney,who lived in the neighborhood. And then I found myself thinking of my father’s mentor, Mel Womack, who was chief steward at the plant in the 1950s when UE suffered brutal attacks under McCarthyism.
In those moments, thinking of Mel Womack, I felt a great deal of courage because Mel was fearless. A 6-foot-4 Black native of Swissvale, Mel held the union together when the combined forces of the FBI, the Catholic Church, and anti-communist right-wing unions tried to run the UE out of Swissvale.
The Steelworkers offered Mel a major pay increase if he switched sides and ratted on the communist in the UE. Mel asked them to put the offer in writing; then published the letter in the UE News with a response that he would never abandon the UE.
As a teenager, Mel used to pick me up from work at the Plaza Restaurant and drive me around, telling me stories of how he kept the UE in Swissvale together in those days. He kept folks together in an area where everyone was scared, and I felt comfort. He told me the key was racial solidarity. The UE was not afraid to stand up for all workers at a time when many unions still discriminated.
The UE remained and when Congresswoman Summer Lee, who lives a few blocks from where the plant used to be, first ran for office, the UE was the only union that backed her against the incumbent Democrat. A legacy of the hard, tough fights that Black UE leaders like Mel fought in ugly days of McCarthyism.
Mel was scared those days too. He was dealing with the FBI during McCarthyism, terrorizing union leaders in Swissvale, just like I am scared now of ICE terrorizing people in my neighborhood. But Mel kept everyone together. He kept pushing for racial solidarity, and I know that somehow, we’ll keep fighting in Swissvale as we always have, no matter what terror ICE brings to the neighborhood.
As I cried over a beer last night at a bar in Rio de Janeiro, I found myself looking at an old photo of Mel Womack that I once found. When the New York Times ran Pete Seeger’s obituary, they ran a photo of Pete standing next to Mel Womack at a UE rally in Pittsburgh’s Mon Valley. Pete was famous for his stands, but many in Swissvale still remember UE legends like Mel Womack, and his memory inspires us to keep going.
The fight will go on in Swissvale; it always has, and it always will. UE guys like Mel Womack laid the foundations for the fightback that we have in our hands in Swissvale today. A luta continua no Swissvale!
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