Labor and Arts Festival panel discussion Sunday, May 13, 2007
4:15 - 5:15 pm (time approximate after performance)
Event is free with the purchase of your ticket to see the performance that day.
TimeLine is pleased to partner with the to present a special panel discussion after the performance on Sunday, May 13. Moderated and organized by festival organizer Lew Rosenbaum, the panel will feature four distinguished speakers:
Fran Tobin Fran Tobin has been a community and coalition organizer and social justice activist for 20 years, since leaving college to fight Reaganomics in the 1980s. He has worked in the peace movement as well as on campaigns for affordable housing, living wages, economic justice and sustainability in groups ranging from Chicago Coalition for the Homeless to Rogers Park Community Action Network to Sane/Freeze (now Peace Action). He is currently Midwest Regional Field Organizer for National Jobs with Justice, a coalition of labor, faith-based, community and student organizations. Tobin has also done volunteer activism work in several other countries, most recently as part of the "Shell to Sea" campaign in Ireland, which is challenging Shell Oil's proposed gas pipeline through fragile bogland in County Mayo.
Beauty Turner Beauty Turner lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the nation's most infamous public housing high-rise buildings, for 16 years. She now serves as assistant editor of Residents' Journal, writing investigative articles and commentaries and co-directing the Advocacy and Outreach Initiative. Turner is a well-known community activist as well as a regular columnist for the Hyde Park Herald and other community newspapers. For the last several years, she has worked as a research assistant for Professor Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University, and has spoken at many events, panels and universities. She has served on the Executive Committee of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and also on the Steering Committee of the October 22 Coalition, a campaign against police brutality.
She has received numerous prestigious awards for her work as a journalist and activist, including the first annual New America Award from the National Society of Professional Journalists and Studs Terkel, Peter Lisagore, Associate Press, Chicago Association for Black Journalists, Courageous Voice, Black Pearl and Woman of the Century awards, as well as a Shero award from the Empowerment Zone Committee. She has been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and in a cover story in the Chicago Tribune Magazine.
Maria de Jesús Estrada
María de Jesús Estrada, Ph.D., was born into a farm-worker community in Yuma, Arizona, and has been a longtime anti-poverty and equal rights activist. She received her doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition from Washington State University. She is currently a
professor of English at Harold Washington College, where she emphasizes race, class and gender studies. She teaches a wide range of literature from proletarian literature to children’s literature. Jesú Estrada also sits on the editorial board of the Tribuno del Pueblo, a bilingual-anti poverty newspaper based out of
Chicago. Currently, Dr. Estrada is working on a co-written book on peace.
Willie "J.R." Fleming
Willie "J.R." Fleming is a Cabrini Green resident/organizer/documentarian/ website designer and researcher with the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, and presented testimony before the U.N. Office of the High Commission on Human Rights this year. He also led the March for the Right to Return with public housing residents and leaders in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina one-year memorial. He filmed and edited a gospelmentary titled "Voice of the Voiceless" along with several other short videos on housing that can be found at housingisahumanright.com.
Before joining the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, Fleming was the director of a gang intervention music program for young men in Cabrini Green, and is currently the Chairman for the Hip Hop Congress Community Chapter in Chicago which deals with issues of social and economic injustice using music as
a platform to unite the people. This year Fleming protested the U.S. Olympic Committee in Chicago by noting that the Olympics can cause poor people to be evicted from their communities and homes. He also took part in training housing and homelessness advoates on how to utilize housing as a human rights mechanism in the United States and educating their communities in fighting for housing as a human right.
