The choir had just finished raising the roof inside St. Basil Visitation Church in Englewood when a visitor, Mauro Pineda, stepped up to the pulpit with an unexpected invitation.
March with us on May 1, Pineda urged the mostly black parishioners, invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s call in 1963 to “lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice.”
As another immigration march winds through Chicago on Thursday — now an annual rite of political passion for some and traffic frustrations for others — such pleas to African-Americans represent a new experiment in the fight for immigrant rights.
Organizers predict this march will be much smaller than the 2006 and 2007 marches that attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and galvanized a movement.
Police decided to allow Thursday’s event to culminate in a rally at Federal Plaza, betting they would not need sprawling Grant Park to hold the marchers.
This year organizers are battling the fear created by a government crackdown on illegal immigrants, and some activists have diverted their energy toward the presidential campaign. So local organizers are seeking to re-energize their movement transforming a predominantly Mexican-immigrant campaign into one that joins communities of color with a broader working-class agenda.
