She has seen it happen before: It has been 50 years since the California grape strike resulted in a resounding victory for farm workers’ rights and became a flash point for racial and economic justice in the nation. Huerta is nevertheless optimistic that recent demonstrations and grass-roots efforts will lead to change. “They are being trained like soldiers, trained to kill, and that’s what they’re doing. “I think the whole policing problem needs to be solved because the police have been militarized,” Ms. The images of Black men and women beaten or killed at the hands of police today, like the images of the Los Angeles episode so many decades ago, are reminders of a seemingly intractable problem in America. This and other instances of police brutality against people of color - she was herself assaulted by police in 1988 at a protest in San Francisco - in part propelled Ms. When she was in her 20s, Dolores Huerta witnessed the aftermath of the “Bloody Christmas” attacks in Los Angeles in 1951, in which more than four dozen police officers beat seven young men in their custody, five of whom were Mexican-American. This is an article from World Review: The State of Democracy, a special section that examines global policy and affairs through the perspectives of thought leaders and commentators, and is published in conjunction with the annual Athens Democracy Forum.
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