May Day rallies broaden to address police brutality

LOS ANGELES — Activists who marched for labor and immigrant rights in U.S. cities on Friday broadened their message to direct attention toward police brutality as tensions simmer in communities across the nation.

The marches on May 1 have their roots in labor movements, which hold annual demonstrations in many countries calling for workers’ rights. In recent years, marches in the United States got a boost from immigrants seeking authorization to live and work in the country legally.

Now, some of the activists in cities from Boston to Oakland, Calif., said they were also rallying in support of “Black Lives Matter” — the slogan of the growing movement in the wake of a series of deaths of black men as the result of a police encounter.

“It is important to support movements and struggles that stand up for people being singled out by the system. Right now, immigrants share that distinction with African-American youth, that we are being targeted by the system,” said Miguel Paredes, membership coordinator of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

The move comes after unrest in Baltimore and protests in other cities over the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a severe spinal injury while in police custody on April 12. He died a week later.

For more than a century, International Workers’ Day has been celebrated on May 1 to mark the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, when a bomb turned a workers rally into a deadly event.

In the United States, the annual event has shrunk since 2006, when stringent immigration legislation drove hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to march.

Broadening the message could help bring new supporters to the push for immigration changes, but doing so isn’t just a political strategy, leaders said, noting that immigrants share a distrust of police authority and concerns of racial inequality.

“This is one of these times where the savvy political move is also coherent political ideology,” said Da- vid Meyer, a professor of sociology and political science at the University of California at Irvine.

Some rallies were still mostly focused on labor and immigration issues, such as an event in Salem, Ore., where advocates support increasing the minimum wage and President Barack Obama’s program to protect millions of immigrants in the country illegally from deportation.

Around the world, leftwing groups, governments and trade unions also staged rallies..

In Turkey, police and May Day demonstrators clashed in Istanbul as crowds determined to defy a government ban tried to march to Taksim Square.

In the Philippines, more than 10,000 workers and activists marched in Manila and burned an effigy of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III to protest low wages and a law allowing employers to hire laborers for less than six months to avoid giving benefits received by regular workers.

Workers in metropolitan Manila now receive 481 pesos ($10.80) in daily minimum wage after a 15 peso ($0.34) increase in March.

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY Demonstrators march in Chicago to mark May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, an observance with roots in the labor movement of the 19th century.