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SI Kahn Benefit Concert for Greensboro Justice Fund

SI Kahn Benefit Concert for Greensboro Justice Fund

Published 09-15-06

Submitted by Greensboro Justice Fund

The acclaimed singer/songwriter, author and activist Si Kahn will be performing at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Northampton and Florence on Saturday, September 16 at 8 pm in a benefit concert for the Greensboro Justice Fund. Tickets are $10 at the door or at the following: Broadside Bookshop, Food For Thought Books, World Eye Bookshop. Doors open at 7:30.

The author of such songs as "Gone, Gonna Rise Again" and "Aragon Mill" about the lives and pain and hope of working people in the South, Si has a rich store of life experiences from which he draws his material. Drawn South by the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register voters in Arkansas, he began writing and singing to capture the power of the everyday folk who constituted that movement.

His passion for social justice led him to rural African American majority counties in west Georgia and then to the mountains of Southern Appalachia, where he first aided in labor organizing with the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA) during the Brookside Strike in Eastern Kentucky. For decades now he has lived and worked in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he is executive director of Grassroots Leadership, a multi-racial organization working in local communities for racial and economic justice.

Most of his twenty-five concerts per year are staged to support the work of Grassroots Leadership. He has also released 15 albums and written songs that have been recorded by over 100 artists.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel declares of Si's music, "He fuses life with song." Pete Seeger says, "I am a great admirer of Si Kahn. He's a solid thinker who is able to humanize the political - an absolutely extraordinary guy."

Most recently Si and co-author Elizabeth Minnich turned that solid thinking to the writing of The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, published by Berrett-Koehler. Political analyst Jim Hightower says of the book, "While we stare at 'American Idol', the privatizing corporations and their right-wing political buddies are running the Constitution through a paper shredder. Like this excellent and timely book says, these days the foxes aren't just guarding the henhouse - they're on the inside."

Si will be speaking on this topic at Congregation B'nai Israel on Sunday, September 17 at 10:00 a.m. The public is welcome. The synagogue is located at 253 Prospect Street in Northampton.

After a hiatus of nearly thirty years, Greensboro Justice Fund Executive Director Marty Nathan met Si again when he provided expert testimony about the difficulty of labor organizing in North Carolina to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission, the first such in this country based on the South African model, was created to investigate the Greensboro Massacre of five labor organizers, including Nathan's husband Mike, at an anti-Klan march in 1979. The recently-released Commission Report cited local police for their negligence in permitting the brutal attack.

Proceeds from the concert will go to publicizing the results and the process of that Commission as well as to grassroots groups around the South funded by the Greensboro Justice Fund, groups that carry on the kind of work Si Kahn believes in: racial and labor justice, peace, civil liberties and protection from homophobic violence.

***For information about the Greensboro Justice Fund, go to http://www.gjf.org.

***For information about Grassroots Leadership, go to http://www.grassrootsleadership.org.

***To read the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Report, go to http://www.greensborotrc.org

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