Hershel Walker Peace & Justice Awards Breakfast set for May 12

By SHERI GASSAWAY

Correspondent

The 26th Annual Hershel Walker Peace & Justice Awards Breakfast will be held Saturday, May 12.

The event, sponsored by the St. Louis Workers’ Education Society and Missouri People’s World, will be held at the Painters District Council 58 Union Hall, 2501 59th St., in St. Louis. Doors open at 9:30 and the program begins at 10 a.m.

This year’s honorees include:

• Cathy Sherwin, vice president of the Missouri Coalition of Labor Union Women who recently retired from the Missouri AFL-CIO where she had worked as a regional field communications coordinator.

• Missouri Representative Peter Merideth (D-St. Louis) and chairman of the House Victory Committee.

• SEIU Healthcare and the victorious Christian Care Home workers, who after more than 100 days on strike finally won a fair contract that includes wage increases, favorable health insurance provisions and seniority protections.

CONTINUITY OF STRUGGLE

The keynote speaker for the event will be Keona Ervin, author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis. Ervin is an assistant professor of African-American History and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Erwin will speak on the continuity of struggle, connecting African-American women workers in St. Louis’ past and their struggle for economic justice to today’s struggles like the victorious Christian Care Home strike. She will also talk about so-called “right-to-work” and working peoples’ efforts to defeat it this fall.

TICKETS

Tickets for the event are $25 per person or $200 for a table of 10. Advertising is also available in the program booklet. The rates are $500 for a full page, $300 for a half page and $150 for a quarter page. The advertising deadline is May 7, and ad copy can be mailed to Al Neal at al@workerseducationsociety.org.

Checks can be made payable to the St. Louis Workers’ Education Society and mailed to 2929 S. Jefferson Ave., St. Louis, MO  63118. For more information, call Neal at 314-541-0924.