From the Yakima Valley College radio station he broadcast the news about the dance floor. Black students were forbidden to dance there; white students were allowed only. "It helps if you can feel like you're part of things and they made us feel like we weren't." So Vendor of the Week Ernest Motin spoke. He spoke on the radio, in the newspaper, and in the streets about the racial inequality he opposed.
Motin has a history of political engagement. The first Black Student Union president at his high school, he was active in the Civil Rights movement of the '60s and '70s. Motin believes that advances in civil rights have since deteriorated in the wake of conservatism and the criminalization of love and peace. "Civil rights, they treat us as if we don't have them anymore." The intimidation and surveillance tactics of the FBI "make everything seem futile and the idea of love just evaporates away."
In defiance of futility, Motin believes in communicating to create a better world. "I still speak out. I don't have a forum from which I express my views, like a newspaper, but I talk to people on the bus, I talk to people when I'm out selling papers. One person at a time."
For Motin, the Real Change newspaper itself is a means to share knowledge. It is "a communication device to help people see and understand in all seriousness that we need to make these changes."
More than anything, Motin would like to speak with his children. "I have a son in Anchorage, Alaska and a daughter in Richmond, California and I haven't seen them in 12 years." Part of a family, he would have "Somebody to participate with. Someone I could share my good times with and somebody who won't let me down when I need a place to stand."