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The New York Times
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April 25, 2006
NYC
A Grand March to a Jail Cell, and Maybe History
By CLYDE HABERMAN

THE luckiest break that Roger Toussaint could have hoped for became a 
reality yesterday evening. He went to jail.

Over the next 10 days, he can pray in his cell for martyrdom. Jail may be 
his best shot to obtain absolution for his waywardness in taking New York 
transit workers on strike four months ago.

Time behind bars has enhanced the reputation of many a union leader, from 
Eugene V. Debs in the 1890's to Albert Shanker in the 1960's. In the short 
run at least, Mr. Toussaint may reap similar benefits, some labor historians 
say, especially when you consider that modern union officials land in jail 
about as often as Enron executives.

Mr. Toussaint's willingness to be locked up "suggests a level of commitment 
which one doesn't see that often these days with the labor movement," said 
Leon Fink, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "To 
the extent that he makes protecting his members a cause, they're likely to 
support him."

Almost inevitably, comparisons have been made to Michael J. Quill, the 
founder of the Transport Workers Union, who was jailed in 1966 after he 
defied a court order and called a strike against New York's subways and 
buses. Nick Salvatore, an American history professor at Cornell University, 
said Mr. Quill "was not upset about going to jail."

Neither is his most recent successor. On the contrary, Mr. Toussaint said at 
a pep rally yesterday outside the state courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, "It
is my honor - my honor - to be standing here and to be about to turn myself 
in."  What else could he have said?

"If you're faced with the alternative of jail or being perceived as 
capitulating, you really don't have a choice if you're looking to preserve 
your position," Professor Salvatore said.

Well aware of that, Mr. Toussaint orchestrated a hero's farewell for 
himself, a two-act opera that promises several encores.

Act 1 was the Brooklyn rally, where he proclaimed himself a champion of all 
working men and women, standing tall against attempts to erode pensions and 
health care benefits. Left unspoken was the fact that the ones who pay for 
those pensions and benefits are not the suits at the Metropolitan 
Transportation Authority but rather other working men and women who ride the 
trains and buses every day.  Also unmentioned was another inconvenient 
detail: Thanks to the three-day
transit strike, many thousands of working men and women found it difficult - 
in some instances, impossible - to reach their own jobs. Some had to forfeit 
their pay.

Act 2 was a march across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Tombs, the jail in Lower 
Manhattan where Mr. Toussaint will spend the next week and a half. The 
encores will be daily vigils outside the Tombs planned by his supporters.

One goal is to cast the predominantly nonwhite union as the vanguard of a 
civil rights struggle, not merely another self-interested group. Mr. 
Toussaint has surrounded himself with figures like the Rev. Jesse Jackson 
and the Rev. Al Sharpton. "Roger Toussaint," Mr. Sharpton said at the rally 
yesterday, "comes from the lineage of Martin Luther King and A. Philip 
Randolph and Nelson Mandela."

HEADY company, indeed. During the strike, Mr. Toussaint also invoked the 
memory of Rosa Parks. In recent days, he let it be known that he was boning 
up for the Tombs by reading Dr. King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

Who knows? Maybe he will emerge as the hero he wishes to be. It hardly hurts 
him that the transportation authority and its chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, do 
not cause tears of sympathy to trickle down the cheeks of most New Yorkers.

Besides possibly being a lucky break, Mr. Toussaint's stay at the Tombs "may 
bring other unions back into the picture," said Joshua Freeman, a labor 
historian at the City University Graduate Center. They are as unhappy as he 
is with the state's Taylor Law, which prohibits strikes by public employees. 
"They've really not been very visible in recent months," Professor Freeman 
said. But they were out in force yesterday, using the rally as a platform to 
demand the Taylor Law's repeal.

However this all turns out, Mr. Toussaint had the good sense not to tell the 
judge who sentenced him to "drop dead in his black robes." Those were Mr. 
Quill's words when he went to jail in 1966. It was a notoriously bad move. 
Within a month, Mr. Quill was dead.