We have demanded that the system reform itself, now it is time for change from the inside out. SOUL and Reclaim Chicago invite you to be part of the people’s movement, our 2015 MLK Day Celebration, on Saturday January 17, 2015. Register now at www.mlkchicago.com.
SOUL, The People’s Lobby and Reclaim Chicago believe we best honor the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by hitting the streets to organize our neighbors to join the fight for racial and economic equality. On THIS Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, SOUL will advance its campaign to fight the mass incarceration of people of color in the Cook County Jail. Reclaim Chicago will lift up its progressive slate of candidates for Chicago City Council – candidates that share our values and will be accountable to us, not corporations and the very rich – and send hundreds of canvassers out to door knock and phone bank to get them elected.
This year, we take particular inspiration from the words, dreams and deeds of the righteous organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an idea supported by Dr. King. In the 1960’s, rich segregationists ran the Mississippi Democratic Party, and they used poverty and terror to silence hundreds of thousands. The party slated candidates in shady back room deals, and announced it would support Republican Barry Goldwater for president, rather than the party’s own candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom it believed was a threat to segregation.
Fed up with state Democratic Party’s broken politics, civil rights organizers like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis formed an independent political network that worked in the clear light of day to organize their community. In the summer of 1964, an unprecedented organizing effort by a few thousand volunteers signed up 80,000 members for the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Everyone from church goers to juke-jivers suffered the sweltering southern heat to reclaim the Democratic Party. Their goal was to pressure the national Democratic Party to seat the Freedom Party delegation at the national convention in place of the official segregationist state party. When the politics of the possible failed them, our forebears organized their own political party and redefined the politics of possibility. Their struggle helped pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
In 2015, we’re stuck with a Democratic Party that is still hostile to the interests of poor and middle class people, especially people of color. Most party policies – like privatization, corporate tax breaks and corporate subsidies – don’t appear overtly racist but hurt African Americans and other people of color the most. In other words, these policies are structurally racist. These policies steal staggering amounts of wealth from poor and middle class people and put it in the hands of the corporate elite – leaving almost no public money to invest in eliminating America’s racial disparities in income, education, housing quality and health care – or anything else, for that matter. Other policies are explicitly racist – like those leading to the mass incarceration of African Americans and allowing police violence to go unchecked in African American communities.
Collectively, the policies of the Democratic Party proclaim that black lives don’t matter. They are still using poverty and fear of imprisonment to silence millions while they steal from the poor and middle class to give to the rich. We must proclaim that Black Lives Matter. And we must urgently build a multi-racial movement to reclaim the Democratic Party from the grip of corporate interests and to reform the racist legal system. In other words, It’s Still Time for a Freedom Party!
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