In 2020, Stacey Abrams, Jon Ossof, and Raphael Warnock led a coordinated campaign to usurp and ultimately neuter massive amounts of radical potential from Atlanta’s grassroots community. Abrams, who’d just unsuccessfully taken on Brian Kemp for Georgia Governor in 2018, became the face of an effort to boost “minority” voter turnout for the 2020 elections, particularly targeting Black voters in the state. The issue of voting rights became synonymous with her name, and in fact with “saving democracy” as the Democrats framed it; Abrams surprise-opened the highly watched Verzuz battle between ATL rappers Gucci Mane and Jeezy to remind the . . .
Local Organizing Updates
Witnessing History: 2022 Elections in Colombia
From May 26 to May 31, I was in Cali, Colombia serving as an election observer with an international delegation of mostly Black women. This is a preliminary report. On May 26th, in my capacity as the co-coordinator of the Haiti/Americas Team for the Black Alliance for Peace, I traveled with a delegation to Colombia to serve as an official observer of its presidential elections. The elections were historic: not only was a leftist presidential ticket leading in the polls, but the vice presidential candidate on that ticket was Francia Márquez, a popular and well known Afro-Colombian feminist activist. As . . .
Dear Charleston, The Shootings Aren’t Going To Stop
Violence is at the core of the existence of the United States. Violence is at the core of the existence of Charleston. So as an oppressed nation within its borders, violence in our communities should not be surprising to anyone. What should be surprising is that we continue to look to those responsible for the violence for solutions to solving it. . . .
No Half Measures, Cancel All Student Loan Debt
On September 1, 2021, Hurricane Ida hit Southeast Louisiana, temporarily displacing thousands of New Orleans residents, including myself and most of my family. Residents who had the means evacuated early, leaving others to fight for limited resources while simultaneously seeking refuge in neighboring cities. On top of their pre-existing bills, evacuees were forced to front the costs of hotels, food, gas and repairs or even replacement of their own homes. Natural disasters produce an overwhelming amount of stress and anxiety — you simply don’t know if you will have a house to live in until you are able to return home. I . . .
Southern Workers Gather to Build Workers Assembly Movement
Under the slogan “Build the Workers Assembly Movement! Organize the South!,” nearly 80 workers from eight Southern states gathered in Durham, North Carolina for a Southern Workers Assembly Organizing School over the weekend of April 29 – May 1. Workers came to the school from Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, Tidewater Virginia, Richmond, Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, Eastern North Carolina, northern Kentucky, and elsewhere. Over the last year, the network of areas building workers assemblies across the South has grown substantially to include nine different cities, the development of several industry based councils – including Amazon, healthcare, and education workers – . . .
Lessons from the Pan-African Community Garden
Last summer the Southwest chapter of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party started the Pan-African Community Garden with the help of comrades, relatives, neighbors, and social justice organizations in Tiwa territory (Albuquerque, New Mexico). We did this without non-profit status, corporate sponsorship, grant funding, or financial backing of any kind – spending very little out of pocket when it came to the construction and maintenance of the garden. We also did this without any formal experience as a chapter undertaking such a project – meaning we had never built something like this together before. And yet in just a bit . . .
The Jackson-Kush Plan & the Struggle for Land
While the land relationships that dominate this society have implications for every relation in society, the recent crisis of gentrification and forced removal in low income Black communities, along with the volatile boom-bust real estate cycles, has made the struggle for adequate housing the most pronounced battleground in an increasingly intense war over the vision for the future of how we relate, prioritize and manage access to land. . . .
#SoyPorqueSomos – a Black women-led Project for a New Colombia
This article was written before the March 13 primaries when Francia Marquez received more than 780,000 votes. She received more votes than any Black politician in Colombian history. Would her outstanding performance, surpassing even candidates from right-wing parties, be enough to secure her the nomination to run as vice-president candidate in the frontrunner party Pacto Historico?* Francia Márquez Mina, a 40-year-old Black female activist from the predominantly Black and forgotten region of the Colombian Pacific coast, is shifting the terms of political debate in the second ‘Blackest’ nation in South America. Francia, the first Black woman to run for the . . .