In 2003, MoveOn.Org began by starting and forwarding email petitions against the coming war in Iraq. Now the organization has 3 million members online, and can bombard elected officials with calls, faxes and email on short notice. Bruce Dixon explores how Black America might pull off something similar to make its will known to elected officials, and tells what you can do to help make it happen. Click on the link to read this commentary, or on the mic at left to listen to it.
Putting a Black Move On the Black Caucus
by BAR managing Editor Bruce Dixon
Back during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq, a group called MoveOn.Org began forwarding email messages which invited recipients to add their names to online petitions directing the president and congress to halt the illegal and unjust war which was about to take place. Millions signed the petitions and forwarded the email. MoveOn activists delivered the petitions, and kept in touch with the signers through regular updates. Today Move On dot Org claims a membership of some 3 million, and is able to mobilize significant pressure on public officials on and between election days.
It's time for a black Move On to put a black move on the Congressional Black Caucus, to directly convey to CBC members who are supposedly more numerous and influential than ever before, the bright lines of black America's political will which are never mentioned or described on Fox News, NPR, or even CSPAN.
Although we are one eighth the nation's population, black people are half its prisons and jails, due to an unspoken national policy of racially selective policing, prosecution, and racially selective mass incarceration. African Americans want to know why the prison population has risen sevenfold in a generation when crime rates have remained essentially level. We want to know when our elected officials will hold hearings and propose legislation to end mandatory sentencing, three and two strikes laws and propose meaningful measures to curb and reverse the growth of the open sore of injustice that is America's criminal justice system.
We want to know where the tens of billions allocated to rebuild New Orleans went, and why hundreds of thousands black renters, who made up most of the city's pre-Katrina population are denied meaningful opportunities to return and participate in the rebuilding of the city. African American voters and communities want to see action this year --- not in 2008, 2009 or 2012, on job creation, voting rights, ending this war and stopping the next one, and universal single payer health care for everybody.
It's time for a black Move On to put a black move on, a move that take us beyond corporate media's artificial restriction of the African American political dialog to who is or isn't "black enough" or who possesses the most star power and charisma. It's time to build our own machinery to carry popular demands for concrete, specific and meaningful actions from the grassroots straight to the telephones, faxes, email boxes and doorsteps of black and other elected officials not just on election day, but every day of the year. Black America does not have that capacity now. Help us build it..
Sign the 7 point online petition to the Congressional Black Caucus and pass it on. If you haven't received it by email already, visit our web site at www.blackagendareport.com., and click on the link marked CBC petition. Follow the link to sign it. Then email our page describing it to yourself and use your own email to forward it to a hundred of your closest friends with a note from you about why they should sign and pass it on.
It's time to bust a black move on the Black Caucus, by building a black Move On. Sign the petition. Forward the petition, and let's do this.
Click on the mic at the right to hear or download the audio of this Black Agenda Radio Commentary.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire, an international electronic press service.
Mary Hooks is National Field Secretary with the Movement 4 Black Lives based in Atlanta.
Brooke Floyd is co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People's Advocacy Institute.
