The Big Isms

Trump Reveals the Truth About Voter Suppression
David W. Blight, April 11, 2020, The New York Times



On March 30, the Republican id burst forth when President Trump said that the latest congressional stimulus bill “had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Two days later, the Republican House speaker in Georgia, David Ralston, admitted that an expansion of absentee voting would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

And on April 6, the U.S. Supreme Court refused, in a 5-to-4 ruling, to allow additional days for absentee voting in the Wisconsin primary. For years, Wisconsin Republicans have demonstrated that they will do anything to gerrymander and restrict access to voting to stay in power, including now asking citizens to risk their health to vote. Someone should ask Mr. Ralston and the conservative legislators and judges in Wisconsin what they are conserving.

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Black people are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates because racism is a preexisting condition. https://t.co/EMsU1NWHXd — Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 10, 2020
#BloodOnTheirHandshttps://t.co/HyhWfkKCmI — Trace kalala Hentz (@StonePony33) April 10, 2020

Wilmington on Fire "Wilmington on Fire" is a feature-length documentary that chronicles The Wilmington Massacre of 1898. The Wilmington Massacre of 1898 was a bloody attack on the African-American community by a heavily armed white mob with the support of the North Carolina Democratic Party on November 10, 1898 in the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina. It is considered one of the only successful examples of a violent overthrow of an existing government and left countless numbers of African-Americans dead and exiled from the city. This event was the spring board for the White Supremacy movement and Jim Crow segregation throughout the state of North Carolina and the American South. This incident has been barely mentioned and has been omitted from most history books. It was not until 2006, after the North Carolina General Assembly published a report on it, that the tragedy became known to the general public.

Beloved community,

The night before he was brutally shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached “Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point...either we go up together or we go down together.” Fifty two years later, in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic and the poverty that preceded it, and is now deepening and spreading because of it, the truth of this statement still reverberates.
Epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only the biology of the infectious agent, but patterns of marginalization, exclusion and discrimination. We are seeing that our society is only as healthy as our sickest person, our country is only as secure as the least secure homeless family, low-wage worker, indebted student, or uninsured person. Times such as these require that we come together in bold, new ways and build a moral fusion movement that has everybody in, nobody out.
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