Coalition sets demonstrations for Democratic National Convention

When the Democratic National Convention meets in Charlotte, N.C., in September, there will be thousands of people from across the country in the streets to raise demands for jobs and justice on the world stage.

That’s what the Coalition to Protest at the DNC announced at its first press conference Jan. 19, held outside the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, where the convention will be held Sept. 3-6. More than three dozen labor, anti-war, civil rights, anti-foreclosure, immigrants rights, student and youth organizations, and many prominent activists from across North Carolina, the South and the U.S. have joined together to initiate this coalition.

They are united behind demands for “Good jobs for all! Economic justice now – make the banks and corporations pay for their crisis!” “Money for education, health care, housing and all human needs, not for war and incarceration!” and “Justice for immigrants and all oppressed peoples! Stop the raids and deportations!”

At the press conference, held during the week commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., representatives from many organizations explained why they will be demonstrating.

“We’re here to demand an end to the war on Black people, here and in Africa — from police brutality and mass incarceration, to AFRICOM [the United States Africa Command] and proxy wars across the African continent,” said Efia Nwangaza, founder and director of the Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination.

Nwangaza continued, slamming the Democratic Party for their “silence on the depression-level, African-American unemployment,” for taking no action to stop racist predatory lending and home foreclosures, and for the continued imprisonment of political prisoners.

Wall Street of the South

Coalition organizers call Charlotte “the Wall Street of the South.” With the world headquarters of Bank of America and the eastern headquarters of Wells Fargo, it has the second largest concentration of finance capital in the U.S., behind New York City. Both banks are notorious for foreclosing homes, holding huge amounts of student loans, bankrolling the prison-industrial complex, and funding environmental destruction, among many other crimes against our communities.

North Carolina is also the least unionized state in the U.S., with a Jim Crow-era law still on the books that bans public workers from collectively bargaining. Virginia is the only other state with this ban. In both cases, Democrats enacted the bans and have done nothing about them since.

Donna Dewitt, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, raised that city workers in Charlotte have been fighting for years just to win the basic right of dues deduction. Dewitt spoke about why workers should be mobilizing to protest at the DNC.

“Located in the Deep South of historical struggles for civil, worker, immigrant and human rights, North Carolina, like other Southern states, continues the competition to underbid other Southern states to attract corporations that locate to the South for lower wages and exploitation of workers. … Elected officials of both major parties have followed the practices of the corporate world in their bid to protect the rich and deny the working families of our country.”

Concluding the press conference, Ana Maria Reichenbach, with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, gave a spirited talk calling on young people to come to Charlotte this September. “Working-class youth of this country find our prospects of attending higher education diminished as tuition continues to rise. We’re forced to go deeper into debt with student loans.

“Unemployment rates are soaring and those jobs available fail to provide us with living wages. … We are rising up because we have the right to a dignified life and because we refuse to be a lost generation of jobless, uneducated people. We are rising up because this two-party system has failed to meet our needs.”

Following the example of other cities that have hosted political conventions, Charlotte is preparing to pass restrictive new ordinances regulating demonstrations. They have denied every request by the Coalition to Protest at the DNC for permits to march, and have told organizers that the DNC has reserved every park in the city the weeks prior to, during and after the convention. Coalition organizers have vowed to fight the city for the right to protest during the DNC.

Organizations including Occupy movements across the country are already planning to mobilize to be in the streets of Charlotte during the DNC. For more information on the Coalition to Protest at the DNC and to find out how your organization can join, visit protestdnc.org.