specialnights: Fannie Lou Hammer and Ella Baker. This is a convention of the Mississippi Freedom Dem
specialnights:Fannie Lou Hammer and Ella Baker.This is a convention of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker founded in 1964, a third party supported by the direct action-oriented Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in response to the racist Democratic Party which only allowed whites to vote in its Mississippi primary. Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker knew what was up. They played a part in forcing the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.Since the 1990s I’ve been agitating on behalf of – and preaching the historical significance and current necessity of – small radical third parties, because every major progressive victory in US political history has only occurred under third party pressure, from abolition to suffrage to labor laws to desegregation. Hell, both the Democratic and Republican parties used to be third parties too, but now they have people convinced that they’re the only two parties ever and they’ve locked up their duopoly through corporate collusion and effective propaganda, like a good cop and bad cop both aiming to coerce you into making a false confession to the good cop who speaks softly and brings you coffee, or like a right and left hand both strangling one’s neck from two sides. Never buy into that defeatist “lesser of two evils” noise that you must meekly limit your support to only two options; the truth is, nothing changes in electoral politics unless populist support breaks off into third parties, and the bolder the populist uprising, the bolder the change can be. Starting with breaking the two-party chokehold on US politics by replacing the winner-take-all voting system with instant-runoff voting which allows third parties to gain votes on so-called marginal issues without diluting major party voting blocks. -- source link
#ella baker#third parties#us politics