BAMN's Call to Action:
Build the New, Militant, Integrated, Youth-led Civil Rights Movement
Defend Affirmative Action – Realize the Promise of Brown v. Board of Education
> No more dream deferred
BAMN is building a new mass civil rights movement starting where the movement led by Martin Luther King left off in 1968. It is a fully integrated, militant movement; it is a movement of young, determined leaders utterly committed to the cause of racial equality and integration. BAMN is the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary. BAMN aims to realize the dream of Martin Luther King - the dream of a just society of sister- and brotherhood.
America is at the beginning of a mass political awakening. BAMN is preparing the leadership and voice of that awakening.
The national defense of affirmative action is the point of departure for the new mass youth-led civil rights movement. It is also the decisive pivot point for the direction of American society: do we move forward toward equality, integration and justice or backward toward exacerbated racist inequality and segregation, bitterness, polarization and injustice. The development of race relations is now and has been the harbinger of progress or reaction. For these reasons, the attack on affirmative action has sparked the beginning of the political awakening to which BAMN must now give political direction.
BAMN began in 1995 with the conviction that it would be necessary to build a new civil rights movement to defend the gains won by the first civil rights movement. BAMN is the organization holding the line against the concerted and ongoing attack on civil rights. By winning modest but important victories now, in this period of rightwing attacks on social progress, more and more young organizers, activists and leaders are learning how victories are won. BAMN has both the energy that the established organizations lack and the long-sighted pragmatism absent in most groups illuminated by idealism.
Our Successes
BAMN is on the front line of the watershed battles over civil rights. Our success so far at defeating the rightwing attacks on affirmative action and integration provides a model for how to fight and win.
BAMN successfully defended affirmative action at the US Supreme Court as the student defendants in the University of Michigan Law School case, Grutter v. Bollinger. BAMN organized the most complete and compelling legal defense of affirmative action ever presented in a court room. On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, the day the Supreme Court heard our case, BAMN organized a march on Washington of 50,000 young people.
BAMN successfully defended the first ever voluntary school desegregation plan in the country from a rightwing law suit aimed at resegregating the Berkeley Unified School District in Berkeley, California.
Despite an over $2 million dollar ad campaign, BAMN high school organizers defeated overwhelmingly a municipal ballot proposal in Detroit, Michigan that would have taken away citizens' right to vote for school board and facilitated the privatization of the city's public schools.
BAMN reversed the University of California Regents' ban on affirmative action, the place where the attack on affirmative action began.
Drawing the line in Michigan, defending affirmative action across the nation
BAMN kept Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action initiative off the 2004 Michigan ballot and is fighting now to keep it off the 2006 ballot.
A victory in Michigan this year will have a profound effect on the rightwing's anti-affirmative action campaign. Having failed to achieve a national ban on affirmative action at the U.S. Supreme Court, the right wing anti-affirmative action forces were forced to turn back to a strategy of attaining state constitutional bans on affirmative action through ballot initiatives. A defeat for Connerly in Michigan will make clear that they will have no more success at the state level than they did at the national level, and will provide young, determined civil rights activists with a model of how to defeat anti-affirmative action ballot schemes.
The battle in Michigan gives us the opportunity not only to defeat the efforts to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement, but it also provides an excellent opportunity to strengthen and build the new youth-led civil rights movement.
Black and Latino youth are the leaders of the new civil rights movement
BAMN shines at building the new civil rights movement. BAMN alone is organizing high school and even middle school youth in the ghettos and barrios of this country to be the leaders and voices of their peers. BAMN alone is preparing a constructive direction for the anger and social upheaval made inevitable by a society pressed into deteriorating racist inequality and segregation by rightwing social policy schemes that are as provocative as they are inept and ill-conceived. The contradictions of our society are great and the rightwing architects of these clumsy schemes do not realize that to the people they affect, the schemes look mean - not sensible and not strong. BAMN alone is building the leadership of young women and men who can give constructive and meaningful direction to the inevitable reaction to this injustice. At every turn we have been forced to ignore those who thought what we were attempting was impossible.
We are bright with optimism. We have seen unpredicted strength in
each other. We watch each other rise to the occasions of struggle; we
see new civil rights leaders flower. We have seen young people come
from situations of terrible abuse and mistreatment and rise to speak
for their peers with élan, insight and power. We know we can do what
needs to be done both to defend affirmative action and to move our
society toward the long-deferred promise of justice and equality.
Join the new movement. Join BAMN.
All out to the University of Michigan
on October 27, 2005!
No Racist Fraud in Michigan Elections
Stop the Attack on Affirmative Action
Defend Grutter v. Bollinger
March, Rally & Mass Organizing Meeting
