BAMN is determined to struggle for a society wholly free from the racist inequality and segregation, discrimination and prejudice, sexist abuse and degradation and fundamental inequality that stifles human potential and dulls the mind and spirit. BAMN aims for an integrated society, a society of equality and sister- and brotherhood where the ability of all is developed to the fullest. 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 is the fastest-growing and most dynamic youth civil rights organization in the country. If you care about these principles, you should help us. BAMN is fighting for these principles. We can win, but we must have your help.
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 on the front line of the watershed battles over civil rights - holding the line against a concerted and ongoing attack.
BAMN has both the energy that the established organizations lack and the long-sighted pragmatism absent in most groups illuminated by idealism.
BAMN has the leadership and scope to carry out multifaceted, professional activity: from strong street-level protest to aggressive civil rights litigation to shifting the terms of debate with our media interface to our widely acclaimed public speaking and partnerships with civil rights, labor, student, community and religious organizations across the country - from small local groups to household names.
We need your help
BAMN is bold and exceptionally ambitious. We are bright with optimism.BAMN is organizing college, high school and middle school youth in the ghettos and barrios of this country to be the leaders and voices of their peers. We have seen new civil rights leaders rise to the occasion of struggle and flower. We have seen young people come from situations of terrible abuse and mistreatment and emerge 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 integration and to move our society toward the long-deferred promise of justice and equality.
We will give all we have to give. To succeed, we need you to do the same.
A generous and regular contribution by you is needed to realize the vision of hope and equality we share. No cause could be better - no organization more worthy of your support.
BAMN has what almost no other organization possesses, a profoundly diverse, dedicated army of volunteer youth organizers. Our ability to mobilize our base of young people has been the key to our victories. Now, however, our shortage of funds to cover basic organizing expenses (e.g., phones, copying, transportation) coupled with our lack of a core, paid, full-time staff is limiting the tremendous potential of our work.
BAMN is well positioned to make a significant breakthrough if we can raise the funds to increase our administrative capacity. Thousands of high school and university students have come to BAMN eager to build this new civil rights movement.
To utilize effectively this wealth of talent and possibility, we must increase our administrative and organizational capacity. A strengthened infrastructure will enable us to launch a counteroffensive to the right wing attacks and make possible long-overdue proactive legal and political civil rights initiatives.
Our projected annual operating cost over the next three years is $850,000/year.
BAMN has set up a non-profit 501 (c)(3) organization as a tax-exempt affiliate that coordinates the legal defense and education aspects of the civil rights movement we are building. It is called United for Equality and Affirmative Action Legal Defense Fund (UEAALDF). Contributions made to UEAALDF are tax deductible.
Please - make a donation today.
Click here to make a donation to UEAALDF
UEAALDF
PO Box 24462
Kensington Station
Detroit, MI 48224
Click here to make a donation to BAMN
BAMN
PO Box 24834
Detroit, MI 48224
313-438-3748
How We Fight
BAMN is on the cutting edge, advancing an aggressive strategy in defense of civil rights. Everywhere in our society questions of civil rights are being contested, our approach provides a grassroots model for how to fight and win.
In the courts… So far BAMN has kept America from the
provocative lurch toward the racial polarization that would result
from the banning of affirmative action. 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 courtroom. On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, the day the
Supreme Court heard our case, BAMN organized a march on
Washington of 50,000 young people, now widely credited with
shaping the context of the pro-affirmative action court decision.
At the polls… Despite an over $2 million dollar ad campaign by
our opponents, BAMN high school organizers overwhelmingly
defeated 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. On
voting day, over 300 BAMN students campaigned with voters at
polling stations throughout the city in a cold rain.
In the media… BAMN has been the voice in the media declaring
the equality of the races in a forthright, uncompromising way,
consistently presenting a program of mass civil rights struggle
that is the key to progress in race relations.
In the classroom… BAMN is a youth organization made up of
and led overwhelmingly by youth with hundreds of groups and
supporters in high schools and colleges across the country. We
regularly organize marches, demonstrations and conferences
that draw many hundreds and, not infrequently, thousands, of
youth. Through systematic organizing in black and Latino schools
and neighborhoods, BAMN has given hope and a voice to
ambitious and angry youth across the country - building young
leaders in a way no other civil rights organization has attempted.
Youth leadership development is the center of our activity.
In the streets… Building the new mass civil rights movement
means mobilizing masses of people - mainly youth - out into the
streets in protest standing up and fighting for equality and
freedom. We have a long proud history of protests, pickets,
marches, rallies and demonstrations. We choose honesty and
struggle over propriety, so our street actions provoke controversy.
In the words of the great Frederick Douglass - "Without struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground" - BAMN wants the crops of integration and justice and BAMN is energetic and brave enough to plow up the ground.
