2024 Program:
Civil Rights and Legal Strategies
Thursday November 21
According to state and federal law enforcement officials, May 25th 2020 was the inception of the largest, most organized, and best funded criminal syndicate in America’s history. Tens of thousands of co-conspirators. Rampant violence across the nation. Millions of dollars stolen. Property destroyed. All over the span of four years.
According to police and prosecutors, you’re likely a part of this criminal syndicate to commit violence, racketeering, and intimidation. Court documents suggest that if you have attended a rally, concert, meeting, or protest in support of racial, gender, reproductive, migrant, or climate justice since the death of George Floyd in May 2020, you could be a co-conspirator. If you contributed your talent, your money, or even provided food in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, you could be a co-conspirator.
Law enforcement in at least 12 states, as well as the FBI, are advancing a dangerous legal framework that weaponizes the First Amendment against social movements. It asserts that dissent is the enemy of the state. Association is now conspiracy.
And the problem is getting worse. State legislatures and Congress are advancing bills that increase the use of surveillance, criminalization, and punishment built from the Global War on Terror and War on Drugs to topple decentralized movement formations. We’ll go inside the authoritarian playbook to target and destroy the engine of our democracy and explore what social movements, philanthropy, and government officials must do to stop it.
Preemption is currently being used and abused to disrupt advances in racial justice, health equity, voting, and countless other issues that deeply impact the ability to build power for communities of color. We saw this clearly in Jackson, Mississippi, where the state legislature passed House Bill 1020, mandating the appointment of special judges and prosecutors by Mississippi state officials in majority-Black Hinds County, which includes the City of Jackson.
HB 1020 also permits Capitol Police to take effective control of policing responsibilities in an area of Jackson, increasing the police presence in Black communities. With its enactment, it shifts authority over the county’s criminal justice system away from democratically elected judges and prosecutors elected by Black voters. It also starves revenue from the city by diverting 18% of the tax revenue that should go to Jackson city but will now go to the state to fund the new judiciary arm.
The blatant power grab and preemptive attack by the majority-White legislature in a Black city like Jackson, MS, is spreading across the country. White and right-wing conservative states are attacking our voting rights, education and curriculum, efforts to advance police abolition, living wage ordinances, and the bodily autonomy and healthcare of trans and gender-expansive youth.
Our communities are feeling the brunt of these state attacks. This panel will discuss the impact of state power grabs at the local level and the strategies to combat them, from narrative shifts needed to organizing strategies to protect local victories and community self-determination.
From Atlanta to Palestine, organizers are facing unprecedented attacks on the right to protest, including repressive laws designed to silence dissent across issue areas. In this session, you’ll hear from:
- Kamau Franklin, the Founder and Executive Director of Community Movement Builders, which has been leading the fight to StopCopCity since its construction was announced.
-Julia Bacha, the director of the documentary "Boycott" and the Creative Director at Just Vision, an organization that fills s a media gap on Israel-Palestine through independent storytelling.
Presenters will share media clips and other compelling visual materials to illustrate this issue and efforts to push back. For years, lawfare tactics have been used to silence organizers for racial justice and Palestinian advocacy across the U.S. and beyond.
For Palestinian advocacy, the trend is especially sharp in local legislatures, where 36 states have laws on the books that aim to silence those boycotting Israel based on its human rights record. Similarly, StopCopCity organizers are facing legislation that penalizes essential organizing methods, criminalizing everything from the use of burner phones to charitable bail funds, impacting the ecosystem of who can protest, dissent, and organize for their communities.
With these laws spreading quickly across the US, the speakers will share about techniques used to push back and the importance of cross-movement / intersectional organizing in these efforts.
As our country undergoes major political shifts, it’s essential to focus on hyperlocal strategies that promote financial and social equity for ourselves and our communities. This session explores how to build solidarity economies and unity to address the racial wealth gap.
Through presentations, discussions, and interactive activities, speakers will share data and community-informed approaches to advancing hyperlocal economies for Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian American communities.
Miguel Algarin will outline the work of Living Cities' Closing the Gaps Cohort, demonstrating how partnerships with city governments and community organizations are helping local leaders leverage needs assessments, data, and technical assistance to advance wealth building pathways via home and business ownership. Miguel will discuss several strategies including shared ownership, community land trusts, local business incubation, and other innovative approaches we aim to support in our cities.
Kellee Coleman, from the City of Austin, will share her experiences engaging residents to shape local programs and policies, including efforts to boost homeownership and business ownership for BIPOC communities in Austin and her work building successful connections between local community organizations and city government.
Participants will walk away with an expanded toolkit of ways to collaborate with residents to name and address challenges in their respective communities, as well as a case study from the City of Austin about how they are leveraging community feedback to expand BIPOC homeownership. Join us to learn practical solutions for a more equitable housing landscape, where all individuals have the opportunity to thrive and build intergenerational wealth.
Since 2021, there have been a deluge of executive actions, legislation, court challenges, and other direct attacks on equity writ large with a special emphasis on racial equity via anti-CRT and DEI laws. Almost every state in the nation has at least seen a bill introduced. Most of these hostile statutes are more rhetorical than relevant and do not preclude real-world racial equity programs.
Similarly, even negative Court rulings have made clear that the vast majority of race-informed institutional strategies are legally sound. Yet, these legal attacks have had their intended effects, with political pressure and threats creating significant obstacles for racial equity work in many jurisdictions
During this breakout session, participants will hear from legal experts who are supporting racial equity practitioners in government. You will learn what initiatives and efforts these laws do and do not impact from a legal perspective, how to engage your general counsel, and what resources are available in the field to navigate this complicated landscape.
Participants in this breakout session will hear and walk through real-world examples of legal messaging, strategy, and interventions to protect and sustain racial equity work in government.
Equity in education requires stepping out of the box and into the community. Block by block, up, down, and all around their neighborhoods, Neighborhood Reading Captains are fostering a love of literacy in St. Louis.
Systemic racism has negatively impacted trust in institutions and has erected barriers in accessing accurate information for communities of color. In an effort to revise the narrative, Reader Readers is striving to shift power back to community members who were already actively hitting the pavement, books in tow, reading and handing out books in clinic waiting rooms, laundry mats, and barber shops through the Reading Captains program, modeled from Free Library of Philadelphia’s initiative as a part of their Read by 4th Campaign.
As trained and compensated members of the community, Ready Readers Reading Captains have engaged with over 500 children and families and distributed over 2,400 books throughout two targeted neighborhoods in just the first six months of pilot programming.
Ready for expansion into our next neighborhood, we encourage conference participants to join us as we reflect on the journey and elevate the voices of our Reading Captains and their experiences promoting literacy. Join us for a joy-filled panel conversation about how to leverage the collective power of those working to improve their own communities.
At the end, walk away with a community asset mapping tool, ready and confident to jumpstart your own community initiative—block by block!
MoJustice was founded by a formerly incarcerated person to serve as the unifying entity to do what has never been done before: building a statewide prison advocacy movement in Missouri. Our goal is to bring together stakeholders including individuals impacted by the criminal punishment system, concerned community members, litigators, and experts.
Our mission is to educate, empower, and unite these community members, transforming them into a powerful advocacy base. Through collaborative efforts, we strive to drive meaningful reforms within the Missouri prison system, addressing the systemic injustices, inhumane conditions, and absence of accountability.
I firmly believe that collective amplification and collective action are essential in building a statewide base of effective and sustained prison advocacy.
In this breakout session, we will discuss the strategy, obstacles, and collaborations in building this advocacy movement and the dire conditions in Missouri prisons that necessitate such a huge undertaking.
This session will be a dialogue between Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Co-Executive Director of Highlander Research & Education Center, and Prachi Patankar, Writer and Organizer with Savera.
Savera's campaign is founded on a simple belief: that building a true multiracial democracy requires multiracial, interfaith coalitions that stand united against supremacist politics of all kinds. Within Indian-American communities, for example, the Hindu supremacist movement has grown in size over the past couple of decades and has since increasingly converged on an alliance with the white nationalist far-right, developing a politics that advances and supports the rise of fascism in India but also harms all of us here in the U.S. Hindu supremacist groups not only oppose the struggle for protections against caste discrimination and Islamophobia, but they have also offered non-white support to campaigns against affirmative action, spread anti-Muslim rhetoric and a pervasive anti-Blackness, and fractured coalitions among communities of color.
This is a moderated conversation between Ash-Lee and Prachi about the steps needed to build a true multiracial democracy in the U.S. Placing these issues within the global rise of authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and racial and ethnic nationalism, this session offers possibilities for interconnected strategies that place our struggles in transnational and local contexts. They will share their analysis from their work in building intra- and inter-community unity against supremacist movements and how to evolve new strategies to take on the far-right in a multiracial society.
The Race and Democracy work at the Horizons Project seeks to employ futures thinking frameworks to advance racial justice. Futures thinking frameworks and analytical tools have proven valuable in helping leaders, organizations, policymakers, and activists make more strategic decisions about policies, priorities, strategic plans, outcomes, and goals. However, we have not seen these tools equally applied to the challenge of organizing to build collective power for advancing racial justice.
The Horizons Project applies futures thinkings frameworks and analytical tools for the specific purpose of advancing racial justice. In addition, our futures thinking frameworks specifically engage the narrative competencies required to advance racial justice. For example, how should leaders engage in conversations that have deep resonances in demonstrative realities of racial injustice? Conversely, how should organizers and activists push against racial stereotypes embedded within organizational decision-making? What skills are needed to re-shape racial narratives?
What practices should leaders adopt to transform their institutional culture and prioritize racial justice within their organizations? How might these leaders imagine racial justice within their organizations and spheres of influence? How might organizers and activists advance institution’s capacity to reshape public services for better racial equity outcomes?
Friday November 22
Neighborhood Leadership Fellows (NLF) is an advanced 9-month fellowship aimed at increasing and amplifying the voices of residents from the St. Louis Promise Zone (North St. Louis City and parts of North County) in civic decision-making spaces in order to produce more equitable regional policies for strong neighborhoods.
Developed by the University of Missouri—St. Louis, University of Missouri Extension, and the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership in collaboration with community leaders, NLF supports current and future leadership in the STL Promise Zone region—an area that is 88.8% Black according to the 2020 census—for those who want to make change at the systems level.
By equipping individuals to access the halls of power via seats on boards, commissions, and elected office, NLF addresses policy inequities and pushes towards systemic change, ultimately building a more racially just future. Fellows work together during and after the program to create policy opportunities and planning documents that address regional inequities.
Panelists will be NLF Alumni and will speak to measurable outcomes achieved locally and statewide as a result of their collaboration with other alumni and the role of lived experiences in leadership and community voice that led to their individual and collective success.
For the interactive portion of the session, presenters will lead small group dialogues on increasing resident leadership in audience communities to achieve a more equitable and racially just future. Groups will have the opportunity to share key takeaways.
Anti-Palestinian racism is at an all time high but many can not recognize it when they see it. Learn the ways that Anti-Palestinian Racism manifests in our institutions and is normalized structurally between institutions impacting not only Palestinians, but also Arabs, Muslims, and others. In order to effectively dismantle racism, it’s important to recognize it, but then work towards intentionally dismantling it. This breakout session will go over roots in Islamophobia and the unique ways anti-Palestinian racism manifests and what people in Government (including all institutions) and in the public can work together to dismantle it. Learn lessons from local organizers in NJ who are organizing to build power for inclusive communities for everyone.