An Open Letter to Doug Jones

Dear Senator-Elect Doug Jones,

Congratulations on your ancestral feat Tuesday night. We were blissful to see, formed on your nationally televised comments that dusk during your debate watch celebration that we are wakeful of a poignant purpose that Black electorate played in delivering your victory. We conclude a interjection that we have expressed, though we wanted to take a impulse to promulgate that a best approach for we to uncover your interjection will be by your legislative actions.

Like you, we bewail that Roy Moore refused to attend in debates during a campaign. Such debates would have supposing an event for we to explain how we would differ from him and a stream Republican infancy in a Senate. Unfortunately, we are faced with a plea of holding we accountable but many specifics on that to bottom that accountability.

With that in mind, we ask that we start a routine of seeking feedback from a village and surveying a prioritized bulletin for a residue of your term. Such discussions should embody feedback on how your congressional bureau is staffed. This routine can embody listening sessions, city gymnasium meetings, people’s assemblies or other mechanisms. Given a shortened inlet of your term, it is vicious that this starts earlier rather than later.

We are not naïve, and we know that in a traditionally red state, that we narrowly won, a enticement will be to change to a right to attract “moderate” Republican voters. Indeed, your radio commercial, that spoke of a Civil War and compromise, spoke volumes. With that in mind, we would like to remind we of usually a few of a things that Black electorate who gave we 96% support have no seductiveness in compromising on.

We design that a Senator from a good state of Alabama, that gave birth to a Voting Rights Act, will disciple for a full replacement and, if anything, it’s offer strengthening. The flay of obstacles such as transgression disenfranchisement, Voter ID and other forms of voter termination are distant too common, and we design we to pronounce to these issues.

Speaking of felonies, we design that we will quarrel for an finish to mass incarceration, and conflict stream efforts by a Trump administration to revisit a drug quarrel that amounted to a quarrel on a Black community.

In a state that has one of a top misery rates in a country, we design we to quarrel opposite any taxation legislation that advantages a wealthiest people in a nation while penalizing bad and working-class families. We also design we to quarrel for a sovereign vital salary and/or to support internal efforts to do a same, such as in a city of Birmingham.

We design we to urge and enhance a Affordable Care Act. And while we know that we do not control Alabama’s function of a act and a enlargement of Medicaid, we design we to use your position of change to safeguard that as many Alabamians as probable obtain affordable health insurance.

We like that we trust in scholarship and that we know that purify atmosphere and purify H2O are essential to a peculiarity of life. We design we to also commend and residence a manifold impact that these issues have on marginalized communities that are mostly targets of environmental racism.

We know that some of these issues and others were mentioned on your debate website and that we have betrothed to “keep fighting for what’s right – either it is renouned or not.” We are carefree that we will indeed stay a course, and we usually wish this minute to offer as a accessible reminder.

Sincerely,

Your Constituents

Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, Alabama Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice, Center for Fair Housing, Inc (Mobile), Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Greene County Democrat (Newspaper), NAACP Tuskegee-Macon, NAACP Dothan Chapter, POWER House, Montgomery Area Reproductive Justice Coalition, The Ordinary People’s Society (TOPS), The Prodigal Child Project, Making a Difference, DuBois Institute for Entrepreneurship, Tandika LLC, SCLC Huntsville, SCLC Tuscaloosa, Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation, Stand Firm, and Fight Back Alabama

Published by Cherese Jackson

Source:

Alabama Organizers: 20 Alabama organizations portion a black village and other people of color

Image Credits:

All Images Courtesy of Open Minded in Alabama’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License

  alabama, Black America, Doug Jones