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Pre-March:

Acts of Faith

We asked Black women across diversity

WHAT DO WE NEED?

WHY SHOULD WE MARCH?

Here is what they said:

  • We want to protect our girls from abuse

    • We want to give our little girls today a better chance of being loved, protected and growing up safe then we had.

 

  • To collectivize our momentum

    • Many of us have been building our activism for many months/years and when we pool our resources and our energy more will get done.

  • To feel and express our passions

  • Black men are still raping Black women and killing black women

    • What does community accountability look like?

    • This March for Black Women is as much a call for accountability WITHIN our communities as it is to the State.

 

  • Too many of us are in prison

 

  • We need access to affordable health care

    • How can Black women use this political moment to push for healthcare policy that is comprehensive, affordable and culturally specific

 

  • We want to organize, need representation, need solidarity in our planning and implementing strategies

    • The March needs to tie into our larger discussion of safety as well.  We want to be able to know who is marching with us, who is in the room when we are planning and we also just need space to form meaningful relationships and connections

 

  • We need the March to push people to act, because we're tired of the present issues

    • “We are marching because we are tired of being tired” we know we have the power to change the current system

 

  • The March should push for education of black girls

  • The March should be about radical love, compassion, respect for each other

 

  • The March should amplify our power in public spaces where we are erased

 

  • We need to be connected with other women who are mobilizing across the country and beyond

 

  • We need to make more noise about the ongoing wars against Black women

    • There isn’t enough noise being made when black girls and black women are raped, are murdered and are disappeared and trafficked  

  • The March should eradicate our silences

  • The March is to educate the larger community about what Black women are strategizing around: policy, electoral politics, justice, healing, community building, collaboration.

Press Conference on Title IX
Why We March Statement
Endorsement by March for Racial Justice with assistance from BLM, YWCA, M4BL

Inspiring Black women to march on September 30, 2017, and creating space for ourselves and fueling existing movements by Black women was our priority.  We organized Town Halls in over a dozen cities, held critical discussions and opened dialogue across difference. We solidified our relationships in Washington, DC. Organizing a Healer's Caravan,  sister marches and supporting national disaster response in Florida, Texas, The Caribbean, including Puerto Rico in response to hurricanes which rocked several locations. 

 

We gave ourselves permission to believe in the power of our demands and the strength of our convictions to take back what is already ours. We could not allow an isolationist impulse to dictate our movement strategy given the political urgency of our time.  As various communities of Black women, we have always faced innumerable personal, and unspeakable brutalities. We cannot allow the travesties that have affirmed disregard for our existence to continue to flourish while we wither away with resentment and stew in our own rage. We issued a call for communities to continue to act to eradicate oppression whenever it shows up. This has been our inherited tradition for centuries, practiced in diverse ways around the world, in in both peaceful protest and in righteous anger in the face of indignities and in the face of dehumanization.

 

Reaching out to Trans Sistas of Color Project (Detroit) and Black Youth Project (BYP100  Chicago) to co-organize the March with Black Women's Blueprint, with Sister Song (Atlanta) joining a few days before the March, M4BW was not only a mass mobilization centered on Black women's lives, but a reminder to every single one of us that so long as Black women are killed by the cops; so long as Black women are taken or go missing; so long as we are raped by friends or by strangers or by nationally renown predators -- there can be NO JUSTICE. 

In Response to Critiques and Yom Kippur
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