Can This Independent Mass. Governor Candidate Rally a 67% Unenrolled Electorate?

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, the midterms edition, we take you to the Commonwealth, where Andrea James—abolitionist, author, and organizer—is currently running for governor of Massachusetts. The countdown to November 3 is officially underway. Debates are scheduled for October, but independent and third-party candidates are being excluded from participating.

Andrea James has led national campaigns to reunite families by demanding clemency from high-level officials for incarcerated women and men. Now, she is running for governor with a platform focused on rent stabilization, lower energy costs, free childcare and stopping the construction of a new $360M women’s prison.

As a 501(c)(3) organization, The Real News Network does not endorse candidates. However, as an independent news network, TRNN understands how corporate media gives disproportionate airtime to the DNC and GOP compared to independent and third-party candidates.

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Credits:

• Production/Post-production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Joining me today is Andrea James, activist in every sense of the word. I want to say abolitionist, but she’s an activist in every sense of the word, organizing and is currently running for the governor of Massachusetts. Thank you for joining me, Andrea.

Andrea James:

Thank you for having me. It’s really great to be back in your studio and just to have the privilege of being a part of how you disseminate information. It’s really an honor to be here and I thank you for this opportunity.

Mansa Musa:

And we want to go on record right now saying that here at Rattling Bar, we recognize that it’s a so-called two party system. And we recognize that when you’re dealing with electoral politics, that if you’re not a traditional Democrat or Republican or so-called independent, according to their definition, you’re not going to get the recognition. So we are here primarily to level the playing field. It’s not our endorsement of it. It’s more opportunity for her to talk about her candidacy, why she’s in this position, why she’s running, and what she expect. And with that being said, introduce yourself to our orders, Andrea.

Andrea James:

Well, I want to say thank you for introducing me as an abolitionist. I mean, I am an abolitionist. I have had a direct experience that causes me to understand that this country has had more than 250, but 250 recognizable years of incarceration of prison and prison building and incarcerating people in cages. And actually, I believe in direct experience and that’s what leaders should have, some level of direct experience so that there’s an urgency around the issues that need to be worked on. And so I’ve had the experience of incarceration myself personally, and I happen to know having lived in a women’s prison that they only cause further harm and that they are antithetical to getting us to a place of having whole, healed and healthy communities and people. So I am a prison abolitionist, absolutely. And thank you for referring to me in that manner.

Why I’m running has a lot to do with that experience in 15 plus years specifically. Decades prior to that in my lifetime came from a family, African American family of civil rights folk breaking color barriers and so forth in law, in the field of medicine. My grandmother was the first black nurse in the city of Boston. I’m from a community that is the most incarcerated community in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We’ve been in Massachusetts for seven generations in the same old house in Roxbury for five generations. And so why I’m running is this alchemy of these life experiences that have brought me to where I am in my life today with my understanding of these issues and also who I am today. And that includes all of my life experiences, not just the highs that I’ve reached and the accomplishments that I’ve had and the academic achievements that I’ve had the privilege to be exposed to, but also my incarceration, which it has been one of the most important experiences of my life that propelled me.

This was 20 plus years ago. I made a mistake in my law practice. I wound up on a prison bunk in federal prison for wire fraud. And what I received and learned from that experience after having been a criminal defense attorney, after having worked my entire adult life on ending mass incarceration and bringing attention to that issue and then having the direct experience of myself of living in a prison, I knew immediately after being surrounded by all these women, I had to survive 24 months of incarceration. I was laying next to head to toe, head to toe, head to toe on a prison bunk next to sisters who had been in there for 24 years. I mean, I knew my parents were researchers of people of African diaspora. When I was a kid, they were traveling all over the world with us showing up different cultures of our people.

And one of them was a trip to Gore Island where we saw where they enslaved African people, put them into caves, waited for ships to come, load them on like cargo and take them to every single place on the planet to work as labor. And when I was in that prison, I wrote a book, a memoir called Upper Bunkies Unite. And because I was on a top bunk and I remember looking up over this sea of black women and being like, damn, the first thing that came to mind all those years later was Gore Island, was how they stacked us.

And so I’m running for all of that and I’m running for more of the immediacy of creating change right now. I’ve been going to the Massachusetts State House for 15 years writing policy, writing legislation, giving of my voice, my experience to panels and state legislative hearings and congressional hearings and being trotted out for all of the things on the federal level policy. And enough is enough. Enough is enough. And I have done every piece. I’m older. I’m older. I believe in pouring into our young because they’re brilliant. They have a language now that we like what you all talked about, but

I like how it sounds. But we need to break the ceiling of the caste system that they expect us to continue to live under. And I refuse to do it any longer. I refuse to be made a chump in an electoral process that is not addressing the needs of the people that are millions, that actually in Massachusetts have become the majority of people who are dissatisfied with either of the establishment parties, meaning the Democrats or the Republicans, that 67% of voters in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have become unenrolled. Now, does it mean that they’re all the way over here, prison abolitionists and to the left and progressives like I am? I don’t even call myself a progressive because that’s been co-opted in so many ways to help democratic socialists get into office and so forth that do not go far enough for me. However, we need to be a part of this in more ways than just being on the table.

We need to shake up. I mean, you talk about rattling the bars, the electoral process needs to, those bars need to be rattled. We get people into office and they think the job, the hard work was getting elected, which is an arduous process even when you have their millions of dollars, which we don’t, but still too many of our electeds have gotten into office and they though getting into office was the job.

And then they just term after term after term, they’re just comfortable. It’s like they have a job. They have a nine to five that they go to.

Mansa Musa:

Let me ask you this here.

Andrea James:

Yeah.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. So you already clarified the so-called progressive. We agree that the term in and of itself says one thing, but the behavior says something else. But you are running as an independent. Now juxtapose that against Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has ran as the longest independent, but how do you see yourself when you say you’re independent? Is your independency similar to Bernie Sanders same or are you saying independent in fact and not in theory?

Andrea James:

I’m independent in fact. I mean, I’m running on issues.

Mansa Musa:

Come on.

Andrea James:

I am not running on any party platform and I refuse to be constricted by a party platform. I unenrolled because I was a member of the Democratic Party. I was raised by strong Black Democratic women over the generations in my family. I unenrolled because I thought it was unconscionable what the Democratic Party has become. And I believe that it is a duopoly between the Republican parties and the Democratic parties. That being said, I wasn’t running on any party because I’ve seen the party that I expected to do, carry the water and make the noise on behalf of the issues that are affecting so many people. When they weren’t doing that term after term, elected position after elected position, I decided the party platforms are not going to carry the work that needs to be done. So I said, I’m going to work on these four issues.

Now I care about a lot of other issues, trust me. But right now in the compounded crises that people are going through, everyday people are going through in the communities like mine across the country, but specifically across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we’re a commonwealth. It’s different

Mansa Musa:

When

Andrea James:

Commonwealth, that means of the people. We become a corporate wealth. In our campaign is it’s the Commonwealth, not the corporate wealth. We are under the oppression and control of a corporate agenda right now in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. So wealthy donors and corporations are getting what the focus and the attention that working families, underemployed, unemployed, formerly incarcerated people, people who have gone through a state of struggle, the focus should be on. We’re a commonwealth. But I’m running on four issues.

Mansa Musa:

Come on, talk about

Andrea James:

It. So that it is very clear because they’ve co-opted the term affordability. They’ve listened to our language and taken our language, both the Republican and the Democratic candidate and morphed our abolitionist language into their establishment party agenda. So I said, I’m not dealing with none of that. I’m an independent, meaning I am running on issues, not any sort of party platform or party identity. We don’t have an independent party in Massachusetts. We’re just called unenrolled/independents. So it’s not even that I’m running on a platform called independent.

Mansa Musa:

I’m

Andrea James:

Running on four issues, housing, universal healthcare, childcare, and equitably funded education. Why those issues? Because I am the voice of the people who have been just tamped down into a caste system that is only growing and widening. So before it used to be all of us, black, brown. We have a wealth gap in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that is astounding, that nobody even wants to talk about. It’s always like, why has it got to be about rates? Because everything is about race, baby. And so we’ve got to discuss that. But we’ve got an unemployment rate that is double for Black people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And so these are things that we have to talk about, but the issues that I’m running on are issues that would create an immediate lift. I call it lifting from the bottom and closing the gaps. When you talk about unaffordability, it is at a crisis level in this state and around the country, but housing, universal healthcare, childcare, and equitably funded education immediately gives economic empowerment to the people, the millions of people just in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts alone, the wealthiest state in the country that has been completely left out of that.

So we have nurses and firemen right now who can’t afford places to live. And so it has expanded. It’s no longer just formerly incarcerated people who got no chance in hell, that’s got no chance

Mansa Musa:

In

Andrea James:

Finding support, I should say. We still make it, but in finding support in climbing out of that hole they tried to bury us in and get back on our feet and raise our children and bring our families back together and restitch the fabric that they’ve shredded economically, family-wise. But it’s expanded to a lot of the middle class, so to speak, who are now feeling the same level of pain, even as they still are intact and have their jobs and may have a house or may be able to figure out how to pay their rent, but really are not making a living wage themselves. And so housing, universal healthcare, why universal healthcare that’s single payer healthcare. I’ve traveled the world in the work that I’ve done as an expert on women and incarceration. I’ve talked to parliaments in different countries about the issue. I’ve visited women’s prisons all over the world.

And while doing that, I have had the experience of those countries and their major cities and how they address policy. Well, housing is a number one thing in many of these places, but also they have universal healthcare. They’re not beholden to what we’re stuck with, which is the CEOs who make 200 million with a M

Mansa Musa:

Dollars

Andrea James:

A year who run healthcare companies in the United States. And we have no benefit of it. We pay high premiums, we have deductibles, and most of the time we have to ask if they’ll fix something for us and it’s denied. And so universal healthcare is one way to immediately infuse some economic stability in the families and in the everyday people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. If we have single payer healthcare, which means the state takes over completely, which we are uniquely poised to do here because Massachusetts already controls its own healthcare market. And so the only reason we don’t have it is that because the governor and the other leadership in the commonwealth of legislature are beholden to the wealthy donors who are the CEOs and their rank and file who donate money to these campaigns because there is no other way to explain in the commonwealth of Massachusetts where we already control our own healthcare marketplace, where it does not make fiscal sense or it’s not fiscally responsible to not have single payer healthcare, that we still have it, except that we will hold in place because of the lobbyists, the healthcare industry and the CEOs that make us have to pay all of this money for healthcare that does not produce the level of health and wellness that we deserve.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. Let me ask you this here then. Okay, so you already acknowledged that you got this wealth gap and you got in terms of the political structure. So how are you managing being competitive in the sense of being able to get out and get your message out unless are you getting APAC money? Are you getting corporate money? So how are you funding your campaign? How do you see it? Because like you say, you up against, just to your own point, it ain’t commonwealth, it’s corporate wealth. If it’s corporate wealth, right?

Andrea James:

Millions and millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. The Republican candidate in this race, there’s three of us. First of all, mainstream media is beholden to the Democratic Party and they only refer to her. And in reference to the Republican candidate running against us, they only refer to one opponent running this race against our current Democratic governor. There’s three of us. There’s not just two. So mainstream media plays a huge role in completely blocking. Took 10,000 signatures. They didn’t think we could get it as an independent candidate. We got 13,311 certified

Signatures from the Secretary of State, certified at the Secretary of State’s office, which means I am on the general election ballot on November 3rd. Mainstream media has refused to include me in anything. We did our first mainstream media interview that aired Sunday morning, the very first one, but yet that same network is hosting one of the few debates that the current governor, Mara Healy has agreed. They left it up to her. They let her do all the deciding. There’s three candidates, but she’s the one that got to decide where she was going to show up. Fine. They’re excluding me from the debates, the mainstream networks. I’m a candidate. I am on the ballot and I am being excluded from being in the debate. When I asked the other network that I just did the interview with, why had they not invited me into the debate between the gubernatorial candidates?

And they said, because the people have expressed that they only want to hear from the establishment parties. Well, that’s interesting in Massachusetts where 67% of the voter roll are currently unenrolled independents. So who are you talking to? And so it doesn’t matter what Donald Trump is doing right now with mainstream media on the national level, CNN and all them, he just kicked them out of the press too of their credentials and they’re on the sidewalk outside of the White House trying to do an interview, being fed information from inside the press room. That’s exactly what these networks are doing to me By inviting us into the debate and allowing the voters to hear the messages, to be informed voters, and not just mainstream media being able to determine who gets to be heard and who doesn’t get to be heard. That’s violation of constitutional rights, a First Amendment.

There’s a plethora of wrongness with it

Mansa Musa:

And

Andrea James:

That shouldn’t happen. And so then we got to talk about the money, right? So the current governor’s a millionaire, but she also has millions of dollars that have flowed into her campaign by corporations, the CEO. And then all you got to do, it’s all public knowledge. Anybody can look at ours, they can look at theirs, and you can see where the money’s coming from. And it’s all the wealth and power in the Commonwealth and people of wealth and power who want to make sure that the Democratic platform stays intact. Now look at the Republican candidate that’s running against us. He’s got a $31 million mansion in Montana somewhere, a summer home in Montana. But he, at the start of his race, said, “I’m putting $10 million into this race.” So they’ve got commercials running, they’ve got all kinds of stuff that we don’t have. So the only thing that we have is an opportunity to be blessed, to be invited into opportunities like this, like what you have always provided for us at Rattling the Bars, but it’s about boots on the ground.

And that’s one thing that our style of organizing didn’t change because it shifted to electoral politics.

So we know how to do this. It’s still hard because you have to pay for signs. You have to pay for, even though, here’s an example. I don’t know if you can see it because my screen.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, I can see

Andrea James:

It. But throughout this entire campaign, our money has been spent on toner and paper. You know what I mean? Because we’ve been talking to independent candidates, Schwama out in Washington State and just talking to their campaign managers about how y’all getting this done against multi, multi-millions of dollars that are just, they’re not even talking about us yet because they don’t want to give any rise to the awareness of people that there is a person like myself running. So they’re just suppressing everything else by covering everything with signs, with commercials, things that we just don’t have. So we’re doing our best. We’re boots on the ground. It took them two days to get 10,000 signatures to get back on the ballot. It took us months because we were grassroots. I stood outside in the rain, the heat, the snow, whatever for

Mansa Musa:

Months

Andrea James:

Personally asking people if they would sign my ballot sheet. But also it gave me an opportunity to have conversations with people about what’s their pain points, what do they need in their lives to create joy? It’s not just about the struggle we’re going through, but where are the investments to create joy in the lives of the people of the Commonwealth, all of us. So it has been a really. And then again, Massachusetts is a blue, blue state. We got a

Mansa Musa:

Blue

Andrea James:

Governor, which is another reason why I ran because I’m like, hold up. The line on the sand for me was we went. So Massachusetts was one of three states up until 2000 that allowed incarcerated people to vote, full access to the ballot. They took that right away from incarcerated people in 2000 because the brothers inside of a men’s prison here called Norfolk State Prison started to organize themselves. And they started to organize themselves because of the hard draconian sentences that more of these young brothers were starting to come into the prison with these real heavy sentences hanging over them, young. And so the legislature was predominantly white and male was like, “Oh wait, you going to organize yourselves and your families on the outside? We make 7% of the population Black folks in Massachusetts. We make up 51% of the carceral population.” Well, make that make sense.

Math ain’t mathing. So they said, “We’re going to strip you of the right to vote.” And they did. They had to move heaven and earth. They had to change the Massachusetts Constitution to strip us of the right to vote inside. Now, we have been fighting to reinstate that ever since.

And so they got a congressional hearing in one of the sessions and we went and poured our hats out. And with my testimony, I lined up the fact that this is voter suppression. This goes back to denying Black people the right to vote whenever you have a disproportionality in the numbers of Black folks in the state and the levels of incarceration on and on. Well, they didn’t even reconvene after the hearing to discuss it. It never made it out of committee. It was what every other piece of our legislation that we have worked on over decades went to what they call went to study. That was it for me. Y’all ain’t even going to huddle and discuss this after we came in and poured our hats out about why it’s important as people who have had direct experience with incarceration for people inside to vote.

I was a mother. I had a five-month-old little baby boy when they made me go into the prison, a 12-year-old daughter and young adult, a son and two daughters. I had good reason to still have my right to vote.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Answer this here, Andrea. And I want you to put yourself in this space, your candidacy in this space. So when we was at the Herr March, I asked you about that, and this is what you said. You said when we first started this, the first time we came down here, we had a hundred people. The day that we was down there, we had blocks and blocks and blocks of people. We had Freedom Plaza flooded. So that’s one. I want you to put your candidacy in these two spaces. How do you see your candidacy in this light? I was in Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts, I think year for last, where they was doing a showing of the movie called Strike, where they shut down Pelican Bay, where the men shut down. How do you see your candidacy in terms of you was in a prison where they was treating y’all like animals, y’all made y’all minds up when y’all got out, when y’all got in a position to change the narrative, you was going to change it systematically and continuously you changed it.

Her movement. When I was down there where the buses was at, I ran into a lot of sisters I had dealt with and interviewed. Everybody was energized. Strike. They organized this strike throughout California under a situation where they ain’t even had the ability to communicate. So put your candidacy under that type of light.

Andrea James:

Well, we did. We started our work as incarcerated women inside of a federal prison and we were like, “You know what? We don’t hear nothing about us, the separation of us from our children, whatever.” So we organized ourselves in that prison and we didn’t have no way of. We were writing letters and sending kites outside, whatever we could do to raise awareness of the issue of the incarceration of women and our separation from us from our children. But if you look at the life of a woman on a prison bunk, every issue that we are fighting for has been a factor that led them to that prison bunk. The lack of housing, the lack of healthcare, the lack of education, the lack of childcare, the lack of resources for the most vulnerable among us. And so that’s the first thing. The second thing is I’m older.

I’m older and they want to create a narrative and have created a narrative that we have no more value and we don’t count. And the issues that we’re talking about, nobody should listen to because we have incarcerated or formerly incarcerated as part of who we are. And because of that, we just valueless now. We have no more authority.

We cannot be accountable. We cannot be relied upon to run these institutions, to run these states, and they have these positions like Kiana Johnson, county clerk. What? Come on now. We got the first formerly incarcerated Black woman who is now the clerk in Prince George’s County.

Mansa Musa:

I mean,

Andrea James:

This is what we talking about. We’ve got a new Black woman mayor in Washington DC because of the rallying and the intense work that Black women did, formerly incarcerated Black women did to change that and put new leadership into that seat. So I want to be that. Let me break the mold. You know what I mean? It’s a win-win for us as far as I’m concerned because I’m challenging that. Yeah, they’re like, oh, now they started out only writing stories. There’d be one page of a story when I announced my candidacy a year ago and the whole page was filled up linking my case and talking about my transgression of wire fraud and went to federal prison as a lawyer and one little line that said, “Oh, and by the way, she’s running for governor.”

So I’m like, “Okay, somebody has to step out and kind of be like,” Okay, I’m the whipping post. “You know what I mean? Because I’m going to push back on that. And what? I don’t have time to talk about that. I have time to talk about why it’s important to have people with direct experience who actually know and have the urgency, the transparency, the accountability that it requires that we don’t currently have from our current legislature, from our current governor, particularly in Massachusetts. Massachusetts just received the Black Hole Award in the country. That means the least transparency in any state in the United States. The least. We have the least effective legislature in the entire country. So we have to do something different. And they’ve made it impossible pretty much if you have a felony conviction to run for things. You can’t be a state legislator for the felony conviction in Massachusetts, but guess what they didn’t think anybody would have the nerve to do as a formerly incarcerated person?

Run for governor. But also I’m not a politician. I’m a community organizer and I have no interest in making a career out of starting from school committee and working my way up and sitting around in the state legislature. I’m going straight to the top.

Mansa Musa:

To the top. Yeah, that’s right.

Andrea James:

Where

Mansa Musa:

We can get the

Andrea James:

Things moving that we need to have moving. And so if this just tills the soil, I have had so many sisters in our network across the country say, “Hey sis, I’m going to run for office now. You’ve inspired me.” That’s what I’m talking about.

Mansa Musa:

One thing for sure and two things for certain, you got a broad network in terms, I seen the response that you got from men and women coming out that’s in this space. So what kind of feedback, because you told me earlier that you’ve been traveling across the state. And I want to say this, because Massachusetts got the misnomer of being a progressive state, the Kennedy and whatnot, but talk about what kind of response you getting from the people that you’re talking to across the state. And I know you going everywhere, every crivis. Talk about the response you’re getting from the people that’s going to be responsible for you getting elected because I believe you can get elected and you will get elected.

Andrea James:

Well, those are the communities that I’m in where no other politicians seem to go. The people who represent those communities go there when it’s election time and then they become the untouchables. Nobody sees them or hears from them. I’ve been in the Western part of the state, which is closer to New York than it is to Massachusetts. They wear Yankees caps as opposed to Red Sox hats because they are completely disconnected. I’m talking about what’s the Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, these towns that. I was in Holyoke last year and this sister said to me, “You came all the way out here.” And I was like, “Of course I came out here as a part of Massachusetts, isn’t it?” She was like, “Nobody comes out here. They can’t even tell you who the governor is in those parts of the state.” To me, and it’s mostly black and brown.

Black, brown and poor. And they’re feeling like they don’t even vote. And so we have this tiny, tiny base of predominantly Democrats who are holding a party platform in place. There’s not enough Republicans in Massachusetts to make that matter.

Mansa Musa:

And

Andrea James:

They are predominantly white. They do not have the direct experience of struggle economically. And they have co-opted the term progressive and they go to things like no kings and hold signs because that’s the only kind of way that they’re feeling like they could make a difference. They will never vote for me. And so I’m like, if you vote for me, I would love, great, you have a choice. We just want you to know that.

Mansa Musa:

I impose

Andrea James:

Communities that are in the housing developments, you know what I mean? Up in the projects. I’m knocking doors there. I’m talking to people in towns where people are like, “Don’t nobody vote out here.” And I’ve never voted, but we’ve been simultaneously doing a voter registration drive along with this campaign from day one. We have a false belief amongst the majority of formerly incarcerated Black men that I’ve found out running this race over the past year that do not even know that they can vote because they’ve been told when they leave the prison, Massachusetts, if you’re felony conviction in a state prison, they took the right to vote. But the minute you walk out of that door, if you were registered before, all you got to do is go and vote again. If you aren’t registered, you can register and vote in the next election. We can vote as formerly incarcerated people in Massachusetts as long as we are not currently serving a state prison sentence for a felony conviction.

If you’re in jail in Massachusetts, you can vote. You can vote while you were serving a misdemeanor sentence in a county jail, access to the ballot. Do they have it? No. So those are the people that we’re talking to.

And again, we live. I get it. So many people have said to me, Black people have said to me, “Sis, I don’t vote. I would vote for you, but I can’t vote. I’m formerly incarcerated.” We correct that and say, “You can.” We get them registered. We tell them, “You don’t have to go into the voting place. You can get a mail-in ballot. You can do all these things.” The other piece of that is no matter what, too many Black and brown folks have said to me, “I don’t even believe in the process, sis. I don’t vote.” And now my response to that is one in six Black children in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts go to bed hungry. 30,000 children, predominantly Black and Brown and poor kids sleep in a car or under some makeshift shelter every single night in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

If they still go to school, they go to school that are woefully unequally funded, underfunded, and they just had more teacher layoffs. If you say to me, I’m asking you, I’m an elder Black woman running for office. We’ve never had a candidate like me. I’m asking you to get engaged just to vote. Just vote. Vote for us. Vote for our issues. If I’m wrong, I’m willing to step out of the electoral process and to do what are you doing? When I tell you that, do you have children? Most of them tell me yes. Do you care about the Black child over here who’s going to bed hungry every night that’s sleeping on the street? If you have a better way to approach that, I’d like to know if you have an alternative to getting somebody like myself in the governor’s seat to create immediate significant radical change that is going to start not from a budget that they’ve created that has no transparency, that nobody knows if it’s true, if it’s not true, that we voted for an audit that we can’t get.

We don’t know how much money’s there. We don’t know who’s deciding where money should be allocated. If you don’t understand the power to not start from a budget that we don’t even know if it’s true or not, but instead start from the issues and the people that need the support the most and make that the priority for the work and where the money is being spent, then tell me what you have as an alternative for me to make sure as a mother who raised black children, as a grandmother who now has grand babies and is from a community that has been. The fabric has been shredded by all of these systems. You tell me what your proposal to me is so that I’m not wasting my time any longer so I can make sure that these black babies and these poor families, white, black, brown, whatever, we don’t have any more children who are hungry and sleeping on the street.

Mansa Musa:

Andre, tell our audience as we close out how they can get involved with your campaign or how they can get more information rather about your campaign.

Andrea James:

We don’t have millions of dollars. We barely have any dollars. Our money comes from mostly poor, formerly incarcerated black, white, brown women who just are urgent to create change in their own families and communities who are struggling just to feed their kids, find a place to live and the whole bit. AJ4FOR, that shows my age. My kids were like, “Ma, why didn’t you just put the number four?” Because I didn’t know. So AJFOR4MA for Massachusetts.com, that’s our website. You go there, there’s a volunteer form, there’s a donate button. No amount is too small. We get five, 10, 15, $20 donations and that has carried us for whatever we’ve been able to get the signs, whatever we’ve been able to do. We’re doing lit drops right now. Lit drops are where you carve out turf and you literally drop in literature like this so that people know we’re running and knocking on doors, door knocking.

Anybody who’s run campaigns like we have to stop prison builds and so forth, you’ve door knocked with me. Come and stand with me and door knock for this campaign now. It is change. And so that’s how they can. Ajforma.com, hit us up, send us an email, whatever you want to do, [email protected]. All the information’s on our website and we’ve got 45 maybe. I don’t know, November 3rd

Is the election day. We are in the 11th hour and still too many people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who want or are looking for change don’t know about this campaign because mainstream media has intentionally left us out. And so we need help. We need boots on the ground who can go do a standout for us, disseminate our lit for us, put a yard sign if you have a yard or a window sign if you have a window. We need to raise awareness and we need to do it right now.