#progressive party

What the fuck are you doing? Get out there.

We need to be in the streets. We need to be on air. We lost because we're incapable of radical---peaceful, but radical---action. This isn't another turn-the-other-cheek situation. We are about to lose all of our most fundamental rights.

If any other country was about to have abortions, gay marriage, trans rights, women's rights, migrant rights, and working class rights removed by a system with no checks and balances they'd be fucking shit up right now.

This isn't the time to prove we're better than them. Act radically--- without hurting and destroying, but fucking act.

We will not go silently into the night, because we are not just fighting for a better future we are fighting for our lives. Many, many people are going to die.

We will preserve.

We will survive.

And I know, surviving is not living. But it’s enough to get through.

I know so many of you are tired of fighting. But we have to keep fighting.

And the truth of it is, the Democratic Party is done. It has to be replaced. The Progressive party ideology is stronger. And I swear to God, come hell or high water, we are going to change this country. We will do it because there is no other option.

Show Time for Wallace was a musical theater for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace

(In this essay, Baldwin writes about the distrust between Black Americans and politicians, and particularly the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace. This is more of a (short) chronological narrative than Baldwin’s previous essays. He describes the experiences of his brothers who, as part of a quartet, were hired to travel South and sing for the Progressive Party campaign, where they faced both overt racism and more subtle forms of discrimination, including from the (allegedly pro-civil rights) Progressives themselves.)

“It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.)”

“...the Negro situation is not static... changes have occurred, and are occurring and will occur—this, in spite of the daily, dead-end monotony. It is this daily, dead-end monotony, though, as well as the wise desire not to be betrayed by hoping too much, which causes them to look on politicians with such an extraordinarily disenchanted eye.”

“Since Negroes have been in this country their one major, devastating gain was their Emancipation, an emancipation no one regards any more as having been dictated by humanitarian impulses. All that has followed from that brings to mind the rather unfortunate image of bones thrown to a pack of dogs sufficiently hungry to be dangerous... [N]o matter how many instances there have been of genuine concern and goodwill, nor how many hard, honest struggles have been carried on to improve the position of the Negro people, their position has not, in fact, changed so far as most of them are concerned.”

“The American commonwealth chooses to overlook what Negroes are never able to forget: that they are not really considered a part of it. Like Aziz in A Passage to India or Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they know that white people, whatever their love for justice, have no love for them.”

“‘There was a man there called a folk singer,’ says David [James’ younger brother] with venom, ‘and, naturally, everybody had to hear some folk songs.’” (Okay, this one made me laugh)

“In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared even more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it. The prospect of being arrested in Atlanta made them a little dizzy with terror: what might mean a beating in Harlem might quite possibly mean death here. ‘And at the same time,’ David says, ‘it was funny’: by which he means that the five policemen were faint prophecies of that equality which is the Progressive Party’s goal.”