Organizations Announce Plans for Actions During the Democratic National Convention in September, and to Challenge City over Denial of Permits

Ben Carroll, 919-604-8167 <tel:919-604-8167>
itsaredletterday@gmail.com <mailto:itsaredletterday@gmail.com>

*Organizations Announce Plans for Actions During the Democratic
National Convention in September, and to Challenge City over Denial of
Permits*

Charlotte, NC — On the week honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a
coalition of social justice, community, and labor organizations are
announcing plans to protest during the Democratic National Convention.
There will be a press conference on *Wednesday, January 18, at 1pm
outside of the Time Warner Cable Arena*.

The Coalition to Protest at the DNC includes organizations from
across North Carolina, the South, and the U.S., and includes labor
organizations, groups fighting home foreclosures, peace groups,
students and youth, and many other groups and prominent activists.

Coalition organizers have called Charlotte, NC the “Wall Street of
the South.” They intend to target the two corporate parties and to
raise grievances about injustices that are perpetrated and funded by
the international banks that call Charlotte home. The three primary
demands of the Coalition are:

Good   jobs for all! Economic justice now. Make the banks and
corporations    pay for their crisis,

Money  for education, health care, housing and all human needs, not
for war         and incarceration,

Justice        for immigrants and all oppressed peoples! Stop the raids
and     deportations.

Speakers will announce plans to explore challenges to the City of
Charlotte’s denial of requests for permits to protest during the
DNC. They will also address the City’s current attempts to pass new
ordinances making it more difficult for organizations to exercise
their rights to freedom of speech and assembly during the convention.

“I don’t hear the Republican or Democratic Parties addressing
safe, quality jobs, with good benefits that would eliminate many of
the social needs that unemployed workers depend on to survive. Instead
they continue to focus on a capitalist strategy to bring industries to
the southern right-to-work states with little union density, competing
with tax payer dollars as incentives,” said Donna Dewitt, President
of the South Carolina AFL-CIO.

“We are pleased to be a part of the campaign to challenge the
hypocrisy of US corporate political parties. We’re here to demand an
end to the war on Black people, here and in Africa – from police
brutality and mass incarceration to Africom, and proxy wars across the
continent. The Democratic Party and Obama Administration claim to be
people oriented, but refuse to recognise and protect basic human
rights; they continue to imprison COINTELPRO/Civil Rights era
political activists while lecturing the world. Obama signing the NDAA
effectively suspends habeus corpus,” said Efia Nwangaza, Founder and
Director of the Malcolm X Center for Self Determination and chair of
the US Human Rights Network’s Political Prisoner/State Repression
Working Group.

For more information about the Coalition to Protest at the DNC, a
full list of endorsers, and more, please visit http://protestdnc.org
<http://protestdnc.org/>
.
###