The Black American Party advances the producer class of the Black American community — through ownership, enterprise, constitutional principle, and economic solidarity. What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans.
The party supports the free practice of religion for all Americans, and recognizes what the Black church built while the state was not protecting us.
As Americans, the Black American Party supports the free practice of religion for all Americans. All Americans, without qualification and without a list of approved faiths.
This is a short position because it is a settled one. It requires no elaborate defense and this party will not manufacture a controversy where there is none.
Black Americans have particular reason to be serious about it. The Black church is the oldest institution this community owns outright. It was built with our own money, on our own land, run by our own leadership, at a time when there was no other institution in American life that answered to us.
It carried the schools, the burial societies, the mutual aid funds, the first Black banks and insurance companies, the meeting halls of the civil rights movement, and the credit that no bank would extend. When this platform argues for institutions the community owns and controls, it is describing something Black Americans have already done once, at scale, under far worse conditions than today's.
A people who built their central institution in the teeth of hostility should not need to be persuaded that the state must keep its hands off worship.
Foundational Black America is not religiously uniform and never has been. There are Baptists and Methodists and Pentecostals, Catholics, Muslims in several traditions, Hebrew Israelites, practitioners of African diasporic faiths, and a growing number of Black Americans who hold no faith at all and are entitled to the same standing in this movement as anyone else.
This party is a political organization, not a denomination. Its membership requirement is lineage and commitment, not creed. Any movement that makes one tradition the price of entry has decided in advance to be smaller than the community it claims to represent, and this one intends to be the size of its people.
One thing, and it is asked with respect. The Black church has enormous convening power and it has often been the delivery mechanism through which outside political interests reach our community during an election season and vanish afterward.
This platform's argument about the swing vote applies inside the sanctuary as much as outside it. A congregation is a constituency, and a constituency that can be gathered for a candidate can also be gathered to ask that candidate for something specific and enforceable.
The Black American Party supports the free practice of religion for all Americans, without qualification.
No. It is a political organization, not a denomination. Membership rests on lineage and commitment, not creed, and includes Black Americans of every faith and of none.
Because it is the oldest institution this community owns outright, and it carried the schools, mutual aid funds, first Black banks and the meeting halls of the movement when nothing else answered to us.
That the convening power of a congregation be used to ask candidates for something specific and enforceable, rather than being gathered for a campaign that vanishes after the election.
A party that cannot say precisely who it represents will end up representing whoever funds it.
A vote that is guaranteed is a vote that is worthless.
The mechanics are public, unglamorous and entirely achievable. Most people have simply never been told them.
A PAC is how a constituency speaks in the language the political system actually listens to.
We keep producing extraordinary leaders and no machinery. Then we lose the leader and start over.
The two-axis map of American politics was not drawn with Black American interests in mind.
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