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2nd Defend Black Women March
Honoring Marielle Franco: Celebrating the Power of Black Feminisms
in Latin America and the Caribbean / July 29 - July 31 in Washington, D.C.
"The roses of resistance are born in the asphalt. We will receive roses, but we will be with our fists clenched speaking of our existence against the push and pull that affects our lives."
- Marielle Franco
July 1,2022
New Black Nationalist Network - Statement of Support for the 2nd Defend Black Women March in Washington, D.C.
Today New Black Nationalists [NBN] are issuing this Statement of Support for the 2nd Defend Black Women March as one of the most significant Black diaspora gatherings to occur since our network formed in 2018. We congratulate Black Women Radicals and 'I Support Black Women,' as the hosts organizations.
As a dynamic political event, marquis social gathering and cultural festival featuring path-breaking black literature, crafts, film, remarks from probing Black thought leaders, and a march charged with the revolutionary energy of Black diasporic women from Africa to Brazil to Canada, this is an event you shouldn't miss.
Black women are leading on the front lines and behind the scenes in every battle and movement we're engaged in for our humanity, rights, and liberation. From opposing the January 6, 2021, coup to install a white nationalist American Apartheid regime, to the Supreme Court's Dodd decision stealing women's reproductive rights and criminalizing them as wards of the state, Black women must not only be defended but supported as a vanguard liberation force.
Black Women Radicals is 'doing the work 'in the trenches, favelas, villages, and hoods with brio and grit like few other organizations. Confronting the challenges of racial and gender justice, educational equity, anti-Black state violence, and mutual aid, they are championing transnational Black feminisms, Black women and gender expansive people as a vanguard force of radical international struggles.
Black Women Radicals' School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP) and their extensive international collaborations, empower them as critical vision keepers of an alternative Black future shorn of social inequality and investing all Black women and LGBTQI communities with agency. But don't take our word for it: visit their website "Events," link to see the work for yourself.
As Black Nationalists and 'Womanists,' committed to generating analytical and theoretical products supporting the creation of a majority Black-led non-heteropatriarchal nation-state, Black Women Radicals are an indispensable resource and inspiration to our work. NBN is currently engaged in a one-year project to complete a Draft Program for a New Black Nation-State-The Vesey Republic, by Juneteenth 2023. We seek to incorporate contributions in all areas of policy and recommendations for a national governance structure from the Black Women Radicals diasporic community.
New Black Nationalists wish to express our strong support for the theme of the 2nd Defend Black Woman March: Honoring Marielle Franco: Celebrating the Power of Black Feminisms in Latin America and the Caribbean. Historically speaking, tension in the past between Black activists in America's settler state and activists from the Caribbean have been counterproductive when those divisions were not based on respect and principled political difference.
Black Women Radicals outreach to Black women of Iranian descent, and Black First Nation women in Australia and Melanesia, is lancing the privileged position of past Black Diaspora movements dominated by the hubris and paternalism of Black Atlanticist-centered activists (mostly men) in the United States.
The Defend Black Women March is highly significant in breaking that yoke of privilege. By listening, learning, foregrounding, and expanding the Black diasporic experience 'eastward' and to the Black Global South in the Caribbean, Central and South America they are reconfiguring the galaxy of the Black diaspora.
The historic contributions of the Black commons in the Haitian, Grenadian, and Cuban revolutions have profoundly influenced world events and Black diaspora liberation movements. Arguably, the Caribbean has also produced the most significant body of theoretical work in the Black Diaspora. The contributions of Walter Rodney, CLR James, Marcus Garvey, Amie Cesaire, Leon Dumas, and Edouard Glissant are well known.
Having recently concluded our one-year critical reading of Frantz Fanon's corpus of works and adopting Fanonism as New Black Nationalists' guiding philosophical system, we reassessed the compendium of works comprising the Caribbean intellectual tradition. The writings and organizing efforts of Paulette and Jane Nardal, Suzanne Lacascade, Suzanne Cesaire and other Caribbean women were at the nexus of the intellectual explosion that launched the first fully fledged Black philosophical school of thought: Negritude.
The Nardal sister's Paris salon was the breeding ground where Harlem Renaissance cultural giants mixed with young Caribbean and African Francophone thinkers in the 1930s. The forums, workshops, and collective cultural exchange activities of the 2nd Defend Black Women March revives and advances the spirit and content of the Nardal Sisters Claymont Salon experience in virtual and real time.
It was the cultural, ideological, and philosophical critique of Negritude that Martinican Frantz Fanon inverted into his revolutionary Decolonial Theory while living in France. His 1960 metaphorical reference to the colonized inability to 'breathe' until taking up armed struggle for liberation, reverberated across the globe in the 2020 BLM 2.0 revolts following George Floyd's execution.
Honoring the Latin and Caribbean contributions to the Black diaspora liberation struggle personified in the life of Marielle Franco is a fitting tribute. Marielle Franco fought for the humanity of the most downtrodden Afro-Brazilians and marginalized people brutalized by the racist authoritarian Bolsonaro government. Her actions and ability to speak to the loftiest aspirations of the Commons in an uncompromising, straightforward, and loving vernacular captured the imagination of millions of Brazilians beyond her City Councillor district in Rio de Janeiro.
So profound a threat did Marielle Franco present to Brazil's white ruling-class, that at President Bolsonaro's request, she was publicly executed in broad daylight on March 14, 2018. Public assassinations on the orders of ruling governments of high-profile women is something we've rarely seen the last half century. We recall the murders of Indira Gandi, Benazir Bhutto, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and Jacqueline Creft, Education Minister in Grenada's New Jewel Movement government. In death as in life, Marielle Franco's spirit dwells and vibrates in rarified air of the Black liberatory cosmos that will be felt at the 2nd Defend Black Women March. We are all honored to be Marielle's successors.
On behalf of the stateless maroons in the New Black Nationalist network, we call on the Black Commons to gather in mass on Saturday, July 30, 2022, at 11:00 a.m. at the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C.
Below is a tentative schedule of events for the Defend
Black Women March weekend.
Please note that the official host hotel for the March Weekend is the Eaton Hotel. We currently have a special rate of $159 per night (1st come, 1st serve).
FRIDAY, JULY 29TH, 2022
︎︎︎
CHECK-IN & FILM SCREENING (6:00PM-10:00PM)
Location of check-in & time: Eaton Hotel 4PM (1201 K St NW, Washington, DC 20005)
Opening plenary about the Defend Black Women March, with film screenings of the “I Support Black Women” documentary and “Sementes: Mulheres Pretas no Poder” by Éthel Oliveira and Júlia Mariano
Post-film screening panel featuring Afro-Brazilian & Afro-Caribbean women and gender-expansive activists.
SATURDAY, JULY 30TH, 2022
︎︎︎
DEFEND BLACK WOMEN RALLY & MARCH (11:30AM-2:00PM)
Location of march meet-up: The march will start at Malcolm X Park (16th St NW &, W St NW, Washington, DC 20009) to Black Lives Matter Plaza (BLM Plaza is a two-block-long pedestrian section of 16th Street NW in Downtown Washington, D.C.).
See map below.
Post-march gathering reception: Location to be determined.
SUNDAY, JULY 31ST, 2022
︎︎︎
DEFEND BLACK WOMEN SALON SERIES (9:00AM-1:30PM)
Location: Eaton Hotel 1201 K St NW, Washington, DC 20005
Please note there is $50 fee to participate. Click here for more info.
1st Come, 1st serve, 75 Maximum Participants.
Workshop Schedule
8:00AM-9:00AM - Registration, Breakfast, Salon Material Dissemination
9:00AM-10:30AM - “Asé to Axé: Transnational Black Feminisms and the Role of Solidarity in African Spiritual Practice”.
Coffee Break - 10:30AM-10:45AM
10:45AM-11:45AM - Concurrent Sessions of “Black Women Deserve: Sex & Pleasure” and Radical Reproductive Revolution Now!
12:00PM - 1:00PM - Lunch, Networking, and Letter Writing
1:00PM -2:00PM - Closing Session|Chinga La Migra: Defend Black Women
The Defend Black Women Salon Series will consist of 1 plenary session and 3 fishbowl-style networking sessions broken up into four different categories. Attendees will have the option to participate in two different sessions and a closing session.
I. The Futurity Of Black Feminisms In The Americas Plenary Session:
“Asé to Axé: Transnational Black Feminisms and the Role of Solidarity in African Spiritual Practice”.
II. Radical Reproductive Revolution Now!
A facilitated fishbowl-style session exploring radical approaches to reproductive justice.
III. Black Women Deserve: Sex & Pleasure
A facilitated fishbowl-style session centering Black pleasure through BDSM and Kink as a liberatory practice.
IV. Chinga La Migra: Defend Black Women
A facilitated fishbowl-style session on the incarceration and detainment of Black women and gender-expansive people across borders.
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“Hard times require furious dancing. Each
of us is proof.”
Alice Walker
Defend Black Women 2022 Co-Chairs Jaimee Swift and Trinice McNally.
2DBW Planning Committee
Krystal Leaphart
Nana Brantuo
PG Watkins
Nakisha M Lewis
Emani Cannady
Breya M Johnson
Delaney Vandergrift
Aja Taylor
Brianna L Gibson
Lauren Williams-Batiste
Latisha James-Portis
Ehime Ora
Todd St. Hill
Keri Gray
Marcia Black
Jay Curry
Tyler Hicks
