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Algernon Moncrieff

(5,780 posts)
Wed Feb 24, 2016, 12:51 AM Feb 2016

Clinton's Most Valuable Allies in South Carolina: the Moms of Black Lives Matter (HRC Group)

LINK to article at Mother Jones

They all described an intensive courtship by the Clinton campaign that began quietly, through back channels and outside the glare of the national media. Hamilton got her first meeting with Clinton after she promised on Facebook to shut down a Clinton rally with a protest in Milwaukee last spring. When the two met, they hugged for three minutes, and Hamilton cried on Clinton's shoulder. Reed-Veal met Clinton at a Congressional Black Caucus dinner. "She walked up, held my hand, and she said, 'What is it that you want?'" Reed-Veal recalled. She got a personal letter from Clinton afterward. Then she got a second letter, inviting her to a Democratic debate. After a Texas grand jury decided not to indict anyone for her daughter's death, she got a third letter from Clinton.

Clinton sealed the deal, they explained, when she met with the five of them last fall in a conference room in Chicago. It was a low-key affair. The candidates' staffers shooed reporters from the room before it began, and Clinton showed up with a notepad to jot down what she heard. They were told they had 30 minutes; the meeting lasted for two hours. "She knew which cases went to jail," Fulton said, when she told the story at the second stop of the day, a church in Sumter. "She knew specifically what happened in our tragedies. She knew that information and she knew because she cares. She cares. Not only does she care about victims of gun violence but she cares about women, she cares about African Americans. She cares!"

"We sat there and collaborated with her and her staffers," Reed-Veal recalled, sounding a little awed. "Our concerns are implemented in her policy. God is good! He was in the room. The Lord was was in the room! And Hillary was that mother, that grandmother, that sister."

That such an event happened at all is a testament to how far the Democratic landscape has shifted not just from 2008—when the Clintons cast doubts on the electability of Hillary Clinton's African American opponent ahead of the South Carolina primary and boasted of the then-New York senator's unique strength with white voters—but from the launch of the campaigns last spring. Neither Clinton nor Sanders talked about police violence, incarceration, or gun control in their announcement speeches last spring. It simply wasn't something Democratic presidential candidates felt they needed to talk about. But as they hit the home stretch in South Carolina, it has become a cornerstone of their platforms.
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Clinton's Most Valuable Allies in South Carolina: the Moms of Black Lives Matter (HRC Group) (Original Post) Algernon Moncrieff Feb 2016 OP
I am listening to cspan right now---The moms were at the Church and Hillary attended. Lovely to see riversedge Feb 2016 #1
They are amazing...so strong and brave lunamagica Feb 2016 #2
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