Grassroots Movement Takes Off in Tennessee
NASHVILLE, TN — With early primary voting beginning next week, Our Revolution — the grassroots political group founded by Bernie Sanders — held an Organize to Win 2020 Summit here today, drawing activists from across the state.
Local groups — including Our Revolution Nashville and Middle Tennessee and others — committed to joining forces to create a statewide political powerhouse that will fight for progressive policies and elect candidates up and down the ballot who will champion those policies.
They are off to an impressive start here: last September, six Our Revolution-endorsed candidates won seats on the Nashville Metro Council. Two of them spoke at today’s summit: Zulfat Suara, Council Member At-Large, who made history as the first Muslim elected to a Metro Council seat, and Delishia Porterfield, Council Member for District 29.
“More than 600 Our Revolution groups around the country are working to get progressives elected at all levels of office. What we accomplished in September is just the beginning,” said Porterfield.
A diverse group of speakers shared personal and motivational stories on a range of issues.
Franklin mom Kristen Grimm, who launched Mothers for Medicare for All last year, said her family lives in constant fear of losing coverage for her chronically ill son. “Recently, our insurance company denied a payment on a technicality, and we now owe a children’s hospital $54,000. There have been times when we’ve had to make a choice: do we pay our mortgage or our health insurance premiums?” She believes human suffering and medical bankruptcy in America have been normalized. “So much of it is preventable — it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Stephanie Kang, a native of Nashville who helped write the Medicare for All Act of 2019 for its lead sponsor, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, said, “Tennessee is ground zero for hospitals closing in places where they are needed the most. Our mothers and babies are dying unnecessarily, at some of the highest rates in the nation, and we have 675,000 uninsured people in the state.” She said the only reason our broken healthcare system persists is greed. “The private insurance industry rakes in $1.3 trillion a year, and the pharmaceutical industry’s annual income is $400 billion. So don’t tell me we can’t afford it. The money is there, we just need it to go towards patients, not profits.”
Pastor James Turner of Nashville’s New Hope Baptist Church spoke on the local affordable housing crisis and gentrification. “Developers and investors are buying up all the low-income apartment complexes and displacing the residents or making them homeless with no effort to keep them.” Even government projects, he said, are adding to the crisis. “Right now, they are tearing down public housing to rebuild it as ‘mixed-income.’ They applaud themselves because residents can return, but the vast majority of the new units will be sold at market rate, in a city that already has a homeless problem and an affordable housing crisis.”
Jim Wohlgemuth, a member of Veterans for Peace Nashville Chapter 089, spoke about his service in Vietnam and stopping endless wars. “I participated in a war that was worthless, useless, purposeless, that killed over 58,000 young Americans and millions of Vietnamese. Yet I’m expected to be proud of what I did.” He pointed out that just 10% of our annual defense spending could pay for tuition-free public college, and 28% could get us to 100% renewable energy in ten years. “In 1967, Dr. King said that a country that spends more on its military than it does to uplift society is approaching spiritual death. It’s 2020 and not only hasn’t that changed, it’s gotten worse.”
Our Revolution, which has 600 local groups nationwide, has been hosting Organize to Win 2020 summits in cities from coast to coast as part of an unprecedented campaign to mobilize voters, advance progressive issues, and elect progressive champions at all levels of government.
