Community Conversation with Monica Moorehead, Presidential Candidate for Workers World Party
Friday, September 16. 6:30 – 8:30 P.M. 3020 W Vliet Street, Milwaukee at the African American Women’s Center (Former Carpenter’s union hall). Free and open to the public.
Monica Moorehead has been an activist and organizer for more than four decades. Moorehead has long been a supporter of people’s struggles in Wisconsin including the 2011 people’s occupation of the state capitol in Madison to fight for union rights, the immigrant rights movement, the struggle for justice for Tony Robinson and Dontre Hamilton and others killed by cops, joining protests against the right-wing Bradley Foundation, supporting the latest Milwaukee rebellion by Black youth and defending Black Lives Matter organizations such as the Coalition For Justice and Young Gifted and Black. Moorehead and her Vice Presidential candidate Lamont Lilly have been certified by the Wisconsin Elections Commission to be on the 2016 presidential ballot in the state.
A member of Workers World Party since 1975, Moorehead now sits on the Party’s national secretariat and is a managing editor of Workers World newspaper. She was WWP’s candidate for president of the United States in 1996 and 2000; in 1996 and 2016 she sought the nomination of the Peace & Freedom Party in California.
Born in Alabama during segregation, Moorehead became politically active as a teenager in Hampton, Va., distributing the Black Panther Party newspaper. She was banned from her high school band for refusing to play the racist song “Dixie.” A graduate of Hampton Institute [now University], Moorehead is a former kindergarten teacher.
She is a founding member of Millions for Mumia of the International Action Center—an anti-death-penalty project—and she co-chaired the historic May 7, 2000 rally of 6,000 people in Madison Square Garden Theater demanding freedom for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Moorehead has written extensively on the prison-industrial complex and anti-racist issues. She co-authored “Mumia Speaks– An Interview with Mumia Abu-Jamal.” She wrote the pamphlet “South Africa—Which Road to Liberation?” and the essay “What Is a Nation?” in the book “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.” She edited the 2007 book “Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle.”
She is a co-coordinator of the International Working Women’s Day Coalition in New York City. She is also an executive board member of the International Women’s Alliance—a global network of women organizers and women’s organizations that fight imperialism, racism, sexism and all forms of oppression.
Moorehead has represented Workers World Party on many international solidarity trips including South Africa, Iraq, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, South Korea, France the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and the U.S. internal colonies of Puerto Rico and Hawai’i. From the movements against racism, police killings and mass incarceration; to the struggle against imperialist war and neocolonialism; to solidarity with Cuba, Palestine, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, the DPRK, and all peoples struggling for self-determination and sovereignty; to the struggles for women’s and LGBTQ liberation; to battles for union rights, disability rights, environmental justice—from local struggles to international movements, Monica Moorehead has devoted her entire life to the great cause of building a better world.