Community Conversation with Monica Moorehead

1- 3 p.m., September 17 / Villager Mall, Room A, 2312 S Park St.

press release: 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 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 are on the 2016 presidential ballot in Wisconsin.

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.