Reminder - NO SHOW JULY 4!
Friday Power Lunch team is on break this week and will be back on July 11 at 12 pm ET.
Not registered yet - go here. Next Friday, we will tackle pressing issues from Democrats needing to ramp up voter registration to make up for lost ground since Obama. We will speak with Tram Nguyen, Co-Executive Director of New Virginia Majority about their secret sauce in engaging not only immigrant voters, but voters of color, women, low-income working people, and youth across Virginia.
Be inspired to join us next Friday to follow-up with Ms. Margaret Morrison’s about her personal story she told at Women’s Summit on June 27-29, 2025. Watch and listen here.
Ms. Margaret began her story with a verse from the poem “Dark Testament” by the Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray, a writer, scholar, Episcopal priest and civil rights warrior. Pauli Murray was a superb groundbreaking civil rights lawyer and the first African American to receive a J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School.
Hope is a song in a weary throat.
Give me a song of hope
And a world where I can sing it.
Give me a song of faith
And a people to believe in it.
Give me a song of kindliness
And a country where I can live it.
Give me a song of hope and love
And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline
Lift up your weary self today to sing your song of hope. Get outdoors with your family and friends and proclaim your stake in this long fight for freedom. We don’t have a choice friends. It is fight or flight - and we choose to fight for liberty and freedom. It is worth fighting for.
“Happy f*cking fourth of July 🇺🇸”
On this day of celebrating our independence from a King, we know our fight has just begun to take back our country from the grip of MAGA fascists. In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, not all individuals in the newly forming United States were free. The proclamation that "all men are created equal" did not extend to enslaved people, women, or Native Americans. It would take centuries to arrive at the abolition of slavery to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act 1965. Women’s rights made considerable progress in the 70’s and 80’s though the Equal Rights Amendment would take years to secure ratification but still sits unceremoniously awaiting the Archivist to formally add it to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment. Then, we celebrated the election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States in 2008 who served for two terms.
We believed America was making progress - slow but surely we were heading in the right direction. What happened instead was a wild almost frenzied backlash.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wesley Lowery called it an American “whitelash” defined as steps forward followed by “a backlash, and a violent backlash, on behalf of people who are socially coded as white in our history, legally coded as white in our laws, against changes that they perceive as now putting them at some type of disadvantage. Even if all that’s happening is the leveling of a playing field.”
We know what this fight is about. Ms Margaret’s story reminded us of that America’s story is nowhere near perfect. The rage of white supremacy is still alive and kicking - and it will need all of us to mount a greater movement and action to put it in its place.
It will take all of us - weary and ragged - but determined.
Glad we are in this fight together.
See you next Friday, July 11 at 12 NOON.
BIG MIC - Katherine White
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