Courtesy of Cathie Berrey-Green/BG Productions Photos & Video
- Civil-rights attorney Larry Krasner won the race for Philadelphia’s district attorney on in a blowout.
- Krasner’s big victory can be traced to massive canvassing and get-out-the-vote operations by local activists and organizers.
- Many of Philadelphia’s progressive organizations formed a coalition after the election of President Donald Trump to maximize their impact on local politics.
By the time Larry Krasner entered the William Way LGBT Center in Philadelphia Tuesday night, his victory party had already become something like a family reunion.
The ballroom was packed, sweaty with supporters. Dotted around the room were the local activists who led canvassing efforts that helped drive the civil-rights attorney to a landslide victory in the Philadelphia district attorney’s race.
Todd Wolfson, a veteran local organizer, looked around the room and shared glances with many of the city’s community leaders. Each one seemed to say, “Look what we accomplished. We made this happen.” Moments later, Krasner stepped to the podium for his victory speech.
“This is not another story about kings and queens. This is a story about a movement,” Krasner told the ecstatic crowd. “This is what a movement looks like.”
Talking with activists in the city, there is a clear sense that his victory is theirs. And the path to that victory began with the election of President Donald Trump last November.
‘I can’t sit on the sidelines anymore.’
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Like it was for most liberal cities in America, the day after last year’s presidential election was dispiriting in Philadelphia.
Rick Krajewski, a software developer, woke up every day with a sense of dread.
“I remember the days after the election feeling very alienated. I was thinking, this is what it must’ve been like to be a black person in the 1960s,” Krajewski told Business Insider. “I just felt like my presence shouldn’t be here. And I’d never felt that before.”
In the days that followed, he began looking for a place to channel his fear and anger. He heard about a community group called Reclaim Philadelphia that was having a meeting at the Teamsters Hall a few days later.
Its members, led by Lev Hirschhorn, a former Bernie Sanders regional field director, talked about economic inequality and its relationship to racial issues. They talked about wanting to get money out of politics and seeing a fundamental change in the system. Krajewski liked what he heard.
Reclaim Philadelphia had started only months earlier, in the wake of the Sanders campaign, with 20 former Sanders staffers and volunteers. In the months that came after, Reclaim’s membership jumped to 300 dues-paying members. Krajewski was one of them.
“I thought to myself, I can’t sit on the sidelines anymore,” Krajewski said.
He wasn’t the only one.
Philadelphia’s activists and organizers create ‘a united front’
Courtesy of Cathie Berrey-Green/BG Productions Photos & Video
Days before Trump’s inauguration, Rev. Gregory Holston called 25 of the city’s progressive leaders to meet at St. Malachy’s Church, the headquarters of POWER, an interfaith justice organization that he runs.
The group piled into a converted classroom the organization uses for conferences, and Holston began lamenting the danger the incoming Trump administration posed to the city’s most vulnerable communities.
But he had an idea: If the faith-based, community, progressive, and labor organizations assembled there were able to become a “united front,” the group would become a formidable vehicle for pushing back at a time when most felt powerless.
Having worked with most of the groups before, he had seen how change became possible with greater numbers. POWER had supported the Service Employees International Union and UNITE HERE! efforts to unionize airport workers and raise their wages in 2011. And Holston and his fellow pastors had worked with more than a dozen groups, including the teachers’ union and 215 People’s Alliance, on a long-running campaign to raise school funding and retake control of the city’s school system. (It has been under state control since 2001.)
Holston didn’t have to do a lot of selling — everyone was ready to talk about working together.
“A lot of folks were like we can’t do business as usual any more. We need to build a process with folks who have the same vision of the world,” said Wolfson, who helped found 215PA and was at the meeting. “We’re representing the same kind of folks and we need to build together.”
Holston called the new coalition the Martin Luther King DARE Table, named after a landmark 2015 post-Ferguson march led by POWER that many consider “the birth of the city’s modern justice movement.”
“If the president wants to take credit for a victory, he can take take credit for bringing all of us together,” Mark Tyler, a pastor at Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel AME Church and a founding member of POWER, told Business Insider.
A surprise turned an “accountability campaign” into a wide-open race
Courtesy of Cathie Berrey-Green/BG Productions Photos & Video
While they was committed to working together, it became a challenge to find an objective that the Table’s diverse organizations — from single issue immigrants’ rights advocates to public sector unions — could agree to.
As the US convulsed over the implementation of Trump’s travel ban, the electorally-minded members of the Table zeroed in on the district attorney’s election.
Months before, another collection of local progressive groups, some associated with members at the Table, had united with ACLU Pennsylvania, and Color of Change, a national civil rights advocacy organization, to sketch out a plan for the upcoming DA’s race.
Over the last several years, the push for criminal justice reform has centered around electing progressive DAs. It’s an acknowledgement that DAs make the day-to-day decisions of what cases to pursue, what charges to press, and who gets a second chance.
Seth Williams, the incumbent, was widely expected to win the race, but challengers had begun emerging for the Democratic primary. The coalition, which became known as the Coalition For A Just DA, had been planning to run an “accountability campaign” to push Williams to center communities impacted by DA policies and embrace the reform that he had turned his back on since his first electoral victory in 2009.
Then a corruption scandal erupted involving Williams. The “accountability campaign” suddenly became a wide-open opportunity to elect a progressive committed to the coalition’s goal of “decarceration,” or reducing the number of people imprisoned in the city.
The coalition, and members at the Table like 215PA, Reclaim, and the Working Families Party, a minor progressive political party, picked up the search for their “true progressive.” Krasner, the civil rights attorney who had spent his pro-bono work springing most of them from jail after one protest or another, fit the bill.
Krasner had been toying with a run after seeing the field of, in his words, “faux-progressive” assistant district attorneys emerge. When the groups said they would support him under a platform of ending “mass incarceration,” the constellation of state and federal policies that have put more than 2 million Americans behind bars, the 56-year-old attorney says he knew it was time to run for the first time in his life.
Krasner announced his candidacy surrounded by local activists in February. Two days later, Williams dropped out of the race.
When the MLK DARE Table met for its monthly meeting after Krasner’s announcement, the groups found found that most already had been working on their own toward either electing Krasner or educating their communities about the issues, like cash bail reform, which became important in the race.
It had found the campaign to unite around.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
