kevinpowell

Good Day, BlackPlanet friends.

I want to personally thank all of you who responded to my urgent appeal last week and made that $5 donation.

Well, we have exactly 2 weeks left now until my Congressional election on Tuesday, September 9th. SO I STILL NEED YOUR HELP AND SUPPORT.

Please go to www.kevinpowellforcongress.org as soon as you can, and make a $5 donation.

Again, your donation will help trememendously toward our final push for victory.

Greetings, BlackPlanet family. I want to thank you for your nonstop messages and donations to my Congressional campaign. But I REALLY need your help TODAY.

My Congressional campaign needs to raise another $200,000 TODAY, by 11:59pm this evening, East Coast time. I want to generate half of it, or $100,000, from you, the blackplanet family. So I need 20,000 of my blackplanet FRIENDS, from wherever you are in America, to go to www.kevinpowellforcongress.org, to make that $5 donation. You can use your credit or debit card to put $5 down for new leadership.

Politics is EXPENSIVE and this new round of funds will help pay for our mailings to voters and, most importantly, our get out the vote operation on my Democratic primary day, Tuesday, September 9th.

It has been SMALL DONATIONS like this that have propelled Barack Obama to his historic heights. And it will be small donations that will lead me to Congress on my election day.

Together, we CAN bring new leadership to all levels of American government. And President Barack Obama is going to need serious people in the United States Congress to help him push his vision for America forward. I want to be one of those people.

With your help, I will be. Will you please help our national movement for change TODAY by putting FIVE DOLLARS on it right away? God bless, Kevin

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
10:05pm

This run for Congress here in Brooklyn, New York has come down to this: 21 days, 3 weeks, of nonstop campaigning, media interviews, fundraising, talking on the phone, emailing, and texting any and everyone I've ever met in my life to support me. To say that I am tired would be an incredible understatement. I am so tired I cannot even sleep, honestly. But this doesn't matter. I get a rush every time I am out on the streets with the people.

This morning I worked the L train stop in Canarsie, at Rockaway and Glenwood. I was there with a volunteer named Sadrina. She is a true Southerner with manners, sense of humor and all. And that Southern drawl, always calling folks "baby" or "sweetie" the way they do in the Dirty South. An actress by profession, Sadrina is one of the many 20somethings who work my campaign because they believe in it. It is an honor, real talk, to have so many folks who take time out of their lives to help.

And man did we have a great morning. That train stop was a goldmine of voters. A lot of registered voters, many of whom did not even know there was a Democratic primary on September 9th. I have been handing out flyers and postcards since I was an 18-year-old youth and student activist, 24 years ago. So I learned the art of interacting with people while passing them literature the hard way: on buses and subway trains, in housing developments, at rallies and forums and concerts, any and everywhere people gathered. So working the subway station is second nature to me. The key thing is to put a part of your body in front of people so they have to come in your direction. Always be mad polite, always make eye contact, and always have a postcard ready to pass along as you say things like "Good morning" or "Are you a registered voter?" or "Wouldn't you like to see some new leadership in Brooklyn?" We New Yorkers are mad funny people. Some of us actually do smile in the mornings on the way to work or school. But most folks look tired, stressed out, or just plain pissed off. And the last thing they want is someone trying to shove something into their hands.

So I measure the success rate by how many people take the postcard, and how they take that postcard. I watch to see who actually looks down at the card, and I definitely make it a point to say "That's me" if they glance down at its photo, then at me. And I am not going to lie: it has helped tremendously that I have a certain amount of face and name recognition because I was on the first season of MTV's "The Real World"; because I was a founding staff member at Quincy Jones' Vibe magazine and did all those cover stories on Tupac Shakur when he was alive; and because to this day I am always doing this or that interview on television. Any little edge helps when you are, as I am, running against a 74-year-old incumbent Congressman who has been in office for 25 years. He has the local political machine behind him, and I do not. What I have is a core group of serious young volunteers, some name and face recognition, a reputation for doing very solid community work, and great media access because of all the interest in this campaign, here in New York, and across the country.

That is what I felt this morning in Canarsie. A lot of love. One young man in particular affected me. His name was Elijah and he told me he had attended a State of Black Men forum I organized in the Fort Greene (downtown) section of Brooklyn a few years back. Apparently he was very moved by the experience, and wanted to share that with me. Elijah also let it be known that he was unemployed. As I have campaigned throughout this summer, I cannot begin to tell you how many young Black and Latino males here in Brooklyn said they were unemployed. Some were college graduates, while others were formerly incarcerated persons. It did not seem to matter. They have largely been forgotten and ignored. That is how Elijah felt, even though he was on his way to yet another job placement center. You could see in his eyes that he was holding on to hope, to some glimmer of possibility for his life. And these young males, like Elijah, make it clear, loudly, that they feel no one cares about them. Well, I do. Because I was them, once.

It feels like yesterday that I was bouncing from place to place in my home state of New Jersey, a YMCA here, a boarding house there, someone's floor or sofa somewhere else. When I was in my early 20s, I had been kicked out of Rutgers University and my mother's home (I was mad disrespectful to her back in the day, in ways I am very ashamed of now). So life felt like a downward spiral to me, like I was just plain stuck. I spoke with an ex-girlfriend from 20 years back just last week, and she told me, real talk, she thought I was going to have a short life, because she knew me back then.

I thought of this and more, later in the day, when I participated in a King magazine roundtable discussion in Manhattan. Honestly, because of the campaign's grueling schedule, I was not trying to be there too long. But the time was beneficial. It was moderated by King freelancer Erik Parker, and included rappers T.I. and Young Bird, Hiphop Summit Action Network Executive Director Valeisha Butterfield (she's brilliant and, ironically, her father is a North Carolina Congressman who is good friends with my Brooklyn Congressional opponent), and "The Wire's" Gbenga Akinnajbe.

We covered the gamut of issues: Barack Obama's historic run for president; young America and voting; the many crises happening in our inner cities, like terrible schools, crime, violence, and a sense of hopelessness. The dialogue was lively, passionate, and full of strong opinions. I personally stressed a few things:

1) Barack Obama is running to be president of the United States, not of hiphop America, not of Black America. We as younger people of color need to be politically sophisticated enough to understand that. That means that while Barack is a great symbolic figure for our times, he is not a savior, or the savior. Any progressive movement for change that is going to happen has to be created by Generations X and Y, or, basically the two generations born during and after the Civil Rights era. The leadership we are waiting for is US. Now how many of you out there are willing to do what it takes, educationally, skill wise, and it terms of building your knowledge and life experiences nonstop, to be a leader? I especially was feeling T.I. because you could just sense that after his gun charges last year, and the fact he could have wound up in jail for a very long time, really affected him. There is a different sense of purpose to him now. He's got his foundation, he is doing nonstop voter education and registration work, and he is the Guest Editor for this special King issue about politics. Sometimes it takes a very traumatic experience for someone to realize their real life purpose, to realize their leadership qualities.

2) Voting is an important part of the puzzle. Locally, people need to understand that voting does matter. It determines what money and resources come to your community, what happens with land and property in your area, and it can even determine what kind of sentences young men of color get for jail time and if certain kinds of judges have been voted in because few voters were paying attention. It is real like that. But besides voting, we need to struggle for real self-improvement and self-empowerment every single day of our lives. No one can help you succeed, grow, heal, be, more than you can for yourself. And, if you happen to get to a point of being a public servant, a leader, then you have a moral and political obligation to point people toward the information and tools they need to empower and improve themselves, their lives, and their communities. Young Bird kept asking when the CHANGE was going to happen if Barack Obama becomes president. I understood what YB was asking, but the reality is not much is going to happen if the people don't make it happen. Think of the Civil Rights Movement, and how it was driven largely by young people, mostly Black, but certainly a number of White sisters and brothers as well. Or look at how young people were on the frontlines of change in South Africa in the apartheid era, or those courageous young people in China in the late 1980s. Barack Obama's campaign for president is the spark that has been needed for a very long time, but if we do not sustain this energy, this activism, this new desire for awareness, it will be a wasted moment in American and world history.

The rest of the day was a little comical. I inadvertently bolted the campaign team out of the office for much of yesterday, as I was the last one to leave the night before. My bad, kp4c (Kevin Powell for Congress) team! Fundraising calls, fundraising calls, fundraising calls! There is nothing more time-consuming or monotonous than calling every single person you have ever met in your life, and asking them for money. Nothing! There are those who are way down and readily give. Then there are those who are surprised and shocked that you have the nerve to ask them for money. But that is American politics: it is all about the Benjamins. No Benjamins and you have no campaign, period. Now that I am running for Congress, I fully get why campaign finance reform should happen. All Americans should have the right to run for public office, not just those of us who are either personally wealthy, or who have access to people with great wealth. I can definitely tell you all that fighting for national campaign finance reform is going to be high on my agenda once I get elected Tuesday, September 9th.

By the end of the night I was in a funk. Frank Watkins, a brilliant progressive political strategist out of Chicago and D.C., told me just recently that I was not a real candidate for office IF I did not have moments of despair, self-doubt, of wanting to give up.

This is absolutely the most exciting AND hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Indeed, everything I have ever learned and experienced until now, is being tested by this campaign for Congress. Folks that I thought were my friends and supporters have mysteriously disappeared. While complete strangers have become some of the most essential people on my campaign staff. Go figure. But I maintain, because this is bigger than me.

This is about the people of Brooklyn, the people in America. I am just a vessel doing my part.