PHOTOS/FRANK JOHNSON
CHICAGO, IL — On November 22, before an electrified crowd of 1,200 at the Chicago Teachers Union Hall, the renowned National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) seemed to come full circle. With an opening rally headlined by Angela Davis, the organization was officially refounded by the very woman it had helped to free from unjust imprisonment some 46 years ago. True to its new historic reality, this reborn NAARPR set out a distinct path and a new central task in the struggle for human rights.
The NAARPR was originally founded in 1973 as part of the movement to free Dr. Davis and all political prisoners. It was the Chicago branch that issued a call to refound the National Alliance this year as a mass defense organization that could coordinate and protect the various strands of the people’s movements fighting intensified FBI targeting of Black activists; the depraved caging of immigrant families and children seeking sanctuary at the border; and an epidemic of police murder of Black and Brown men and women.
In addition, the advancements made in Chicago for an all-elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) became the basis for calling the refounding conference here in Chicago. Some 800 conference participants upheld the central political objectives of the renewed NAARPR: a national campaign to demand community control of the police and to protect the inalienable democratic right of the peoples’ movements to protest and organize for systemic change.
Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates welcomed the crowd to the conference and spoke of the need to defend black identity as a birthright. Activists—young and old, Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer and working class—from over 100 cities representing 25 states and over 300 local, national, and international organizations took part in the three-day event. Speaking from the lectern, Frank Chapman, Field Organizer of the Chicago branch of the NAARPR, spoke of the need to unite these various strands around “unity of action instead of unity of ideas.”
On the conference’s final day, a resolution to refound the Alliance was adopted and saw Chapman elected as executive director of the Continuations Committee. That committee’s main task will be to convene a delegates’ conference sometime in the next year at which the Alliance’s new leadership will be elected and begin writing the next chapter of this long-lived and storied organization.
