Missouri Turns Back Anti-Civil Rights Initiative

Our guest blogger is Glenn Burleigh, ACORN’s statewide lead organizer on the Missouri voter education campaign.

While the struggle for the Democratic nomination has dragged on and taken up the attention of the progressive movement, there has been a sharp battle fought out in five states over the deceptively-titled Civil Rights Initiatives (CRI), which would ban Affirmative Action programs. This past weekend, the progressive movement in Missouri scored a major victory and stopped this reactionary initiative from making the 2008 ballot.

This past Sunday, the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MOCRI) failed to submit the signatures necessary for qualification for the 2008 general election ballot. Unlike in other states where the CRI’s have failed to qualify because signatures were disqualified, in Missouri they didn’t even bother with turning in signatures. Why? Community, labor, faith, and other progressive minded forces organized quickly and effectively, to educate the voters about what MOCRI was really about:

“They talk about California and Washington being progressive states, but Ward Connerly won there. In Missouri, we beat him,” said Brandon Davis, Chair of the WeCAN Coalition that led a successful grass-roots effort to defeat the so-called Missouri Civil Rights initiative.

MOCRI was the Missouri right’s favorite choice for a wedge issue on the 2008 ballot. With the Democratic nominee assured of being either an African-American or a woman, mobilizing reactionary anti-civil rights voters was seen as a key piece of their electoral strategy in many swing states. With McCain’s nomination, the Republicans feel more confident in Arizona, one of the other swing states that they have launched a CRI petition drive, and so Missouri (and our potential electoral votes) became a central battleground in this struggle. The right mobilized massive financial resources to Missouri. In the final weeks, they were willing to pay to fly signature gatherers to the state, pay for their hotel rooms, and pay up to $10 per signature. In the end, this was still not enough to overcome a well-organized progressive movement.

Since this victory, the right has panicked and is trying to rush wedge issues such as Photo ID and TABOR onto the ballot by way of the legislature. In the end this victory positions Missouri, once again, as a battleground state where progressive victory is possible. It also shows that progressive forces here are organized and have matured into a statewide political power.