2026 NAARPR Eastern Regional Organizing Conference December 4ᵗʰ-6ᵗʰ in Washington, DC

DEFEND VOTING RIGHTS! STOP POLICE CRIMES!

Comrades,

Great excitement and great urgency drive us toward our first Eastern Regional Organizing Conference. We are surging towards December 4ᵗʰ atop a rising wave of resistance that has swelled across the country against the racist and reactionary Trump agenda, leading to the forced removal of ICE from Minneapolis by a hundred thousand people in the streets. Their chants of “ICE OUT!” were echoed by tens of millions across the country in united rejection of Trump’s mass deportation project. Chicago then made history as the first city to mandate the investigation and charging of law-breaking Federal agents through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s ICE On Notice Executive Order. To be sure, NAARPR played a leading role in these and other brilliant flashes of people power, guided by the task we all committed to during our 2025 National Conference: Build the United Front Against Trump and the movement for Community Control of the Police.

But Trump and the right-wing forces arrayed against us have many tentacles. As we fought against ICE terror, they unleashed another attack. In what our National Executive Director Frank Chapman described as “a full-frontal attack on the Black Liberation Movement,” the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically paving the way for Black political power to be further broken down by racist redistricting maps. In the South and Midwest, seven states have either redistricted or are preparing to redistrict Black people off the congressional map ahead of Primary Elections. The fires of Black disenfranchisement are raging up the East Coast as well, starting with Florida and the Carolinas. As usual, Frank Chapman summarizes the threat aptly: “Their goal with Black people is always disenfranchisement. Jim Crow and the entire racist police state in the South were instituted on the premise of keeping Black people from being able to vote.” Our struggle for community control of the police is about expanding on our basic democratic rights that have already been won. Our right to vote is a building block upon which we build greater and greater power, and so we must defend it with all the strength we have.

Fortunately, we are getting stronger by the day. A young but powerful united front against Trump is emerging across the country, and we are helping to nurture and lead it. NAARPR chapters and affiliates are becoming bright headlights in cities up and down the East Coast, leading families, workers, organizations, schools, coalitions, unions and elected officials into the fight to “stop the Trump train in its tracks.” NAARPR and our ancestral organizations like the Civil Rights Congress have fought to win and defend voting rights and political autonomy for nearly a hundred years, and we will continue that rich tradition when we convene in Washington, D.C., a raging battleground of Black disenfranchisement, to unite and chart our path to victory.

NAARPR Executive Committee