Build the New Civil Rights Movement

BAMN is the fastest-growing and most dynamic youth civil rights organization in the country. We can win, but we need your help.
Donate today to defend affirmative action and integration. You can help move our society toward the long-deferred promise of justice and equality.

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Contributions can also be sent by mail to:

BAMN
P.O. Box 7322
Detroit, MI 48207

Your donation will build the New Civil Rights Movement

BAMN is organizing college, high school and middle school youth in the ghettos and barrios of this country to be the leaders and voices of their peers. We have seen new civil rights leaders rise to the occasion of struggle and flower. We have seen young people come from situations of terrible abuse and mistreatment and emerge to speak for their peers with insight and power. We know we can do what needs to be done both to defend affirmative action and integration and to move our society toward the long-deferred promise of justice and equality.

We will give all we have to give. To succeed, we need you to do the same.

A generous and regular contribution by you is needed to realize the vision of hope and equality we share. No cause could be better – no organization more worthy of your support.

BAMN has what almost no other organization possesses, a profoundly diverse, dedicated army of volunteer youth organizers. Our ability to mobilize our base of young people has been the key to our victories. Now, however, our shortage of funds to cover basic organizing expenses (e.g., phones, copying, transportation) coupled with our lack of a core, paid, full-time staff is limiting the tremendous potential of our work.

BAMN is well positioned to make a significant breakthrough if we can raise the funds to increase our administrative capacity. Thousands of high school and university students have come to BAMN eager to build this new civil rights movement.

To utilize effectively this wealth of talent and possibility, we must increase our administrative and organizational capacity. A strengthened infrastructure will enable us to launch a counteroffensive to the right wing attacks and make possible long-overdue proactive legal and political civil rights initiatives.

Our projected annual operating cost over the next three years is $850,000/year.

BAMN has set up a non-profit 501 (c)(3) organization as a tax-exempt affiliate that coordinates the legal defense and education aspects of the civil rights movement we are building. It is called United for Equality and Affirmative Action Legal Defense Fund (UEAALDF). Contributions made to UEAALDF are tax deductible.

Please – make a donation today.

How We Fight for Civil Rights, Immigrants Right, Public Education, and LGBT Rights

BAMN is on the cutting edge, advancing an aggressive strategy in defense of civil rights. Everywhere in our society questions of civil rights are being contested, our approach provides a grassroots model for how to fight and win.

In the courts

So far BAMN has kept America from the provocative lurch toward the racial polarization that would result from the banning of affirmative action. BAMN successfully defended affirmative action at the US Supreme Court as the student defendants in the University of Michigan Law School case, Grutter v. Bollinger. BAMN organized the most complete and compelling legal defense of affirmative action ever presented in a courtroom. On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, the day the Supreme Court heard our case, BAMN organized a march on Washington of 50,000 young people, now widely credited with shaping the context of the pro-affirmative action court decision.

At the polls

Despite an over $2 million dollar ad campaign by our opponents, BAMN high school organizers overwhelmingly defeated a municipal ballot proposal in Detroit, Michigan that would have taken away citizens’ right to vote for school board and facilitated the privatization of the city’s public schools. On voting day, over 300 BAMN students campaigned with voters at polling stations throughout the city in a cold rain.

In the media

BAMN has been the voice in the media declaring the equality of the races in a forthright, uncompromising way, consistently presenting a program of mass civil rights struggle that is the key to progress in race relations.

In the classroom

BAMN is a youth organization made up of and led overwhelmingly by youth with hundreds of groups and supporters in high schools and colleges across the country. We regularly organize marches, demonstrations and conferences that draw many hundreds and, not infrequently, thousands, of youth. Through systematic organizing in black and Latino schools and neighborhoods, BAMN has given hope and a voice to ambitious and angry youth across the country – building young leaders in a way no other civil rights organization has attempted. Youth leadership development is the center of our activity.

In the streets

Building the new mass civil rights movement means mobilizing masses of people – mainly youth – out into the streets in protest standing up and fighting for equality and freedom. We have a long proud history of protests, pickets, marches, rallies and demonstrations.

“Without struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
-Frederick Douglass