How Monica Moorehead’s Political Upbringing Shaped Her Politics

Workers’ World Party (WWP) 2016 presidential candidate Monica Moorehead was born in Alabama in 1952.

“Growing up under segregation shaped my political outlook from a very young age,” she said in an interview in late June.

Moorehead’s parents were part of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott was sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 for not giving her seat up to a white man. It would last 13 months; at which point the US Supreme Court struck down bus segregation policies as unconstitutional.

Both of Moorehead’s parents were professors at traditionally black Alabama State University.

“They were able to drive other black people around so they could avoid the busses,” Moorehead explained. “They were some of the only black people who had cars.”

That drive for social justice would become part of Moorehead’s life’s work. As a teenager in high school in Virginia, she was part of the school band. The school’s fight song was the racist anthem “Dixie.”

A 15 year-old Moorehead refused to play the song, and was kicked out of the band for taking the stand.

“It raised my consciousness,” she said.

“I was very much influenced by the Black Panther Party” growing up, Moorehead said. “I helped get out the paper on the weekends.”

The Black Panther party’s work with prisoners in the US was a particular point of focus for Moorehead.

Attica and the Soledad Brothers strengthened and hardened her radicalism on prisons and mass incarceration. Moorehead said she was particularly affected by the death of George Jackson, who was killed by San Quentin Prison guards during an attempted escape in 1971.

“All this activism that I was involved in led me to the WWP when I went to Hampton University,” Moorehead continued. “At that time WWP had a prisoners’ solidarity committee.”

She wouldn’t officially join the party until 1975.

“The reason was that prior to that there was a major struggle against racism in Boston,” she explained.

White Northerners resisted integration of the schools in the city of Boston.

“When black children were being transported to the schools, they were being bombarded by bottles, cans, etc,” said Moorehead. “the WWP helped organize buses to go to Boston in December of 1974. There were different groups coming together for a common cause: to stop these racist attacks.”

The experience of solidarity with people of all races against racism had a profound and life changing effect.

“At that time I realized the real roots of racism were in capital,” Moorehead said. “I always though all white people were racist, growing up in the South. But it’s a function of capitalism to divide all people by race.”

Moorehead’s work with the WWP has taken her around the world.

“I was able to travel around the world to show solidarity with oppressed people fighting imperialism, like Cuba, like North Korea,” she said. “They had already had their revolutions. I wanted to show them there were people in the US who would defend them against imperial aggression.”

International travel would take Moorehead to global hotspots from the 1980s to the 1990s.

“I was in Iraq before the war in 1992,” she said. “The Dominican Republic, The Philippines, South Africa. I attended the first meeting of the African National Congress after apartheid fell.”

Moorehead first ran for president in 1996, then in 2000 and 2004. WWP has run candidates since 1980 to expose what the party sees as fraudulent elections.

“The elections are there to dupe people to think that fundamental change comes through them,” Moorehead explained. “To tell people that voting for a Republican or a Democrat will make things better- but really nothing changes.”

The problems are systemic.

“The rich control all the wealth in society, including stealing labor of the workers who create all the wealth in society,” she said. “We have so stake in the system, it cannot be reformed. Only socialism can lay the basis for equality.”

“We need to free up workers to create for human need and not for human greed.”

You can find more information on Monica Moorehead and her running mate Lamont Lilly at their website.