Did you know that SURJ’s national network includes local projects in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia that organize thousands of renters in majority-white communities into coalitions fighting for housing justice?
Far-Right state legislatures in these states rely on places like Tullahoma, Tennessee to be a rural red stronghold for their white supremacist agenda. But housing organizers working in rural Southern places like Tullahoma know a different story. Our organizers are disrupting the Far Right’s authoritarian agenda in rural Tennessee by organizing white tenants into multiracial tenant unions and away from the Right.
This is the kind of multiracial working-class organizing in the South that’s required– alongside our electoral work and national mobilizations– to overturn authoritarianism in this country and win the things all working-class people need. Will you make a donation today to stop the Far Right and build power in the South?
Before our tenant organizers knocked on her door, Carol felt alone in her struggles at her apartment complex. Carol has chronic illnesses and worried that if she had to call the ambulance, they wouldn’t be able to find her because the landlord did not keep up the property, including the proper signage needed for emergency workers to find tenants.
But after meeting with our organizers, Carol began talking with her neighbors and, a few short months later, led a winning tenant campaign in her complex that pressured the landlord to put up the necessary signs so emergency workers would be able to find Carol and her neighbors. After this win, Carol joined hundreds of renters of all races at a statewide advocacy day at the Tennessee state legislature to make sure legislators knew that renter power in her hometown was rising and that they were going to stand up to billionaire landlords.
There are so many people like Carol in the rural South who feel alone and are bombarded with right-wing messaging that tells working-class white tenants to blame immigrants and Black people for their economic struggles. But strategic community organizing in rural majority-white areas is an antidote. Our organizing builds leadership in people like Carol to win on issues that impact people’s material lives while also bringing them into deep solidarity with a multiracial coalition of other tenants.
Carol is taking a leadership role in a statewide campaign for more tenant protections. Will you make a donation to support our work organizing tenants like Carol in the rural South?
In solidarity,
SURJ
Showing Up for Racial Justice
PO Box 1376
Buffalo, NY 14205
United States