With midterm elections a few months away, voting rights, re-districting and voter suppression bills topped the agenda at Sunday’s 67th NAACP Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner in Detroit.
“We will not be played on by politicians who want our vote, not our voice,” said Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the NAACP’s Detroit chapter. “We had the most turnout in 2020, and that’s one of the reasons they introduced all these voter suppression bills.”
The dinner comes less than a month after Patrick Lyoya was killed by a police officer in Grand Rapids.
“We will continue to demand justice and fairness from every police department in the state as we witness another execution style murder of a Black man named Lyoya,” Anthony said.
A horde of Democratic state leaders planned to attend, including Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan.
“Protecting freedom at any price is about having each other me backs and showing up together,” Whitmer said.
The theme for this year’s dinner is “Freedom is expensive but tyranny is unaffordable.”
“Too many extremists are playing loose with the governments, using the dream of MLK as a scheme to camouflage to take us back to the good bad days of separate and unequal,” Anthony said.