This year’s Black National Convention (2020 BNC) is inspired and guided by the historic 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana says its organizers. The 2020 BNC will be Friday, August 28 and will be virtual.

Amiri Baraka helped open the 1972 convention in the newly constructed West Side Senior High School gymnasium by declaring the objectives of the 10,000 person gathering: “Firstly, the unity of Black people.” The convention was historic, but not a panacea.  For one, the momentous convention failed to unify and endorse Shirley Chisholm’s historic bid for the presidency.

“They just could not support me because more of anything else, I was a woman – running for the presidency,” said the African-American of Caribbean descent, as recorded in the film "Chisholm '72 - Unbought and Unbossed." In response to the Reverend Walter Fauntroy’s explanation for not supporting her, in the days of sex-icons Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones, the more serious icon Shirley Anita Chisholm simply responded, “That bastard!”

The elections of Richard Hatcher of Gary and Carl Stokes in Cleveland, as the nation’s first Black mayors to lead major American cities, helped prompt the gathering. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) announced it will host the 2020 Black National Convention after several weeks of national and global protests over the state-sanctioned murders of Black people.
   

The 2020 BNC will feature a series of conversations, performances, and other activations geared toward engaging, informing, and mobilizing Black communities. At the convention, voters will ratify a Black national agenda ahead of the November elections guided by the Vision for Black Lives (V4BL) -- a policy agenda endorsed by over 50 Black-led organizations in the Movement for Black Lives ecosystem, along with hundreds of allied organizations and individuals.

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The 2020 BNC aims to reach and engage four million Black voters across the U.S.

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The 2020 BNC is being orchestrated by the Electoral Justice Project (EJP), a project of M4BL. The 2020 BNC will be preceded by the People’s Convention on August 6-7, which will convene hundreds of delegates made up of activists and organizers from across the U.S. to connect M4BL’s policy platform to specific policies, programs, and investments in their cities and communities.

The 2020 BNC aims to reach and engage four million Black voters across the U.S., build infrastructure of Black political engagement that transcends the 2020 election season, and create and ratify a policy platform for the first 100 days of the next administration.