According to its website, BVMF aims to increase power in marginalized and predominantly Black communities across the U.S. Among its five core beliefs is supporting individuals and organizations striving to obtain social justice.
The point of the Atlanta group’s local ad campaign is to help residents connect the dots between the ways billionaires influence federal policy and the trickle-down effect on local government, Albright explained.
“Part of the reason we’re doing this campaign,” Albright said, “is because we don’t want this to be a conversation between Black Voters Matter and Ald. Vasquez or any single alderman. We want it to be a public conversation. That’s why what’s asked for in the ads is for folks to get more information, to reach out to the alders and to even ask the question — which one of our other ads are about to do. If not the head tax, then what?”
BVMF was founded in 2016 by Albright and LaTosha Brown. A related organization BVM Capacity Building Institute is a 501(c)(3) that lists as board members #MeToo Movement leader Tarana Burke; Baye Adofo-Wilson, former Newark, New Jersey, deputy mayor; and Jackson, Mississippi, activist Rukia Lumumba, daughter of civil rights activist and former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba and sister to Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who also served as that city’s mayor. The 19th* called BVMF a “get-out-the-vote powerhouse” in its 2021 profile of co-founder Brown.
“It’s pretty interesting that a group based out of Atlanta is paying attention to Chicago alderpeople and how they vote in a finance committee hearing, which is a pretty niche meeting to be watching,” Vasquez said.
Albright told The TRiiBE he learned about Chicago’s budget season and Vasquez’s position on Johnson’s proposed corporate head tax through a Chicago Sun-Times article. Published on Nov. 13, the Sun-Times reported that Vasquez is “still searching for head tax alternatives.” He also said, according to the article, it may be a better idea “to restore the automatic escalator locking in annual property tax increases at the rate of inflation” and possibly doubling the garbage collection fee.
“They’re pushing the corporate head tax as the end-all-be-all, and I don’t know if that’s the right answer or not,” Vasquez told Sun-Times political reporter Fran Spielman.
Albright said they’re learning about the budget season through publicly available press conferences and media reports.
“And to be honest, we really, like a lot of the nation, started paying more attention to Chicago and the mayor because of the battle over ICE and the National Guard. That’s how I first found out about The TRiiBE,” Albright said. “And so it was really in the aftermath of following that, and continuing to follow that, that we come across this budget question, which fits into one of the priority areas that we routinely deal with.”
It was not their intention to cause confusion or disruption, Albright said.
