U.S. SENATE CANDIDATE LAWRENCE HAMM WILL SPEAK IN PISCATAWAY

A community meet and greet for U.S. Senate candidate Lawrence Hamm will be held on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, 6:00pm at North Stelton AME Church, 123 Craig Avenue in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Hamm a social justice activist and chairman of the People’s Organization For Progress, is running against Senator Robert Menendez, the incumbent who has been indicted for corruption and conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Egypt.

He will be running in the New Jersey Democratic Primary Election which will take place in June of next year. He filed as a candidate with the Federal Election Commission in September.

“I look forward to meeting and talking with people at this event tomorrow evening. I plan to discuss my reasons for running and major aspects of my platform,” Hamm stated.

“I am grateful to the organizers for putting it together and to the church for hosting it,” he said. One of the key organizers is Bill Davis, an author, educator, community activist, and local resident.

The event is being held on December 5thwhich is the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus boycott. It started after Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955 after sitting in the whites only section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Her arrest ignited a 381 day boycott of the racially segregated busses in Montgomery. That boycott considered to be one of the seminal events of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement, catapulted a young black minister, Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, to national prominence.

More than 30,000 of Montgomery’s 50,000 black residents participated in the boycott. It lasted 381 days and finally ended after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on buses and trains to be unconstitutional.

The ruling resulted from a case brought before the court of four other black women arrested in Montgomery for violating the law mandating racially segregated seating on the city’s busses. The four included Claudette Colvin, a high school sophomore at the time of her arrest who is still alive today.

“I think it is significant that this activity, which is my first campaign event, is being held on the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I see my campaign as an outgrowth of the movement it started and continues to this very day,” Hamm said.

“I was fortunate enough to meet Rosa Parks on several occasions during my lifetime. When I was a member of the Newark school board I voted to rename schools after Rosa parks and Dr King,” he said.

“I also had the privilege of meeting Claudette Colvin who is an unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement. The People’s Organization For Progress brought her to New Jersey several years ago to tell her very important story,” he said.

“During the more than sixty years that have passed since the end of the Montgomery bus boycott we seen a steady erosion of what little racial progress was made during the Civil Rights Era,” Hamm said.

“Before our very eyes we have seen the gutting and near elimination of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and affirmative Action. Racial inequality, discrimination, and violence against black people continues to intensify,” he said.

“As a U.S. Senator I am not going to Washington to forget about, or sell out or be silent on the issues that affect African-Americans. I am going there to speak truth to power and to fight for racial justice, equality, and equity in our lifetime,” Hamm said.