This weekend, the Human Rights Campaign announced Project One America, a three-year, $8.5 million initiative to bring LGBT equality to one of the places it’s most desperately needed: the Deep South.
The campaign will specifically target three states with no marriage, housing OR workplace protections — Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. HRC will open an office in each location and commit a total of 20 staff members to working with folks on the ground.
It appears to be a cultural campaign as well as a political one; HRC says the goals include “changing hearts and minds, advancing enduring legal protections, and building more inclusive institutions for LGBT people from the church pew to the workplace.” Their strategy is based on the idea that face-to-face, personal interactions are more effective in changing a person’s views than most anything else, an idea that has recently been confirmed with regards to marriage equality.
With no legal protections, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama have substantial rates of discrimination against the LGBT community. A survey by the polling firm Anzalone Liszt Grove found that 65 percent of LGBT people living in the states experienced verbal abuse, and 20 percent experienced physical violence. Moreover, 25 percent reported discrimination in either the workplace or a “public accommodation.”
The launch of Project One America coincides with a larger progressive movement gaining traction in the South. Since its origin in North Carolina last year, Moral Monday protests have slammed the right-wing agendas of conservative leaders and tied today’s fights with the South’s history of civil rights activism. Specifically, cuts to unemployment benefits, refusals to expand Medicaid, and the implementation of voting rights restrictions have resulted in the protests’ movement throughout the region. Democrats are also pushing to turn deep-red states “purple”, as black, Latino and Asian American communities grow in the South.
It’s incredibly important to remember that queer folks everywhere need representation, resources and support — not just those who live in big metropolitan areas. I’m not sure if HRC is the right organization to carry out this mission — lots of money, sure, but questionable politics and policies — so we have to look to the people living in these areas to make change happen. Go forth and conquer!