Hilary Shelton, second from left, attempts to deliver a letter to the American Legislative Exchange Council before finding the door locked.
A group of civil rights organizations, labor unions and other advocacy groups attempted to deliver a petition today to the American Legislative Exchange Council—a policy shop that writes corporate-friendly bills for passage by state legislatures—asking it to stop promoting the so-called “Stand Your Ground” law, only to be locked out of the office building housing the think tank.
Florida’s version of that statute was invoked by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., when he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26.
During a lunchtime rally outside 1100 Vermont Avenue NW, leaders of organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, MoveOn.org, the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union and People for the American Way, among others, inveighed against ALEC and its relationship with the National Rifle Association.
“We are here today to pull back the curtain on the ghostwriters,” said Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League. The groups behind today’s rally charge that the NRA’s funding of ALEC encouraged the think tank to push what they call “Kill at Will” laws in 34 states. The passage of such laws, especially in Florida, has coincided with an uptick in justifiable homicides and a more permissive attitude toward racial profiling.
The event’s purpose was to explain how ALEC and the NRA created the legislative conditions that made Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin possible.
Between 100 and 150 people showed up to shout “No justice, no peace!” in between speakers. “We will not rest until there’s an arrest,” Garlin Gilchrist, the national campaign director for MoveOn.org, said.
Following Gilchrist’s remarks, Hilary Shelton, a senior vice president of the NAACP, led a handful of advocacy-group leaders to the front door of 1100 Vermont, where they hoped to deliver a letter imploring ALEC to disclose the amount of funding it receives from the NRA and to stop pushing laws that allow citizens to use lethal force outside the home when they feel threatened.
But the building’s security guards had locked the doors, leaving Shelton and the others stuck outside with a group of reporters.
“They’re clearly not even willing to consider the damage,” he said. “We know just how terrible it is.”
Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center or Media and Democracy, which runs an online campaign called ALEC Exposed, accused the policy shop of “excluding citizens” from the lawmaking process in favor of corporate interests. “There’s no good evidence the laws they write are needed,” she said.
Besides the “Stand Your Ground” laws, ALEC has also pushed bills loosening environmental regulations, encouraging school privatization and requiring voters to show photo identification. Marge Baker, executive director of People for the American Way, called it a “corporate bill factory.”
Still, the main goal remains finding justice in Trayvon Martin’s death, Shelton said in an interview.
“This was extraordinary in that the killing was done not by a police officer,” he said, but by Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood patrolman.
“We have to explain racial profiling to our kids,” Shelton said, mentioning that his own son is 17 years old. “What we have in this case is a law that exacerbates the problem of racial profiling in a deadly way.”
