A group of concerned Baltimore City residents, inspired by a recent initiative out of Ghana, has created a campaign to raise awareness about malfeasance in local government. The group, known collectively as the Kitchen Table Politicians (KTP), is asking area residents to wear red on Fridays to draw attention to a number of issues they feel the city working on to insure desirable outcomes for its citizens.
KTP, with a membership of five to 10 people, was founded four years ago by Morning Sunday, a resident of northeast Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood. The group, which meets every two weeks to discuss local issues over lunch, is made up of the demographic most likely to vote in local Baltimore elections, older Black women. “I thought, if we need someone to discuss the politics and what’s really happening, we need to have the women who are voters discussing that,” said Sunday.
Earlier this summer, a group out of Ghana called Concerned Ghanaians for Responsible Governance, launched the Red Friday campaign, asking fellow Ghanaians to wear a red item on Fridays as a way of demanding responsible governance in their country, regardless of who is in power. Morning Sunday, who told the AFRO that she follows news in Ghana, South Africa, and Nigeria, saw in the initiative a model that could be reproduced in Baltimore, a city where many residents feel that the local government could be more in touch with their concerns.
Thus Wear Red Fridays was born. The campaign began Aug. 15, and KTP is now selling red t-shirts to anyone interested in participating in the campaign but without an adequate red garment. The group plans to put on some street theater style puppet shows to help raise awareness about various issues affecting the city and related to local governance, such as minority set-asides for city projects, the confiscation and sale of homes over unpaid utility bills, environmental issues such as air quality, and the city’s unsolved homicide rate.
For Sunday, this is about advocating on behalf of the city’s residents and shedding light on issues that often can be addressed with the simple enforcement existing laws. “These are not things you have to do something special for,” Said Sunday. “Minority set-asides is a law. Taking care of the children, that’s a law. Making landlords fix their properties up, those laws are on the books. We’re not asking them to make new laws, we’re asking them to enforce the laws that are already on the books.”
Dale Hargrave is a contractor and member of KTP who joined the Wear Red Fridays campaign to raise awareness about how minority contractors are often left at a disadvantage when the city fails to enforce e-verify requirements for those employed under city contracts. E-Verify is a free, online system developed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, that allows employers to determine the legal eligibility of their employees to work in the U.S. “The issue is that, me as a contractor, if I’m bidding on a contract, and I have to compete with individuals that are using undocumented labor, they have an unfair competitive advantage,” said Hargrave.
“We compete with people that are crunching the numbers, and the reason they can make the low bids work is because they’re using undocumented labor, and many times they are not in compliance with the wages they’re supposed to be paying,” added Hargrave.
Sunday has been in touch with groups in Ferguson, Mo., and in Chicago, Ill. where she is working to expand the Wear Red Friday effort. Those interested in purchasing a t-shirt should email KTP at wearredfriday@gmail.com. The first run of 100 t-shirts, Sunday said, has already sold out.
