MINNEAPOLIS — The Democratic National Committee passed a resolution Friday afternoon supporting the Black Lives Matter movement at the party’s summer meeting. The national party also affirmed a resolution supporting same-sex marriage in every state and another honoring the son of Vice President Joe Biden, Beau Biden, who passed away in May.
Activists with the Black Lives Matter movement have roiled Democratic politics in recent months, interrupting speeches by the party’s presidential candidates as they try to force the party to prioritize their issues.
“[T]he DNC joins with Americans across the country in affirming ‘Black lives matter’ and the ‘say her name’ efforts to make visible the pain of our fellow and sister Americans as they condemn extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children,” the resolution states.
It also calls for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and calls for minimizing the use of “weapons that were used to police peaceful civilians in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri” last summer.
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The resolution passed the party’s resolutions committee Thursday afternoon, and then was affirmed by the larger meeting of hundreds of DNC delegates Friday. Racial justice was also the key theme of the invocation given Friday morning by Rabbi Michael Adam Latz, who said “we’ve replaced Jim Crow with mass incarceration.” The resolution honoring Biden, who was attorney general of Delaware and slated to run for governor, comes as his father takes a closer look at a White House bid that would pit him against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who addressed the party meeting Friday.
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