The MAARPR is a multi-racial organization dedicated to organizing against racism and its expressions in police violence, mass incarceration, school discipline and the racist treatment many African Americans and other people of color experience in their neighborhoods, in stores and in public arenas. In our Michiana chapter, we support Black Lives Matter-South Bend, and BLM activists were among the founders of the organization and continue to provide leadership.
As a multi-racial organization we believe that when people of all backgrounds work together against racism we will have more power to change these conditions and we all will learn how racism has permiated our culture, our social instituions, and in our own ideas and behaviors. We are an alliance of organizations and individuals. We welcome individuals who want to join in this struggle. Among the organizations we work closely with and have co-sponored activities with are: Black Lives-Matter South Bend, American Indiana Movement of Indiana and Kentucky, Northern Indiana Democratic Socialists of America, and 4US (Goshen). Organizations that participate with the MAARPR are expected to have their own agendas and their own activities. We unite together in our movement against racism. There is no expectations that everyone, individuals and organizations, will agree on everything-just that in the MAARPR we share the commitment to fight against racism in all its manifestations.
The Michiana Alliance is a chapter of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. The NAARPR was first founded in 1974 after Angela Davis was freed from a frame-up murder charge. The NAARPR was based in the Free Angela Davis movement, and expanded to include other victims of racist and political repression. The NAARPR campaigned to free political prisoners such as Black Panthers, Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners, AIM leader Leonard Pelletier, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, among others. It also campaigned for individuals who were framed on racist criminal charges, for improving conditions in prisons, and fighting to abolish the death penalty. By the late 1980s the original NAARPR shrunk leaving only a few chapters still functioning such as those in Chicago and Kentucky. In 2019 the Chicago Chapter called for a re-foundation conference that was attended by over 750 people from all over the country including BLM-SB and other individuals from this area. After the uprisings set off by the police murder of George Floyd, BLM and non-African American friends of BLM decided to organize a local chapter.
Read Angela Davis’s keynote address at the opening convention of the NAARPR (1973)