‘Mothers of this civil rights movement’, such as Sandra Bland and Eric Garner’s mothers, are holding forums to support Clinton ahead of upcoming primaries

Sandra Bland was a skilled trombonist and, much to her family’s chagrin, a proponent of sustainable eating. Eric Garner loved the holiday season and liked to dress up as Santa Claus. Dontre Hamilton was his neighborhood’s unofficial financial adviser. Jordan Davis had serious swag.

Speaking from St Peter’s AME church in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Sunday, a group of women who call themselves the “mothers of the movement” united to remember their children, whose deaths helped mobilize Black Lives Matter, a modern civil rights movement.

They also campaigned for Hillary Clinton.



“Our children have become sacrifices to this movement,” said Lucia McBath, whose son, Jordan Davis, was just 17 when he was shot dead by a middle-aged white man in the parking lot of a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, in November 2012.

“We are the mothers of this civil rights movement, today, here and now.”



Seated next to McBath, at a wooden table by the altar, was Geneva Reed Veal. Her daughter, Sandra Bland, was found hanged in a jail cell three days after being pulled over for a minor traffic violation in Houston last July. Gwen Carr was nearby – her son, Eric Garner, died after a New York police officer placed him in a chokehold while he gasped “I can’t breathe”. Maria Hamilton’s son, Dontre Hamilton, was shot 14 times by a white police officer at Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park in April 2014.

“We are in a club [in which] the dues are so high to pay to be involved,” Reed Veal said of the women seated next to her. “You would never, ever want to be in this club voluntarily.”

Connected through shared tragedy, these mothers have forged a powerful coalition on behalf of Clinton, helping the former secretary of state amplify what she has called a “breaking down barriers” agenda centered on issues of racial inequality, gun policy and police reforms.

Sunday’s forum was the first of several around the state, part of an effort by the Clinton campaign to engage black voters as the Democratic presidential contest turned to the South Carolina primary on Saturday and the Super Tuesday primaries on 1 March.

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On Saturday, Clinton won in Nevada, where she earned strong support from minority voters, steadying her path to the party’s nomination.

Ahead of Saturday’s primary here, Clinton has a 20-point lead, in large part because of overwhelming support among black voters who in 2008 made up more than half the Democratic electorate in the state.

The mothers’ message has particular resonance in North Charleston. Last April, just a couple of miles down the road from St Peter’s AME, coastguard veteran and forklift operator Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black man, was shot dead by a white police officer. In a rare move, the officer, Michael Slager, was charged with murder. His trial is due to begin later this year.



The women agreed that the stakes in this election were high, and that the key to progress was to vote for leaders at every level of government – and not only for the president.

“We’ve got to stand,” Hamilton said. “We don’t have a choice. Our country is being destroyed by racism, bigotry and hate.”

‘Mothers of the movement’

Late last year, in Chicago, Clinton organized what became known as a “meeting of the mothers”. She held a private conversation with these women and others who lost children to gun violence or policing incidents.



“She was actually listening and taking notes,” said Gwen Carr. “I was watching this and thinking to myself, she’s really listening.”

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Hamilton, who said she was not a particularly political person before her son’s death, agreed that the Chicago summit was powerful. Then came the follow-up.

“Three months [after the meeting], I received a package in the mail with the policies that [Clinton] planned on enforcing for police reform and mass incarceration,” Hamilton said.

That Clinton had reached out personally and then followed up on her word was especially important to Hamilton. She said neither the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, nor local officials reached out to her after a police officer killed her son. Hamilton recently joined Clinton as a guest at the Democratic debate in Milwaukee.

Reed-Veal said she was a Clinton supporter long before the death of her daughter, but like the others she was impressed that someone as busy as the Democratic hopeful would repeatedly make time for her.

Gun control is a priority for McBath, who is also an advocate with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense. In court, lawyers for her son’s killer argued that he had the right to defend himself under Florida’s “stand your ground law”.

She supported Clinton’s pledge to take on the National Rifle Association, amend the nation’s gun laws and close the “Charleston loophole” – a reference to the June massacre in which the gunman was able to purchase a gun despite having a criminal record, because if a background check takes longer than 72 hours a gun dealer can sell the weapon without the completed check.

The women are in many ways the bridges between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the one that has mobilized under the Obama administration – daughters of the former and the mothers of the later.



“My father would roll over in his grave knowing that his [grandchild] had died under the same terms that he had fought to eradicate all those years before,” McBath said. “I have come full circle now. This is my work.”

The meetings, of which several more are planned, can be painful, the women said. Reliving the circumstances of their children’s deaths is just one of the many sacrifices they have made in the hope that other mothers will not come to know their pain.

“It’s too late for my son,” Carr said. “But if there’s another child out there that can be saved I will do this for the rest of my life.”