The Texas mini-tour is not even on jill2016.com as of this writing: The Events page just mentions that Baraka will be at Jackson State University (in Mississippi) this morning. It was PDiddie who reminded me that this is blogworthy news indeed.
Law professor and Congressional candidate Thomas Kleven will be speaking as well, and possibly some other #DownTicketGreens.
Palm Center Memories
One thing that I can report as an exclusive is that Kayleen came up with the idea of having Baraka visit the early voting site at Palm Center Saturday afternoon, either before or after his TSU appearance. We passed it on to the local Greens tasked with handling his ground logistics. There's no definite word on whether he will make a side-trip to court voters at Palm Center, and I'm a tad pessimistic.
Palm Center is a mostly vacant '50s-era shopping center on Griggs Road at MLK Boulevard. Most of its occupancy now is county offices, including a Tax Assessor-Collector annex and the headquarters of the Precinct 7 Constable, as well as the Post Office for 77021 and a branch of Houston Public Library. It is also the terminus of the Purple Line for MetroRail, and as such it is undergoing a transit-oriented renaissance of sorts.
The best day to drop by Palm Center is the only Sunday afternoon of the early voting period, when mostly African American voters from the surrounding area (Third Ward, South Park, South Union, Sunnyside) show up in their Sunday finest and turn the place into a righteous celebration of The Franchise.
We won't talk about that Sunday four years ago when Sheila Jackson Lee's team showed up at Palm Center and encouraged people to "just vote straight Democrat," which would have deprived them of the opportunity to vote not only for Greens in races with no Democratic candidate, but to vote for or against the $2 billion-dollar HISD bond package.
We also won't talk about how profoundly that experience soured me on SJL and made me want to run against her in 2014—which I didn't end up doing, but Remington Alessi did, the first time the Green Party challenged the allegedly progressive Democrat in District 18.
Nope. I won't say a word about any of that.