Alternative Politics

Curry carries the VP banner for the Greens

November 8, 2007 12:19:38 PM

Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry

The Green Party’s 2008 vice presidential candidate is an articulate juggernaut of personality from South Central Los Angeles with a super-lengthy moniker: Sedinam Kinamo Christin Moyowasifza-Curry. The alt-party candidate, who smartly goes by the more concise and imposing-sounding SKCM Curry, is just as good at boiling down her pitch.

In 2000, Curry explains, she voted for Al Gore. “When he did not act out and act up,” when the US Supreme Court tossed the contested presidential election to George W. Bush, “I knew I could not be part of a party that would not stand up for voters’ rights.” Since the Green Party doesn’t accept corporate contributions, she says, “I knew that was the key to change.”

Curry, 45, who has an activist background, says it was time for her to put up or shut up when a group of like-minded individuals challenged her last year to run for office.

While seven candidates are competing to be the Green presidential candidate, Curry says she is the party’s sole contender for VP. She hopes to be on the ballot in more than 40 states.

Despite the Green Party’s struggles to get mainstream attention in a nation dominated by the two major political parties, Curry calls it her mission to help grow an alternative political movement. “I don’t see them as separate,” she says of the Democratic and Republican Parties. “There’s more of us than them.”

A South Central native, Curry, clad in a green jacket and a brightly colored hair-wrap during a visit to the Phoenix office last week, was in town for the November 3 fall meeting in Peace Dale of the Green Party of Rhode Island. She says fundraising is going well, but declined to reveal the size of her war chest.

Curry, who is black, says part of her quest is promoting diversity in the Green Party. She says she plans a trip later this month to launch the Green Party in 15 West African nations.

The VP candidate, who credits Head Start with helping her to overcome poverty and providing the path toward her education at a California state college, has a platform emphasizes opposing voter fraud, challenging white privilege and racism; and staging a “green revolution” through a greatly expanded environmental movement. “I would just strongly encourage people to wake up,” Curry says. “We don’t have all the time in the world.”

State Representative David Segal of Providence, who ran for that seat as a Democrat, became the only Green to win election in Rhode Island when he prevailed in a 2002 campaign for the Providence City Council.

Greg Gerritt, a stalwart of the Rhode Island Green Party, says more than 60 Greens, including the mayor of Richmond, California, and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, have taken office in California (and more than 200 in the US). He says an estimated 1000 Greens will be running for office nationwide in 2008, although the outlook in Rhode Island remains unclear.