Email the text of this article to yourself or to a friend . Get a print-friendly version of this article . The Project serves as a vehicle for traditional civil rights organizations and communities of color to engage in campaign finance reform initiatives. It seeks to connect the history of earlier voting and civil rights struggles to the ongoing struggle for campaign finance reform. The current system of privately financed politics has a discriminatory impact on African Americans.
Campaign finance is one of the most important civil rights issues of our time.
The few outreach efforts have generally been perceived as strategic attempts to co-opt black support for specific campaign finance proposals, without any real effort to understand the particular problems that the existing campaign finance structure creates in black communities. We must realize, however, that the current campaign finance system disadvantages African Americans, and that black voices must be heard in this critical public debate. In a privately funded political system, those who make contributions have special access to politicians and the leadership of political parties, and they determine which candidates will be able to run credible and viable campaigns. Voting too often simply consists of making a choice between candidates preselected by the big contributors. Currently, all Americans are not equal because a wealthy contributor has significantly more power than a voter, and almost all contributors are white.