The block has always been political.

This is where we say it and show it out loud. We The People, Too is a community organizing, voting rights and civic engagement movement built on a single, refused premise: the hood is the most political place in the Black community. For decades the polling firms, the news desks and the campaign field offices have written off the projects, the block, the so-called dangerous zip codes as the parts of America that don't care about politics. They have it backwards.

The block decides who eats. The block decides who gets help. The block decides who comes home from prison. The block decides which kid walks to school without being scared, which auntie keeps the lights on, which neighbor catches a fade at the corner store and which one catches a plate. That is politics. That has always been politics. The block has never not been political. America just stopped looking.

We launch on the 4th of July. In New Orleans. On purpose. If Philadelphia is where America was signed into being, New Orleans is where America became itself. The food, the rhythm, the cadence, the brass, the vernacular, the way a Saturday turns into a Sunday turns into a Tuesday, that is not a regional flavor. That is the recipe. The South wrote America's sound. The block wrote America's table. We did not borrow this country's culture. We are it.

Independence Day on the block was never about fireworks and bunting. It was Grandma at the stove since six in the morning, the pot of red beans pulling the whole hallway into the kitchen. It was the corner taken over by speakers somebody had borrowed from the church. It was the family day in the courtyard of the projects, kids dragging hoses, an uncle on the grill, a card table that turned into a stage. It was the brass line that rolled out of nowhere and the hangout on the stoop that lasted until the streetlights came on.

That was politics too. We just never called it that. We are calling it that now.