Press Release: Senator Brown Begins Weekly Fast for D.C. Statehood

News Release — DC shadow Sen. Michael D. Brown

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  December 6, 2021

CONTACT:  United States Senator Michael D. Brown

(Washington, D.C.)—United States Senator Michael D. Brown (D-D.C.) today began a fast every Monday for D.C. statehood in solidarity with human and civil rights activist Joe Madison, the host of the show Urban View on SiriusXM Radio. Last month, Madison began a hunger strike for voting rights and has subsisted on a liquid diet for the past 29 days.  In an act of solidarity, Senator Brown joined to make sure that the issue of D.C. statehood is included in the national narrative on voting rights.

Madison, also known as the Black Eagle, is abstaining from eating any solid food until the U.S. Senate eliminates the filibuster and passes voting rights legislation which is signed into law by President Biden.

“Just as solid food is essential to maintain life, the right to vote is essential to maintain democracy in this country.  People have sacrificed a lot more than food to get the right to vote,” Madison said during an interview on SHADOW POLITICS, Senator Brown’s weekly radio show on BBS Radio, which has been on the air since April 2013.

On the show, which is rebroadcast three times a week on We Act Radio, Madison also pointed out that “Forty young people in the state of Arizona are conducting their own hunger strike for voter right protections.  It’s not my job to encourage everyone to do what I’m doing, but everybody can do something whether it’s a hunger strike, petition drive, arrest, demonstrations or social media.”

Senator Brown has started his Monday fast and invited his many listeners to join him in fasting one day a week for freedom.  “As the ground swell for national voting rights expands, I want to make sure that D.C. statehood is not lost in the push for voter right protection,” Senator Brown stated.  “The people of Washington, D.C., have been denied our most basic rights of citizenship for more than 220 years.  Washingtonians are the ‘poster children’ of voter suppression and voting rights anywhere must include voting rights for D.C.”

“Hunger strikes have been used as a means of political protest as long as there have been politics and resistance. Throughout history, suffragettes in the United Kingdom and the United States have used hunger strikes as a means of protest.  So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone, with my background in human and civil rights that I have chosen this form of dissent through what I believe should be a redress to what is just plain politically and morally wrong,” Joe Madison stated on November 8, 2021 – the first day of his hunger strike.

Currently serving his third six-year term as a non-voting senator, Michael D. Brown (D-D.C.) advocates for equal rights for more than 700,000 people living in the nation’s capital who have no voting representation in the U.S. Congress. Since 1794, Tennessee, Michigan, California, Minnesota, Oregon and Alaska also used senators like Brown to achieve representation through statehood.