Lancaster Stands Up

Lancaster Stands Up is a chapter of Pennsylvania Stands Up based in Lancaster Pennsylvania. It is "paid for in part" by PA Stands Up State PAC.

Riot

A Pennsylvania judge threw the book at several protesters accused of rioting — by setting their bail at $1 million each — in the wake of the police shooting of a knife-wielding Lancaster man

Lancaster police nabbed a dozen people and one juvenile for staging the riots around 3 a.m. Monday September 14 in clashes that culminated in police deploying tear gas at the crowd.

The overnight violence came on the heels of the death of Ricardo Munoz, the mentally ill 27-year-old who was seen on bodycam footage charging with a knife in hand at a cop. The officer shot and killed Munoz Sunday afternoon outside his mother’s house in downtown Lancaster.

The mob marched from the scene of the shooting on Laurel Street to the police station, chucking glass bottles, rocks, bricks, gallon jugs filled with liquid and plastic road barricades at cops, police said.

A county vehicle parked in front of the station was also damaged.

Twelve adults — Jamal Shariff Newman, 24, Barry Jones, 30, Frank Gaston, 43, Yoshua Dwayne Montague, 23, Matthew Modderman, 31, Talia Gessner, 18, Kathryn Patterson, 20, Taylor Enterline, 20, T-Jay Fry, 28, Dylan Davis, 28, Lee Alexander Wise, 29, and Jessica Marie Lopez, 32 — face a slew of felony and misdemeanor charges, including arson, riot, institutional vandalism and criminal conspiracy.

Montague, of York, Pa., faces an additional charge of illegal possession of a firearm.

Magisterial District Judge Bruce A. Roth set bail for nine of the defendants — Newman, Jones, Montague, Modderman, Gessner, Patterson, Enterline, Fry and Davis — at $1 million apiece, with court records showing all were unable to post.

They’re being held at the Lancaster County Prison.

Bail information was not available for Lopez and bail was set at $100,000 for Wise, who was also unable to post.

Police said Gaston was on probation and a detainer would be lodged against him.

Social justice advocacy group Lancaster Stands Up claimed Patterson and Enterline were working as “medics” at the Munoz protest when they were arrested.

“The absurdly high bail amounts indicate that what we’re seeing is not a measured pursuit of justice, but a politically motivated attack on the movement for police reform and accountability,” the group tweeted.

Lancaster Stands Up then called on a number of elected officials, including Lancaster Mayor Danene Sorace and Gov. Tom Wolf, “to step in and defend Taylor, Kathryn and other peaceful protestors against the politically motivated actions of local law enforcement, prosecutors and judges.”

“We want an answer,” Kassandra Orjales, 25, told the outlet. “The name of the officer should be known. If it was one of us, we’d be all over the news. We won’t be silent anymore.”

Backing Bernie

Lancaster Stands Up membership voted to endorse Bernie Sanders in February 2020. The Sanders campaign has close ties to the group. His national field director, Becca Rast, and deputy field director, Nick Martin, cofounded Lancaster Stands Up. Rast is married to Jonathan Smucker, another cofounder, who helped start Pennsylvania Stands Up, a larger network of progressive groups that includes Lancaster’s.

Pennsylvania Stands Up has eight other chapters, including in Erie County and the Lehigh Valley, as well as Reclaim Philadelphia, which powered the winning insurgent progressive campaigns of District Attorney Larry Krasner and City Councilmember Kendra Brooks.

Lancaster Stands Up Leadership Team

As of August 2019 members of the Lancaster Stands Up Leadership Team include Fran Auquilla, Rafael Diaz, Zak Gregg, Kareena Rios, Jonathan Smucker, Otis Ubriaco, Ismail Yoder Salim, Melanie Yoder Salim, and Sophie Xiong.

Previous members who served on the Leadership Team: Amber Farward, Evan Gentry, Michelle Hines, Nick Martin, Amanda Kemp, Daniel Levin, Claudia Paz, Becca Rast, Nelly Torres, and Susan Wenger.

Lancaster Stands Up: the handful of folks who called for the initial emergency community meeting November 2016 has since then developed into a multiracial and multigenerational 11-person coordinating team, which includes Eliza Booth, Rafael Diaz, Amber Farward, Evan Gentry, Michelle Hines, Daniel Levin, Claudia Paz, Jonathan Smucker, Susan Wenger, Ismail Yoder Salim, and Melanie Yoder Salim (previous members who served: Amanda Kemp, Nick Martin, Becca Rast, Nelly Torres).

Since May, our Leadership Team has been preparing our next steps—how to move from protest to political power. We have been polling our base and talking with volunteers to figure out how to move this important work forward. We have been developing a clearer and more sustainable structure to allow LSU members to contribute their time, energy, passions, and gifts for the work ahead.

Claudia Llewellyn, is also a member of Lancaster Stands Up's leadership team.

Staff

Lancaster Stands Up is a member-led organization. Our staff work to support our member leaders throughout Lancaster County with base-building, campaigning, leadership development, and much more.

We are very grateful for our partnership with Beyond the Choir, which in 2018, hired three full-time organizers to support the ongoing work of Lancaster Stands Up and specifically the development of a door-to-door canvass operation to elect Jess King and down-ballot state house and senate candidates.

• Julia Berkman-Hill – Organizer
• Eliza Booth – Organizer
• Jonathan Smucker – Executive Director of Beyond the Choir.

Comrades

Lancaster Stands Up November 10, 2017 ·

Rafael Diaz, Michael Jamanis, Nelly Torres and Amanda Kemp.

Lancaster Stands Up founders

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Michelle Hines, a young white woman who works a day job at a local laboratory, and her partner, Daniel Levin, are out knocking on doors and telling their neighbors about the new grassroots group in town.

Founded in the wake of Trump’s victory and led by a 12-person leadership committee, Lancaster Stands Up aims to upend politics-as-usual in this central Pennsylvania city. It wants nothing less than to break the stranglehold of both the Democratic and Republican establishments here and replace them with a progressive multi-racial political force beholden to the people alone. And it is using the tools of long-haul grassroots activism—canvassing, vetting candidates, bird-dogging political foes, forming unlikely alliances, training leaders, convening meetings—to build its constituency.

A crew of young lifelong Lancastrians, some of whom have been organizing together since high school, launched the group on their own, independent of any national organization, November 2016. Lancaster is a middle- and working-class city of roughly 60,000, and it is diverse—more than 30 percent of the population is Hispanic, and roughly 16 percent of its residents are black, according to the 2010 census. The city, meanwhile, is situated squarely in an agrarian “red” county, where residents are almost entirely white and where there are tens of thousands more registered Republicans than Democrats. GOP politicians represent the area in the House of Representatives and make up most of its state legislative delegation, too.

Lancaster Stands Up, for its part, is unfazed by such facts. Indeed its members see small cities like Lancaster—situated at the nexus of urban and rural life—as crucial to revitalizing social-democratic values in the American heartland.

“After Trump’s election, I knew I had to do something,” says Eliza Booth, a 39-year-old black woman, lifelong Lancaster resident, and member of the group’s leadership committee. “I needed to get involved and plug in instead of staying at home and being depressed.”

A passionate Bernie Sanders supporter, Booth worked on his campaign during the Democratic primary and says she still believes he would have beat Trump in the general election. But Sanders didn’t make it that far and Trump, whom she describes as “a monster,” made it all the way to the White House. Like so many others, the outcome shocked and dismayed her.

A few days after the election, though, Booth saw a flyer announcing an emergency mass meeting in town. She decided to attend and found a huge turnout. At least 250 people were there. They had come to vent their anger and share their anxieties, to talk to their neighbors and plot a progressive comeback. It was the debut of Lancaster Stands Up, and Booth was smitten. Since then, she has spent 10, sometimes 20 hours a week volunteering for the group on top of her full-time job.

“It makes me feel so inspired every day,” she says. “It makes me feel less alone in the fight.”

Indeed, Lancaster Stands Up is proving that progressive values are alive and vibrant in Booth’s community. Since its first emergency meeting, when outrage motivated people to come together and commiserate, it has seen both rapid growth and significant victories.

In late January, for instance, the group’s immigration committee partnered with church and immigrant-rights organizations in the city to hold a rally against the Trump administration’s first attempted Muslim ban. At least 2,000 people showed up for what organizers describe as the largest local protest in at least half a century. Lancaster Stands Up is now recruiting people for a rapid-response team to document and protest Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids in town.

Lancaster Stands Up is reminding neighbors that democracy is a practice that must be pursued constantly and in community.

Activists

Lancaster Stands Up October 4, 2017.

1. LancasterStandsUp canvassers just back from registering voters in Millersville.

Julia Berkman-Hill, Beth Reeves and Tom C. Reed.

Prisons campaign

The energy being built around electoral organizing was soon channeled in a new direction when Lancaster Stands Up organizer Michelle Hines noticed an item about the local prison in the paper. The county, it appeared, was preparing to outsource its prisoner re-entry program to the for-profit prison company Geo Group. For the last decade, a coalition of nonprofits had worked to find housing and jobs for inmates released from prison. But they would be shut out of the new profit-driven approach — depriving parolees of a wide array of support.

LSU reached out to Have A Heart for Persons in the Criminal Justice System, one of the key groups involved in prisoner re-entry. It was an unusual meeting of minds. “Their approach is they meet with the commissioners and judges and prison board, and organize people involved, and lobby them. Our approach is to kind of blow things up,” Hines said. “We decided to blend those approaches.”

In November, that “social base” was effectively rallied into a standing room-only crowd, which bombarded the Lancaster County prison board with objections. “The profit motive works wonders when it’s focused on mattresses, farm machinery, and investments,” Franz Herr, a volunteer with the coalition, is quoted as telling the board. “It oversteps its moral bounds when it becomes a tool for extracting profit from the servitude of human beings.” Facing an unexpected amount of public pushback, the board shelved the plan.

Political arena

The group is laboring in the electoral arena too. Its political committee, lovingly dubbed “Hold Them Accountable,” has been particularly adept at hounding recently elected Republican Congressman Lloyd Smucker, who has quickly proved himself a line-toeing party loyalist.

Organizers have staged two raucous rallies outside of his district office, where hundreds gathered to demand that he stand up to Trump. They have denounced his policies on social media and penned op-eds calling on him to hold an in-person town-hall meeting for his constituents (which he has so far failed to do). They have flooded his office with thousands of postcards and phone calls.

Their most aggressive action, though, took place in early March when three Lancaster Stands Up leaders and another supporter paid to attend a Lancaster Chamber of Commerce forum, which featured a question-and-answer session with Representative Smucker. As Smucker prepared to take questions from the crowd, the four infiltrators stood up one by one and interrupted the event.

Becca Rast was one of them. In front of a roomful of Republicans, she denounced Smucker’s support for Trump’s “racist immigration and economic policies.” Michelle Hines stood up immediately afterward—to shouts of “shut up” from old men in the crowd—and told Smucker that she had never seen her neighbors “so fearful for their lives and their families lives since you voted to repeal the ACA.”

“Our representatives have not ever been pressured in the way they are being now,” says Rast, a group founder who grew up in town. “Congressman Smucker was just so freaked out by it. He didn’t know how to respond.”

And while Lancaster Stands Up has mostly been playing defense, its leaders aim for something more.

“I feel like everything we have done up until this point is reactive,” says Nick Martin, the 28-year-old former regional field director for the Bernie Sanders campaign here. Together with Rast and a few other friends outraged by last year’s election, he called the first meeting of Lancaster Stands Up. “Now we are actually going on the offensive and building political power.”

The Nation writer Jimmy Tobias caught up with Martin—who, like Rast, he first met in 2010 when they were all were involved in a campaign against mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia—during the organization’s April mass meeting. Wearing a camouflage cap and work boots, he is greeting people, a mostly older white set, as they file into a local bar in downtown Lancaster.

“Our goal,” he explains, “is to use visionary politics to build a long-term mass-scale organization.”

“We also want to scare the shit out of establishment politicians,” adds Rafael Diaz, another member of the leadership team who, alongside Martin, is welcoming the roughly 200 people that have arrived for the meeting. “We want to show them we are not just going to hold signs in the town square. We are going to be a threat when they run for office.”

Lancaster Stands Up hopes, someday soon, to endorse populist politicians in Democratic primaries and eventually run candidates of its own. On April 7, in an initial foray, the group co-hosted a forum in downtown Lancaster during which its leaders questioned five mayoral candidates in front of a crowd of around 200 people. It has yet to make any endorsements for the upcoming municipal election.

With 18 months to prepare, the group also wants to run Congressman Smucker out of office in 2018.

First, though, it must develop more leaders and recruit more supporters. And so, using voter data that Martin learned to analyze during the Sanders campaign, using scripts that the team developed over beers on a recent Friday evening, the group has decided to start sending canvassers out in both the city and the surrounding county to register voters and to tell people about the movement.

With this plan in mind, Lancaster Stands Up has decided to use part of its April mass meeting as a training camp of sorts. As the meeting enters its second hour, 60 or so people still sit in tight rows in the back of the bar.

Going door-to-door is one of “the skills of democracy that have atrophied over the last 40 years,” says Jonathan Smucker, another Lancaster Stands Up founder and a veteran of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Tall and thin and white with salt-and-pepper hair, he paces the room and asks the audience to name the social movements that have used canvassing as a key organizing tool. The civil-rights movement, says one person. The labor movement, chimes in another. The suffragists, says still another.

“We think Trump was able to win because Democrats haven’t fought visibly for working people,” he tells the crowd. “We need a party that knows it has a grassroots force at its back so it doesn’t cower to big money anymore.” Creating that force will require rehabilitating atrophied civic muscles and that, at its core, is what Lancaster Stands Up is all about.

Smucker instructs the meeting attendees to get up from their seats and form two rows facing each other. One row will play the role of progressive canvassers, the other row will pretend to be apathetic though somewhat sympathetic voters. The clamor of voices reverberates through the room as the trainees talk among themselves, as they learn how to approach strangers and pull them into the political process, as they take part in a small simple practice that could go an awful long way toward rebuilding our democracy.

“Cut!” says Smucker, who, as it happens, is the second-cousin-once-removed of the congressman his group hopes to depose. “Cut! Cut! Cut!”

After a quick debrief, the dress rehearsal is over and the attendees are dismissed. With their new skills, with their willingness to experiment and listen and learn, with their populist anti-establishment platform, the Lancaster Stands Up crew is ready to hit the streets and persuade people to take part in a new kind of politics.

2019 Primary Endorsed Candidates

Lancaster Stands Up is proud to endorse the following candidates in the 2019 Primary:

• Hobie Crystle for District Attorney
• Jamie Arroyo for Lancaster City Council
• Amanda Bakay for Lancaster City Council
• Xavier Garcia-Molina for Lancaster City Council
• Ramon Escudero for School District of Lancaster School Board
• Edie Gallagher for School District of Lancaster School Board
• Robin Goodson for School District of Lancaster School Board
• Kareena Rios for School District of Lancaster School Board
• Barry Kauffman for Manheim Township Commissioner
• Allison Troy for Manheim Township Commissioner
• Courtney Morton for Manheim Township School Board
• Teddy Vasquez for Manheim Township School Board

To win the endorsement Lancaster Stands Up, candidates must receive at least 50% of the vote in an uncontested primary or win by a 15% margin from the next highest candidate in a contested primary. All candidates that are endorsed in the primary will be automatically endorsed in the general, and additional candidates for seats that were not endorsed in the primary will also be endorsed in the general.

All endorsements are voted on by members of Lancaster Stands Up.

Endorsed candidates 2018

Lancaster Stands Up June 28, 2018.

Congratulations to Lancaster Stands Up's member-endorsed PA State House and Senate Candidates!

• Dana Hamp Gulick for PA 97th
• Mary Auker-Endres for PA
• Michele Wherley For PA 41
• Bill Troutman for PA Senate 2018

We know that these candidates will fight for the people of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. We look forward to working hard to get each of them elected in November!

"Where's Lloyd"

Lancaster Stands Up March 12 2018.

We have an exciting announcement. Lancaster Stands Up is partnering with Our Revolution and Keystone Progress to hold ‘Where’s Lloyd’ Town Halls and house meetings all across our newly drawn congressional district, PA-11. To win this uphill district, we have to get started now. And we have to go BIG.

Endorsing Jess King

After holding candidate forums before the Democratic primary, Lancaster Stands Up eventually endorsed Democratic candidate Jess King. King, a community leader with deep local Mennonite roots who founded a nonprofit small business incubator for women and people of color, is running on a progressive populist platform that includes Medicare for All and debt-free public college.

Our organizing efforts helped Jess King to effectively route the establishment competitor in the primary. Now, King and her army of volunteers are set to run a historically tight race against Lloyd Smucker.

References

Template:Reflist