Speeches- Owen Silverman Andrews Joins the Ticket

This issue of the newsletter includes the remarks (as prepared) for the September 19th 2025 introduction of Owen Silverman Andrews to the ticket as the Lieutenant Governor Candidate

I want to start with a story.

I’ve been running this campaign for a long time now, I started in November of 2022. And for most of that time, Owen and I were actually talking less than we had in the six or seven years before. Life, work, organizing family, school — it all pulled us in different directions.

This summer, Owen asked me who I was thinking about as a running mate. I gave him the same three names I gave him last year. But by now, one thing had changed, all three had said no.

A few days later, Owen called me back and said, “What if I did it? What if I joined you as lieutenant governor?”

And I thought — that’s a great idea.

And as I shared the idea with others, the people who advise me and the people I trust,  I heard the same thing again and again: “Yes. That’s the person. Owen is the one.”

Here’s why. 

We are living in daunting times. It can feel overwhelming to look at the crises we face — 

Global racial empire is a brutal regime, 500 years in the making

The Genocide in Palestine is ongoing and the world seems helpless to stop it.  

Climate and ecosystem collapse  threatens life as we know it.

Mass incarceration, mass deportation, and mass eviction are taking aim at many people in Maryland and beyond.

Privacy is being sold to the tech billionaires and freedom of speech and civil rights are on a knives edge. 

The scale of what we face is huge and daunting. 

Indeed in a moment like this its easy to question if all hope is lost.

I think it’s not. An author I really appreciate, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò helps me a lot when thinking about this

 Taiwo asks: “How can we possibly succeed at a task as immense and contested as building the just world? The unjust order we have is the outcome of five centuries of human action—it would be an incredible achievement to undo this evil in half that time. And even that monumentally fast achievement would still involve centuries of struggle, meaning generations and generations of people who have to act in their lifetimes in pursuit of a good that may only materialize in someone else’s.”

Taiwo does not say this to suggest we give up, rather to suggest that when we understand the scope of the work to be done,  it allows a revolutionary patience which frees us to do all that we can.

That is the truth of our moment: the work of constructing a just, peaceful and democratic world is bigger than any one of us, bigger than any one campaign, and it will take not just years, but generations.

But daunting times are not hopeless times, they are the times when people step forward to do their part — knowing they may not see the harvest, but planting the trees anyway. Knowing that the arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice on its own, Dr King reminds us

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom.”

That’s what this campaign is about. Its about doing the work now to build something that outlives us and makes the freedom dreams of those that come after us a little bit easier. 

And that’s why I couldn’t think of a better person to stand beside me than Owen.

Owen is a solid friend, a trusted colleague, and a relentless organizer. He spends his life fighting for working people, building coalitions, and helping people find their power and their community. He is a builder, he is a creator, and he is a uniter.

He has the rare ability to bring people together who have different values while never compromising his values. He listens. He leads. And he shows up. Every day.

I see this campaign and the movement for grassroots democracy as the generational work I can do. And with Owen as the candidate for Lieutenant Governor, we are stronger, sharper, and more ready to take on this fight than ever before.

So friends — please join me in welcoming my running mate, and friend Owen Silverman Andrews.

Let us begin with acknowledgement of my deep gratitude to each and all of you for coming out today. Thank you. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, organizers, former students: thank you.

For some of you, we’ve known each other since I was born. For others, we met in the streets, protesting for peace and justice.

In the neighborhood, building more robust community. In the classroom, deepening our knowledge of multiple languages and the diverse people who use them.

On the campaign trail, knocking doors for candidates with the best ideas and most sincere values, not the best odds and most money. On the job, organizing for our and our co-workers’ rights to security, dignity, and just compensation for our labor.

I treasure every experience we have shared, not least because they have brought us here.

Today I’m honored to share with you I’m joining Andy Ellis’s campaign for governor of the great state of Maryland as the lieutenant governor candidate!

All of you around this yard, or joining online, you are the reasons why. In our work together, we have witnessed glimpses beyond the Maryland that is. Together, we have witnessed glimpses of The Maryland That Can Be. It’s not a mirage. It’s not a distant future. It’s a commitment we share and a map we have charted to arrive at a better present, now. Together we will build it!

My grandfather Abe Silverman set a standard of what’s possible when he ran as an independent third party candidate and was elected Mayor of Sedalia, Missouri in 1958. His policies advanced good governance, civil rights, public works, education, small businesses, and social justice. They are guideposts I live by.

His legacy guided me in the work we have done together. It’s one of the many reasons I believe in what we can achieve, when we organize.

Together, we organized to take down monuments to enslavers and renamed the ground where the Lee-Jackson statue patrolled for a true Maryland liberator, Harriet Tubman.

Together, we mobilized to carry out a direct-action boycott campaign to get apartheid-made SodaStream off shelves of stores across Baltimore County and Baltimore City.

We rallied in D.C. to pull off the largest act of civil disobedience for immigrant justice in U.S. history.

We mobilized to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day in Baltimore City.

Together, we advocated to pass a law on equal credit for equal work for immigrant college students across Maryland. And together, we’ve built coalitions, a party, a shul, a union — established organizations and movement formations — that shifted power and altered the way things are, on the ground, and into the future.

Our organizing was successful because together, we imagined collective visions for futures not tethered to the way things have always been. Instead, our victories are powered by the truth that our communities — when mobilized to collective action — can build viable, durable alternatives.

When we dream big, we can win big. And we will have to fight for it! Those who benefit from the power and wealth they’ve concentrated in far too few hands will not give it up without a fight.

Envisioning The Maryland That Can Be is a huge undertaking. The millionaires and billionaires don’t want us to dream. They want to constrain our collective imagination. They prize a pliable, docile, civil, and predictable working class.

But through our work together, through the glimpses we’ve gleaned of The Maryland That Can Be, together, we grow increasingly confident that this better future state is not just a possibility. We are realizing that a Maryland that can be — if we organize, if we will it — is The Maryland That Will Be. Because of us, here today, she is already on her way.

We have so much work to do. That’s why it’s so important to remember that it is not for us to finish the work, but neither are we at liberty to shrink from it.

If we can envision it, then we can embody it. Since we can dream it, then we can build it.

Let’s build! Thank you! Thank you for building with us! Thank you for building the Maryland That Will Be!