Rasheen Aldridge For State Rep of the 78th District / Facebook
Rasheen Aldridge fought for his community for years before he decided to run for office.
His earliest fights for justice were as a fast-food worker organizing with “Show Me $15” in St. Louis, Missouri, the third city to see fast food strikes in what became known as the Fight for $15. He was working at Jimmy Johns making barely above minimum wage, trying to save and help out his mother. But even working forty hours a week, he could barely get by.
“My mom always says when you go to work, you give 110 percent, but the job wasn’t giving that back,” he tells me by phone from the campaign trail.
When Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the summer of 2014, Aldridge was at work and saw police cars flying by. He checked social media to see what had happened and at first, he says, he thought nothing would change. But Twitter told a story of protests brewing and a community rallying in its grief. He soon joined them, hoping that what he’d learned as part of the fast food movement could help.
The Ferguson protests, too, changed him. “It was a different energy and it was something that greatly affected me,” he says, “seeing that I could have been Mike Brown or my brother could have been Mike Brown.” He joined the protests, letting his own feelings match those of the community. Eventually, he was chosen to be the representative of the protests on the governor’s Ferguson Commission.
Now, at age twenty-five, Alridge is looking to put the organizing skills he honed at Show Me $15 and during the Ferguson movement to use in a new position, as state legislator for the Missouri’s 78th district.
Rasheen Aldridge
“I’ve always wanted things to be fair and just, and not just equal but equitable,” he says. That drive took him from fighting for a living wage to fighting for justice for Michael Brown and his community.
In 2016, Aldridge was elected to be the Democratic Committeeman in St. Louis’s 5th Ward. He ran alongside his friend and mentor, Bruce Franks Jr., who became state representative in the 78th district. Now Franks has stepped down, and Aldridge has stepped up to take his place. In August, he was selected by Democratic committee members as the party’s nominee for a November 5 special election that he is sure to win in the heavily Democratic district.
He’ll be in the minority in the House, but he sees the position as an extension of the organizing he’s been doing, a way to help people get things done on the local level.
“I won’t always have the answers or the solutions, but together we move mountains,” he says. “We’ve seen that in Ferguson. We didn’t have solutions, we didn’t have the answers, we were trying for people to just hear us.”
For the people in his district, Aldridge says, crime is a major issue, but for him, ending crime isn’t about locking people up—a perspective honed during the Ferguson movement. “People in my district are in survival mode, figuring out how they’re going to get their next meal or keep their lights on,” he says. His job will mean “figuring out ways that we can give people, once again, the opportunity to thrive.”
That means livable wages, of course. It means doing something about the food desert in the district. It also means a quality education in well-funded public schools, not charters.
“I went to a county school and lived in the city, so I’ve seen both sides,” he says. “In the county school you could lick the floor, they have SMART boards and all this technology.”
In the city, on the other hand, the schools were crumbling, and the charters were just out to make money off education. Outside of the city, he saw how the grass was literally greener, the air cleaner, the playgrounds nicer. The fight was, always, about equity.
Aldridge’s decision to pursue electoral politics grew out of his frustration with the existing representatives in his district. He ran against Rodney Hubbard, a member of a family that had maintained control of the district for decades, and won. Now his position is unpaid, but he makes sure that people in his district have someone who answers the phone when they call, who is paying attention to what they need, and who thinks they have the same right to representation as the wealthier white people in the suburbs.
“As long as I’m for the people, have good ideas, and my heart’s in the right place, then I can also step up, no matter if I’m running against somebody who’s been in office thirty, forty, or fifty years,” he says. “They always say they want young people but then when we run, they say, ‘Oh, well, you should wait your turn.’ No, my turn is right now.”
“Working class individuals already have so much stress on their day to day. To give them an extra day to just say, ‘I can breathe,’ is going to be healthy for our society.”
Aldridge is taking a lead from Franks and, once in office, plans to hold regular community events where residents can have a say in the policies he’s proposing. “Bruce really took the district and transformed it into the people's district,” he says.
Franks’ decision to step down—he cited mental health concerns—compelled Aldridge to run for the House seat; it also informs the policies he wants to introduce when he gets there. Aldridge plans to put forward legislation for a four-day work week, calling it “the self-care act.”
“In this line of work, we think so much about the people, and that’s what we got elected for, but sometimes we don’t think about ourselves,” he says. For people who work full-time, it’s nearly impossible to do all the other things one needs to do to take care of themselves and the people around them. He cites research on the subject, and proposes a rotating schedule, so that workers get different days off.
“Especially in America, we run and we run so much,” he says. “Something I learned in the Ferguson movement was self-care; taking the time to say, ‘Look, today we are not protesting and today we’re not going out yelling and screaming. We’re going to come together, were going to break bread with each other. We’re going to relax, we’re going to get massages, we’re going to bring in this doctor to talk about what trauma is.’ And we all take time to just breathe.”
At our jobs, he said, it’s the same thing. People are putting in 110 percent, but not getting that back.
“Working class individuals already have so much stress on their day to day. To give them an extra day to just say, ‘I can breathe,’ is going to be healthy for our society, healthy for our businesses, and it's going to be good for our community and our families to be able to have more time with each other.”
Aldridge wants to bring big ideas like these—even if they’re unlikely to pass immediately—to the state legislature, where he hopes to be able to break through some of the gridlock.
“When it’s stuff like four-day work weeks or criminal justice reform or making sure that folks have livable wages or changing our education system so it’s actually equitable and fair for all districts,” he notes, rural districts too are getting shortchanged. “Rural schools are closing and rural hospitals are closing. In urban areas, our schools are closing, our hospitals are closing. So we may look at it differently, but we can come to a common ground to ask how we make it better for all of us.”
More immediately, though, he’s looking forward to continuing Franks’s tradition of town halls and community events, of bringing people in the district together to hear their ideas. He plans to continue answering those phone calls and making sure people feel represented, because he knows what it’s like to feel hopeless.
“I want to be able to give hope to a little boy that was in my shoes,” he says, “to give him hope that just because you are currently living in a community that’s underserved, it won’t always be like that.”