Ruwa Romman, who is a Palestinian American and the first Muslim woman to serve in the Georgia House of Representatives, had hoped to give a speech on Palestine at the Democratic National Convention.
“I was incredibly honored to be considered,” she told Rolling Stone on Thursday.
But on Wednesday night, the Uncommitted Movement learned that the DNC would not be offering them a chance to speak on the main stage. The Uncommitted Movement represents more than 700,000 voters who voted “uncommitted” during the Democratic presidential primary campaign in support of Palestine, demanding a cease-fire and an end to U.S. arms shipments to Israel. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel declared war on Hamas, in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel.
The movement’s voters could be especially crucial in Michigan, where more than 100,000 Democratic primary voters checked “uncommitted.” The DNC has provided several untelevised forums to the Uncommitted Movement this week, but refused to allow the group to put a speaker on stage — not even Romman, a Democratic state lawmaker in Georgia, a key battleground state.
“The reality of the situation is that we genuinely are asking for the bare minimum,” Romman said. “This was a symbolic gesture. This was supposed to be something that we could take back and say, ‘Look, the party is listening.’”
Before the Uncommitted Movement learned that they would not have the chance to speak, its leaders were “heartened because we saw that families of Israeli hostages were invited onto the stage,” Romman said. “So we thought, okay, this is it.”
On Thursday, Mother Jones published a draft of the speech that Romman had hoped to deliver. In it, she talks about the devastation of being “moral witnesses to the massacres in Gaza.”
“But in this pain,” she writes, “I’ve also witnessed something profound — a beautiful, multifaith, multiracial, and multigenerational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party.”
She continues: “For 320 days, we’ve stood together, demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike to reach a cease-fire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety. That’s why we are here — members of this Democratic Party committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world.”
Part of Romman’s frustration was that former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan spoke on Wednesday. Duncan, a Republican, has opposed abortion.
“He’s a Republican, an anti-choice Republican, and in this big tent that we were building throughout the week, there was no room for me in it,” she said.
Romman intended to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in her speech. “Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur,” she says in the draft.
Referencing President Barack Obama’s most famous slogan, she hoped to say: “To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can — yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars. That fights for an America that belongs to all of us — Black, brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.”
