We just put out a press release last night to announce some pretty impressive speakers we’ve booked for the @large conference at the end of next month in Baton Rouge…

@Large Conference Bringing Prominent Black Conservatives to Baton Rouge

BATON ROUGE, La. – Black conservatives and their supporters will gather in Baton Rouge May 30-31 for the @large conference at the Crowne Plaza hotel. Deneen and Tom Borelli, Star Parker and Ryan Bomberger have been added to the dynamic lineup of speakers and workshop presenters.

Deneen Borelli is a contributor for Fox News and author of “Backlash: How Obama and the Left are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation.” In 2012, Deneen was selected to serve as the minority outreach director for FreedomWorks, a conservative non-profit that advocates for less government and more freedom. Tom Borelli is a senior fellow at FreedomWorks and serves as the organization’s expert for energy policy. Before joining FreedomWorks, Tom served as the director of the National Free Enterprise Project.

Star Parker is a nationally-known conservative politician, activist and columnist. She founded the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), a non-profit think tank that provides public policy solutions for fighting poverty. Parker, once dependent on welfare, now seeks methods of transitioning African Americans out of government dependency and shares her ideas across the country.

Ryan Bomberger, founder of The Radiance Foundation, will be leading a messaging workshop on abortion. Bomberger works to combat the staggering abortion rate in the black community through mentoring and creative efforts like the Too Many Aborted campaign (www.toomanyaborted.com).

Also included in the lineup are a mix of local and national political figures, including Rev. C.L. Bryant, K. Carl Smith, Wayne Dupree, Harold Williams, Jeff Landry, Jason Hebert, Pastor Shannon Wright, Bill Marcy and Eric Lewis.

On Thursday evening, conference attendees will attend an exclusive screening of “Runaway Slave” and engage in a discussion about race and politics. Most of Friday will be dedicated to workshops on topics such as fundraising, messaging, and campaign outreach. After educating attendees about the most valuable resources for civic engagement and public office, @large planners want to establish long-term relationships within the black conservative community and track attendees as they move into public policy roles.

The cost of the conference is $79 per person. Tickets can be purchased through the website. More information about @large can be found online at www.atlargeconference.com.

We gave the folks a pretty good indication of what the reasoning behind @large is a while back…

It’s time to stop conceding 15 percent of the electorate to the Democrats, when Republicans getting a quarter to a third of the black vote would ruin the Democrat Party as a national electoral entity.

And that quarter to a third of the black vote is not unattainable.

Blacks are at ground zero where the effects of social leftism are concerned and they’re more socially conservative than the nation as a whole – and yet they’re trapped in a party rushing headlong into taxpayer-funded abortion on demand and gay marriage.

Blacks are at ground zero where the effects of rampant infringement on the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms are manifest – and yet they’re trapped in a party which can’t impose unworkable and disastrous gun control policy fast enough.

Blacks are at ground zero where the disastrous effects of job-killing economic and environmental policies are concerned, with unemployment rates that would assure societal breakdown if they were visited on white America – and yet they’re trapped in a party which continues imposing debilitating socialistic stupidity everywhere it can.

Blacks are at ground zero where the debilitating effect of a self-dealing and failed government school model is unmistakable, with dropout and illiteracy rates reaching depths unimaginable given the billions in taxpayer dollars poured into the maw – and yet they’re trapped in a party so beholden to the teachers’ unions that for them, fighting school choice is reflexive and visceral.

Blacks are at ground zero where the damage done by a wide-open border policy which destroys the job opportunities providing the bottom rung on the economic ladder are concerned, leading to black youth unemployment approaching 50 percent and the inevitable consequence being crime and the dead-end underground economy for too many Americans – and yet they’re trapped in a party which is so committed to trapping the Hispanic vote that their concerns about immigration are forcefully ignored.

And the Democrats are not held to account for this performance?

That is the fault of the Republican Party. The time has come for a change.

The GOP says it will practice “outreach” into the black community, and has announced it will spend $10 million to make such an outreach possible. That’s great. But what we’ve seen so far is that “outreach” consists of sending blow-dried white guys from the suburbs into the black community to make a single speech during a campaign. This after the Democrats maintain a 24-7-365 campaign of demonizing Republicans as racists to Black America.

Blow-dried white guys from the suburbs won’t work. They’re dead in the water even before they make the attempt at “outreach.”

To reach a black community with a message that both indicts the current Democrat lords of the manor for their failures and offers inspiration and another way, you have to present that community with messengers it will accept. Blow-dried white guys can come later.

For now, what’s necessary is that black conservatives lead the fight.

This conference is aimed at black conservatives. But you don’t have to be black to attend. If you support the cause of getting a conservative message into the black community and you want to find ways to support folks who will do it, then click here to see the website. There you’ll see a place where you can support this effort financially, register to attend or follow it and help promote on Facebook and Twitter.

We’ll have more updates to come on this event. We think it’s an important effort that must be made.