Washington DC - Dr. Cornel West has launched an Independent campaign for the White House. Here's what you need to know about his 2024 bid for president.

On June 5, 2023, Cornel West added his name to the growing list of candidates seeking the presidency, but he's not running according to a traditional formula.

West first announced his bid as the candidate for the People's Party, later saying he would seek the nomination of the Green Party. In early October, he indicated he would no longer participate in a Green Party nominating process but would run as an Independent instead.

In his campaign, West is seeking not only to bring new vision to the office of president, but he's also hoping to break the stranglehold the Republican and Democratic parties have on US politics.

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Curious what Cornel West's Independent run is all about?

TAG24 NEWS is here to fill you in on everything to know about Cornel West's campaign and his plan for America should he win in 2024.

Cornel West is a socialist political activist and academic with an illustrious career spanning decades.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1953, West grew up in Sacramento, California, before going on to study at Harvard University. He later became the first Black American to get a PhD in philosophy at Princeton University.

The 70-year-old's scholarship and organizing activities have focused on the intersection of race, class, gender, and religion in America. He garnered international acclaim for his bestselling book Race Matters in 1993.

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West has held teaching positions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and other top institutions. The beloved professor was involved in a well-publicized tenure scandal at Harvard in 2021, when the Ivy League university reportedly refused to consider him due to his support for Palestinian rights.

In addition to his academic contributions, West has become a known figure in popular culture with appearances in The Matrix movie series and the release of several spoken word and hip-hop albums. He was even dubbed MTV Artist of the Week back in 2008.

West was a prominent supporter of Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 campaigns for president, regularly speaking at rallies for the Vermont senator.

In April 2024, Cornel West announced Prof. Melina Abdullah as his running mate.

Abdullah is an Oakland, California, native now living in Los Angeles, where she has made a name for herself as an award-winning academic and community organizer. She is a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

The 51-year-old vice presidential hopeful earned her BA in African American Studies at Howard University, and her MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Southern California. Her publications center around Black feminism and womanist leadership.

Abdullah has deep ties to the Black Lives Matter movement as co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. She also serves as director of Black Lives Matter Grassroots.

On top of that, Abdullah has experience as a union leader in the California Faculty Association and was instrumental in making Ethnic Studies a requirement in the Los Angeles Unified School District and the California State University system.

Abdullah is the mother of three children. She identifies as Muslim.

After Bernie Sanders confirmed he would not run for president again in 2024, Cornel West announced his own bid for the White House.

West is running "to reintroduce America to the best of itself – fighting to end poverty, mass incarceration, ending wars and ecological collapse, guaranteeing housing, health care, education and living wages for all!" the presidential hopeful wrote on Twitter.

The public intellectual turned presidential candidate will be participating as an Independent, hoping to see his name on general election ballots across the country come November 2024. His bid is intended to take on the US duopoly system dominated by the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which he sees as serving corporate interests.

By seeking an alternate path to power, West hopes to disrupt the status quo and unify Americans of all backgrounds around a vision for transformational change.

Cornel West has released a platform of policies intended to alleviate economic suffering, expand civil liberties, and address the climate crisis. They are available on his campaign website.

Here is where the presidential hopeful stands on some of the most pressing political issues of the day.

As a professor, it's not surprising to find education reforms to be a key part of Cornel West's 2024 agenda, including a commitment to cancel all student debt and ensure free higher education at state and community colleges. He opposes book and educational bans passed in Florida and other GOP-led states which target Black and LGBTQ+ history and representation. He wants to equalize public school funding to ensure that all children have strong educational opportunities, regardless of their zip code.

Cornel West has called for an end to the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, which disparately impact Black and brown Americans. He supports an end to solitary confinement, comprehensive sentencing reform, and the establishment of a Prisoner Bill of Rights. He wants to demilitarize the police by barring the transfer of military-grade equipment to civilian law enforcement and investing in community-led safety initiatives.

West has said he will pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as well as Black political prisoners and exiles, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, H. Rap Brown, Assata Shakur, and more. He believes in restoring voting rights for all, including the currently and formerly incarcerated.

Cornel West advocates for an end to foreign military aid, the closure of US military bases around the world, and the disbandment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He is also calling for investments in services to support veterans and a global ban on nuclear weapons. He has been vocal in support of Palestinian liberation and an end to Israeli apartheid and has joined calls for an arms embargo on Israel amid the genocidal assault on Gaza.

Cornel West has spoken on the need to treat all immigrants with dignity as well as to understand the ways in which US policy has created the conditions that cause many people to flee their homes to begin with. He supports abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), protecting asylum rights, and streamlining processes for obtaining citizenship, permanent residency, and work visas. He has vowed to expand dialogue and cooperation with leaders in Latin American countries.

Cornel West is running to eliminate poverty and extreme wealth inequality in America. He wants to guarantee housing, living wages, and paid leave for all, in addition to expanding Social Security and protections for labor unions.

West is a staunch supporter of a single-payer health insurance system, known as Medicare For All, and guaranteed access to quality dental, vision, hearing, mental, substance abuse, and long-term care. He wants to lower the price of pharmaceuticals and abolish medical debt.

Amid the worsening global climate emergency, Cornel West has made environmental protection a core tenet of his campaign. He is calling for a shift to regenerative agriculture techniques, concrete measures to address pollution, and an investment in clean energy. He supports banning drilling on public lands and ending fossil fuel subsidies.

Cornel West is pro-choice and supports federal protection of abortion rights. He has spoken about the pro-life movement as, by and large, an attempt to control women's bodily autonomy and called out the hypocrisy of politicians who speak about the sanctity of life when a fetus is in the womb, but allow huge swaths of children to languish in poverty once they are born.

Cornel West is a vocal advocate of reparations for Black Americans for the crimes of enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid. He sees reparations as a debt owed to Black Americans and a means of eradicating systemic racism as well as an opportunity for reconciliation and healing.

In running for president outside the aegis of the Democratic and Republican parties, Cornel West is seeking to achieve what many say is an impossible feat.

West's bid for the White House pits him against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and former Republican President Donald Trump – the nominees from each of the establishment parties.

The Independent candidate has been critical of both major-party contenders. He has stood in strong opposition to Harris' support for Israel's assault on Gaza, while calling Trump a "neofascist."

Though the road to the White House will be by no means an easy one, West says he is in it to win it regardless of the challenges that lie ahead.

"Do we have what it takes? We shall see," he said in his announcement video. "But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile."