Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Marian Wright Edelman, Bayard Rustin and many other freedom fighters organized the Poor People’s Campaign to focus on what King described at the “triple evils,” of racism, poverty and militarism. A new group, led in part by Rev. William Barber II, is planning to reignite the vision of the 1968 Campaign with not only action in Washington, D.C. but in 26 states across the country.
When tens of thousands of people converge on statehouses across the nation and the U.S. Capitol in May 2018, it will be to further the work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign that Marian Wright Edelman, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other freedom fighters organized 50 years ago.
The new campaign is being framed as “A National Call for Moral Revival.”
“We must transform the moral narrative in this country,” Barber said during a December press conference. “We went through the most expensive presidential campaign in U.S. history in 2016 without a single serious discussion of poverty and systemic racism. Now we are witnessing an emboldened attack on the poor and an exacerbation of systemic racism that demands a response. This is not about saving any one party or policy agenda, but about saving the soul of America.”
As President of the North Carolina NAACP, Barber gained a reputation for a series of sit-ins called Morale Mondays. The protests began in response to several actions by a conservative North Carolina governor and legislature elected in 2013. Once in office, the group began passing many laws the protestor’s felt were unfair, discriminatory with adverse effects on many citizens of the state,
Their regular Monday protest were characterized by civil disobedience. They would enter the state legislature building, protest and each week some of the protestors would be peacefully arrested. The protests launched a grass-roots social justice movement.
Last year, Barber resigned his position with the NAACP to join the leadership of the Poor People’s Campaign Call for a National Moral Revival, and he serves as the campaign’s co-chair. Barber brought many of his policies and approaches from his Moral Monday’s movements to the Poor People’s Campaign.
The Campaign will focus heavily on “statute’s not statues,” says Barber. With a great deal of emphasize placed last year on removing confederate statues in the South, Barber became famous for his call to focus on tearing down “statutes” or laws, rather that statues.
That’s why a major focus of the campaign will be on changing laws nationally, and at state and local levels, that negatively impact poor people. In addition to racism, poverty and militarism addressed in the initial campaign, the new Poor People’s Campaign will also focus on “ecological devastation, “ another crisis that disproportionately affect people living in poverty.
The Campaign co-chairs recently announced a forthcoming reports conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies auditing the “past 50 years of systemic racism, poverty, militarism and ecological devastation in America.”
Preliminary findings include:
Compared with 1968, 60% more Americans are living below the official poverty line today—a total of 41 million people. And while the percentage of families in poverty has merely inched up and down, the top 1 percent’s share of national income has nearly doubled.
More than 50 years after the Voting Rights Act, people of color still face a broad range of barriers to democracy. According to the Brennan Center, 23 states have adopted voter-suppression laws since 2010.
The criminalization of poverty and racially biased sentencing and policing practices have driven up the number of prison inmates eightfold since 1968, with the share who are people of color increasing from less than half to 66%. Federal spending on prisons has increased tenfold in real terms since 1976.
The gap between our government’s discretionary spending on the military versus anti-poverty programs has grown from 2-to-1 at the height of the Vietnam War to 4-to-1 today. In the meantime, millions of lives have been lost in wars that have made us no safer, while “real security” in the form of good jobs, health care and quality education remains beyond the reach of millions of Americans.
Since 1968, the environment has become less polluted, but the poor and people of color are bearing the brunt of climate change and suffering the most from environmental hazards. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, at least 4 million families with children are being exposed to high levels of lead, with low-income and people of color at greatest risk. And low-income families and people of color tend to be more likely to have living conditions and jobs that increase the health risks of extreme heat.
“These are the entrenched battles we face while white moderates and conservatives continue to tell systemically victimized Black Americans to pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” said Barber.