{"id":104955,"date":"2018-01-15T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=104955"},"modified":"2018-01-15T09:50:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T09:50:21","slug":"martin-luther-kings-poor-peoples-campaign-reborn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/01\/martin-luther-kings-poor-peoples-campaign-reborn\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Luther King\u2019s Poor People\u2019s Campaign Reborn"},"content":{"rendered":"

11 Jan 2018 – <\/em>Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 89 years old this Jan. 15. Assassinated at the age of 39 on April 4, 1968, his much-too-short life forever changed America. Among the landmarks of his activism are the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, ending segregation in public transportation; leading the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech; the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and marching with sanitation workers in Memphis, where he declared in his last speech, delivered on the eve of his death, \u201cI\u2019ve been to the mountaintop.\u201d Often overlooked are the increasingly radical policy positions King took in his last years, from speaking out against the Vietnam War to forging a multiracial Poor People\u2019s Campaign that sought, as King said, \u201ca radical redistribution of economic and political power.\u201d Now, 50 years later, a coalition has formed anew to organize poor people in the United States into what King called \u201ca new and unsettling force\u201d to fight poverty and forge meaningful change.<\/p>\n

This renewal, called \u201cThe Poor People\u2019s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival,\u201d has an audacious agenda: \u201cto challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation\u2019s distorted morality.\u201d At the forefront is the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. Born just two days after the famous March on Washington, Barber grew up in the civil-rights movement. For over 10 years he served as president of the North Carolina NAACP, stepping down to lead this new campaign.<\/p>\n

Back in 1968, King described the need for the Poor People\u2019s Campaign, saying: \u201cMillions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But there is another America. And this other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking this week on the \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d news hour, Rev. Barber reflected on how little has truly changed since King\u2019s time: \u201cFifty years later, we have nearly 100 million poor and working poor people in this country, 14 million poor children. \u2026 Fifty years later, we have less voting rights protection than we had on August 6, 1965,\u201d he said. \u201c[Republicans] have filibustered fixing the Voting Rights Act now for over four years, over 1,700 days.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery state where there\u2019s high voter suppression,\u201d Barber continued, \u201calso has high poverty, denial of health care, denial of living wages, denial of labor union rights, attacks on immigrants, attacks on women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barber says the answer is fusion politics: \u201cWe have black, we have white, we have brown, young, old, gay, straight, Jewish, Muslim, Christians, people of faith, people not of faith, who are coming together,\u201d creating what he calls the \u201cThird Reconstruction.\u201d Part of this fusion includes reaching out to traditionally conservative Christians, like Minister Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. From a devout, white evangelical family, as a teen he served as a congressional page under South Carolina Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond, one of the fiercest segregationists of the modern era.<\/p>\n

Wilson-Hartgrove heard William Barber preach, and has been a follower and a colleague ever since. The renewed Poor People\u2019s Campaign is responding to poor, white evangelicals, Wilson-Hartgrove says: \u201cThese people who say, \u2018Vote for me because I\u2019m a good Christian leader\u2019 are not serving your interests. You don\u2019t have health care, you don\u2019t have a living wage, because the same people who say they\u2019re standing up for God and righteousness are, when they\u2019re voting, voting against the interests of poor people, whether you\u2019re black, white, brown or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barber sees transformation of the Deep South on the near horizon, but doesn\u2019t claim it will be easy. Recent court victories against both racial and political gerrymandering in North Carolina will further empower African-Americans and other traditionally marginalized groups. But the real work will be done not in the courts, but in the streets.<\/p>\n

Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove, along with the Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-director of the New York City-based Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and co-chair of the modern-day Poor People\u2019s Campaign, traveled to 15 states around the country in recent months, recruiting, organizing and training over 1,000 people. Barber said: \u201cOur first action will be on the Monday after Mother\u2019s Day. We\u2019re going after 25,000 people engaging in civil disobedience over six weeks to launch a movement.\u201d Their target: the U.S. Capitol and statehouses across the country.<\/p>\n

Martin Luther King Jr. was robbed of life by a sniper\u2019s bullet 50 years ago. But on this anniversary of his birth, this national holiday that people fought decades for, his vital work to empower the poor, lives on.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among the landmarks of his activism are the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, ending segregation in public transportation; leading the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech; the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and marching with sanitation workers in Memphis, where he declared in his last speech, delivered on the eve of his death, \u201cI\u2019ve been to the mountaintop.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spotlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}