With weeks of civil disobedience and direct action across 25 states and the District of Columbia, leaders of The Poor People’s Campaign called for a ‘Moral Revival of America,’ in a meeting in the District of northwest Monday night.
Led by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis, Barber said that the campaign “It is not about saving a party. It’s not about Democrats and Republicans. It’s about saving the soul of a nation.”
The Poor People’s Campaign began under the direction of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in 1967. King announced the plan to the public later that year and asked people who classified as poor to come together to march in Washington to demand President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, better health care and quality education. What is known as the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom brought 50,000 peaceful protesters on June 19,1968.
Weeks before the march, Dr. King was assassinated.
However, Coretta Scot King and a group of black minsters led the rally.
The Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, a leader of the civil rights movement and close friend of King, explained that the intention of the campaign was to “dramatize the plight of America’s poor of all races and make clear that they are sick and tired of waiting for a better life,” according to the campaign’s website.
In 1968, 25 million people—almost 13 percent of the American population—were living below the poverty level, according to the Census Bureau.
Although as many as 50,000 people marched in 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign was considered a failure after conditions of the poor were not improved immediately. By 2006, 36 million Americans were living below the poverty level.
The national rate peaked to 40.6 million people in 2016, according to the Census Bureau.
With the goal of waging war on poverty, Barber and Theoharis picked up the unfinished work of King.
“Let me be very clear,” Barber, said. “You don’t commemorate an assassination, you don’t celebrate an assassination, if anything you reach down in the blood and pick up the baton and carry it the rest of the way.”
On Feb. 23, leaders of campaign held a Mass Meeting to hear the vision and strategy for the Campaign at Shiloh Baptist Church, a historical site founded in 1804.
Drawing on black religious tradition, Yara Allen, the theomusicologist of the Campaign and the choir at Shiloh Baptist in the District, opened the meeting with a rendition of the folk song, “I Shall Not Be Moved.”
“Go tell the president, we shall not be move // Go tell the president, we shall not be moved // just like a tree planted by the waters, we shall not be moved,” Allen and attendees sang.
In a call for justice, a poet received cheers and applauds. “See the most detrimental thing you can do in the fight for liberation is to isolate yourself from the problem, to not acknowledge or promote the need for community and joint efforts,” said the young, black female poet.
“We have a call to defend the weak and the fatherless and uphold the cause of the poor and oppressed,” she said. “To do just and right and to deliver those from the hands of the oppressor… So wake up and pick up because our nation is depending on it.”
After singing the hymnal, “Hold on Just A Little While Longer,” attendees heard the powerful words of Rev. Barber. “A nation is judge by how we treat the least of these. We have to be willing to stand in the great moral of constitutional tradition that teaches us that the only freedom worth having is one that ensures domestic tranquility that establishes justice, provides for the common American and promotes the general welfare.”
The pastor said that the purpose is to “name the sin of poverty,” and be “the cleansing of the sickness of poverty.”
Barber, therefore, called for two thousand people in D.C., to engage in 40 days of necessary disobedience,” to “start a movement to end the narrative,” about the poor in America.
