THE PEOPLE ARE RISING UP AGAINST THE NEW EVIL EMPIRE

THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM DEMOCRACY NOW.

AMY GOODMAN: The Yara Allen Justice Choir, singing Saturday in Washington, D.C., joining thousands who rallied and marched on the Capitol for the Poor People's Campaign, the mass demonstration following six weeks of actions around the country and more than, well, 2,500 to 3,000 arrests, as protesters joined what they're calling a "moral revival" to demand an end to systematic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation. The march brought together activists from around the country, more than 50 years after demonstrators converged in Washington in 1968, to take up the cause that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King had been fighting for when he was assassinated April 4th, 1968: the original Poor People's Campaign. Just over a week after her husband's memorial service, Coretta Scott King led a march to demand an Economic Bill of Rights that included a guaranteed basic income, full employment and more low-income housing. Half a century later, the Reverend Dr. William Barber and Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis led the new Poor People's Campaign in a march uniting low-wage workers, clergy, community activists, even some activists who marched in the original Poor People's Campaign 50 years ago.

 

The demonstrators rallied to protest widespread poverty, just days after the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, slammed a new U.N. report slamming the Trump administration's policies for worsening the state of poverty in the United States. The report details how 40 million Americans live in extreme poverty, 18-and-a-half—live in poverty; 18-and-a-half million Americans live in extreme poverty. Nikki Haley said last week, "It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America," this as she pulled the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

 

Well, organizers say the Poor People's Campaign has been the most expansive wave of nonviolent direct action in the U.S. this century, with well over 2,000 arrests. We turn now to voices from Saturday's Poor People's Campaign rally.

 

REV. MARK THOMPSON: Please welcome the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis and the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber.

 

REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: We are a powerful group of poor people and moral leaders and activists and organizers and freedom fighters. And 40 days ago, on Mother's Day, we launched this campaign. Our work has only just begun, 'cause over the past 40 days people of all races, colors and creeds have joined together to engage in nonviolent moral fusion direct action to demand that we lift all families up, we lift all people up. We don't break them apart. It is unjust, immoral and unnecessary to have millions of poor people in this land. It is unjust, immoral and unnecessary that we have children warehoused across this country because of their immigration status, because of their homelessness, because their families had no access to water. We need a Poor People's Campaign. So we are building one.

 

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: We gather today for a call to action. We gather here declaring it's time for a moral uprising all across America. We are in the same moral tradition of the prophets of Israel, who challenged kings and rulers to stop legislating evil. We are in the same moral tradition of Jesus, whose evangelical work was not being against gay people, but being against poverty. We are in the same moral tradition of the Apache and other indigenous spiritual people, who taught us to care and not destroy and poison the air, water and the land. We are in the same moral tradition of the abolitionists, who knew, if slavery was legal, it was still immoral, and it had to be challenged. We are in the same moral tradition of the reconstructionists, who, after the Civil War, fought for equal protection under the law. We are in the same moral tradition as the social gospel movement, who looked at poverty and corporate greed and asked, "What would Jesus do?" We are in the same moral tradition of those who fought for labor unions and decent wages and 8-hour workdays, even when they were killed and hung in places like Chicago. We are in the same moral tradition as Cesar Chavez and MLK and Rabbi Heschel and Fannie Lou Hamer and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman and Rosa Parks and Unitarians and Muslims like Malcolm and gay people and social justice activists like Bayard Rustin. We stand in the same moral tradition that have always fought to help this nation be a little more, a little more grounded in love, truth and peace, and to come a little closer to being a more perfect union. This is who we are.

 

Make no mistake, America. You've got to get a new lexicon for this. You won't be able to report this like you've normally reported it. We are black. We are white. We are brown. We are red. We are yellow. We are gay. We are straight. We are old. We are urban. We are rural. We are Jewish. We are Christian. We are Hindus. We are Muslim. We are people of faith. We are people not of faith. From Alaska to Alabama, to the Deep South in Mississippi, to northern Maine, from California to the Carolinas, from the Midwest, from the Rust Belt to the Wheat Belt, we are the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. And we won't be silent anymore!…

 

And so, today is about the people. This is a different kind of rally. We've not invited people here today to speak for the people. We've invited the people to speak for themselves, because I think it's time for a revolution.

PROTESTERS: [singing] Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around. I'm gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to Freedomland. Ain't gonna let no president turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. Ain't gonna let no president turn me around. I'm going to keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to Freedomland.

REV. JAMES FORBES: I am here because 50 years ago Martin Luther King was assassinated. This is the 50th anniversary. How did he die? Working for poor people. And now heaven—as you know, I don't talk about heaven much, even though I'm a preacher—has declared that in order to show that Martin Luther King did not shed his blood in vain, heaven has decreed that dramatic, divine enhancement of movement is going to take place, in order to say to King and to Bobby Kennedy, "Ah, although you shed your blood, the movement was not killed. It was not extinguished."

 

AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts, the border, what's happening and the separation of children? You're—you were the head of Riverside Church.

 

REV. JAMES FORBES: Yes.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And in New York, something like 700 children who have been separated from their parents, apparently, are in various institutions. The governor or the mayor have not exactly found out where they are.

 

REV. JAMES FORBES: Let's put it in historic context. The separation of children, for me, goes back all the way to the slavery process, by which the natural way to make slaves and to dehumanize people was to break their family bonds. All I can think of: Here it goes again. Whether or not it is separating by incarceration on trumped-up charges or trivialized assessment of criminal penalties, or whether or not it's separation on the basis of economics, or whether it's separation on the basis of gerrymandering, or whether it's separation on border rights, every time families are torn apart, the fabric of humanity has been rent. That's why I'm saying what's happening in Texas is only a kind of, as it were, sort of snapshot of what is wrong in the body politic in general.

 

PROTESTERS: [singing] I've got a feeling everything's gonna be all right.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Those last voices, the Reverend James Forbes, distinguished senior minister emeritus of the Riverside Church in New York, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was with Reverend Dr. King when he was assassinated April 4th, 1968. Singing was the Reverend Barber, who, together with the Reverend Liz Theoharis, have been leading the new poor people's movement that they say has just begun. In these last six weeks, there have been over 2,500 arrests.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/25/50_years_after_mlk_s_poor.