#40DaysOfAction Archive
#40DaysOfAction Archive
Mass Meeting & MPOLIS Tour
During the summer and fall of 2017, organizing for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival kicked off with our tour of Mass Meetings and trainings across the United States.
Charlotte, NC (8/9/2017)
Albuquerque, NM (8/15/2017)
Topeka, KS (8/21/2017)
- Video
- Twitter Moment
- Ashanti Spears, “Work and Progression“
Louisville, KY (8/24/2017)
Charlottesville, VA LoveOverFear Call to Conscience Clergy Declaration (8/26/2017)
Milwaukee, WI (8/28/2017)
Detroit, MI (9/5/2017)
General Baker Institute 4th Annual Tribute (9/6/2017)
Long Island Truth Commission on Poverty (9/12/2017)
Los Angeles, CA (9/19/2017)
Chicago, IL (10/12/2017)
Binghamton, NY (10/17/2017)
The Launch of the Poor People’s Campaign
December 4, 2017: Washington, D.C.
Following the Mass Meeting tour, on December 4, 2017, we announced the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival with a press conference in Washington, D.C. We proclaimed that our movement would unite tens of thousands of people across the country to engage in direct action at statehouses and the U.S. Capitol in the spring of 2018 — a six-week protest highlighted by one of the largest waves of civil disobedience in U.S. history.
After the press conference, at the U.S. Capitol, we attempted to deliver a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the tax bill that was then being proposed in Congress. Our letter read:
This country’s most vulnerable will not remain silent as this immoral legislation moves through Congress. Tens of thousands of poor and disenfranchised people, clergy and moral leaders today announced that we are coming together to launch the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. We will combine direct action with grassroots organizing, voter registration, and power building in the largest wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in U.S. history. Fifty years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King and others called for the original Poor People’s Campaign, this legislation you are championing makes clear that we need this work now more than ever.
Organizing #40DaysOfAction
Following the launch of the Campaign, on February 5, 2018, thousands of poor and disenfranchised people, clergy and moral leaders in 30 states and Washington, D.C. announced they were joining the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
Poor people, clergy and activists flooded state capitol buildings from coast to coast and the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to serve notice on state and federal legislative leaders that their failure to address the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and America’s distorted national morality would be met in the spring with six weeks of direct action.
Now the organizing toward the Poor People’s Campaign’s #40DaysOfAction was well underway, as we built on the work of the Mass Meetings to establish Campaign coordinating committees in over 30 states and in Washington, D.C., and to prepare the many teams of the Campaign in each state — political education, theomusicology & movement arts, communications, fundraising, and more.
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In February, 2018, movement artists gathered in Raleigh, NC for our Theomusicology & Movement Arts Convening. During the convening, we worked to establish the visual and musical identity of the Campaign, and to plan for documenting our historic actions in states across the country:
In the spring, we marched with hundreds of striking fast-food workers on the 50th anniversary of the historic Memphis sanitation worker strike, kicking off a two-month national tour to shine a light on the harshest poverty in the nation and lift up the leadership of poor and disenfranchised people who are organizing for change.
In an interview with the Kairos Center, our director and Campaign co-chair Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis explained the goals behind the national tour:
The Campaign is in one sense a massive organizing drive aimed at trying to rattle the nation and break it from the dominant narrative about poverty.
We started our tour in Marks, Mississippi, where in 1968 Dr. King came to listen to some of the nation’s poorest people, an experience which brought him to tears — and where he encountered an organizing spirit that ultimately led to a path-breaking Mule Train from Marks to Resurrection City, in Washington, D.C.
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During this time, the Kairos Center, partnering with filmmaker Dara Kell, also released part 3 of our America Will Be series, which shared some of the deep religious and spiritual insights emerging out of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival:
Finally, we were in Memphis on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King during the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. Campaign co-chairs Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis stood from the balcony where Dr. King was killed and spoke on the significance of the revival of Dr. King’s last campaign. The Kairos Center’s Colleen Wessel-McCoy reflected,
The dreamer was slain. What became of his dream? Today we are called not to mere memorial, but to resurrection. To give new life to the idea that the soul of the nation can be saved. To fight for an understanding of the dream that was a threat to power and had to be destroyed. We are organizing the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival because we believe that the time for commemorations is over. Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis said in Memphis on April 4th that “We need to pick up the baton and carry it the next mile.” As Rev. Dr. Barber said from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, “Nothing would be more tragic than for us than to turn back now.”