From March 5th – 8th, leaders from around the country were in Selma for the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights campaign and “Bloody Sunday.” Among them was a delegation representing the effort to re-ignite Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call, originally made in December 1967, for a Poor People’s Campaign. These leaders came from organizations around the country – Iraq Veterans Against the War, Faith Matters Network, Skylight Pictures, the Kairos Center, Union Forum at Union Theological Seminary, Howard University School of Divinity, and more. We worked with community organizations based in Selma and from other parts of the South, including the Alabama Saving OurSelves Coalition, the Alabama Multicultural Fisher and Seafood Worker-Owned Cooperative, and Selma Auto Workers Untied, to hold up the plight of the poor today, the fight being made by those directly affected to secure their basic civil and human rights, and the insight of those communities into solutions to the crises we are all facing. We were honored to be invited to Selma by Faya Rose Toure and AL State Sen. Hank Sanders, Civil Rights movement veterans who are still fighting today.
[aesop_image img=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IMG_1895.jpg” alt=”Poverty in Selma” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Crowd at the Community Hearing on Poverty in Selma, at Brown Chapel AME Church” captionposition=”left”]
As part of that effort, we organized a Community Hearing at the historic Brown Chapel, a central base of operations for the 1965 Selma campaign. Religious and community leaders dealing with the many problems facing the poor today testified about these issues, how their communities are organizing themselves to fight back, and the movement that we need in order to address these problems’ shared root causes. Dr. King, in his call for a Poor People’s Campaign, described this kind of movement as beginning with the poor taking action together as “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” He drew on the experience of the Selma campaign to describe what a Poor People’s Campaign would mean and why it was a necessary next step:
“I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.”
The realities of life for the poor in Selma, the South, the nation, and the world today make Dr. King’s call to “raise certain basic questions about the whole society” more urgent than ever. The community hearing at Brown Chapel, demonstrating those realities and the emerging movement of the poor in this country, was an important moment in the effort, which has begun in earnest, to build a new Poor People’s Campaign for today and to take up the unfinished business of the civil and human rights movement which reached its height in 1960s.
Click here to see the program and amazing lineup of speakers from the Community Hearing.
Jacqui Patterson of the NAACP provided powerful framing remarks on the climate justice crisis in the South:
People are taking to the streets and to the pulpits, lobbying in state houses and in the halls of congress, creating justice based culture work, generating research, starting local food/energy/recycling worker co-ops, engaging in litigation, and more. Folks are standing up, organizing, crafting a new vision and doing what they need to do to steward a just transition from corporate domination to a just society that uplifts the civil and human rights of all, including the rights of Mother Earth.
Cherri Foytlin of the Bridge the Gulf Project was invited to speak about the call for a new Poor People’s Campaign at the bridge crossing on Sunday. You can read the full text of her speech here and an excerpt below:
The thing is, at the time that Dr. King was taken from us, he was not finished in his work. And he left us a pretty large mandate of what he felt was needed to secure our futures. He called it The Poor People’s Campaign. It was his hope to mobilize the poor to be empowered to take action in our lives, to be at the front in building a society of inclusion and equality.
To do so we must be honest about where we have come from, and where we are today. The truth is that since the day that Dr. King was murdered, there are 10 million more people living in poverty in the United States. In fact, this town – Selma, has a poverty rate of 45 percent.
It is time to understand that this is not an accident, that the systems in this country are built to make this so, and that poverty is violence to all of our peoples.
We must remember the words of not only Dr. King, but of our dear Brother Malcolm who spoke of the knife driven in the backs of people of color. He spoke specifically of the dangers of celebrating a knife half removed.
Rev. Jennifer Bailey, founder of the Faith Matters Network and also part of the Poor People’s Campaign delegation to Selma, was asked to give the benediction to close the official commemoration service on the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, you can watch her prayer here and read it below:
Eternal God, you who were and is and is to come. We come this morning giving you thanks for the foot soldiers and unsung saints who with there feet and resolved paved the way for us on this march toward freedom. As Dr. King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.” Grant us the strength to bend that arc here in Selma where 40% of residents live in poverty and unemployment still hovers at 11%. Embolden us to bend the arc in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island where the strange fruit Billie Holiday once sang now lie in the street rather than the poplar trees. Awaken in us a sense of moral imagination that grants us the ability to see the world as it truly is and audacity to build a the kind of world that allows all God’s people—regardless of race, class, religion, or gender—to live lives of health and wholeness.
The United Workers of Baltimore City, one of the groups that participated in the Poor People’s Campaign delegation to Selma, wrote powerful field diaries reflecting on their experiences that weekend. You can find them here and here, and read excerpts below.
[aesop_image img=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/UW-in-Selma.jpg” alt=”Poverty in Selma” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”The United Workers’ delegation to Selma” captionposition=”left”]
“We were welcomed into the home of a woman outside of Fort Depot who, despite owning a home with more adequate infrastructure lived across the street from a lagoon where the town dumped raw sewage. Overflowing sewage constantly floods her yard and her home. We were struck by the similarities of poverty in rural settings and urban. Someone living within the city’s infrastructure would not necessarily be subjected to raw sewage but the anguish, suffering, lack of attention from local officials, and the striking connection between poverty and health and housing are universal to the struggle…
“We understand that this trip is not just to celebrate or commemorate what happened 50 years ago, but more importantly to continue what started more than 50 years ago, we are still living in a political and economic system that exploits and hurts people, we are still living in a society where our basic human rights are not met. We have a duty to fight for those rights as others did before us.”
“Martin Luther King called us to restructure the economic and political system during the “Golden Era” in the US, a time when productivity and income where growing hand in hand, when globalization and automation weren’t even a part of our economy. Today, the call for a Poor People’s campaign is even more urgent, the need to unite across color lines, to build a movement that comes from the bottom-up, is not a necessity it is an urgency, an obligation, and we are part of that movement, we are living history, and we, United Workers, are not alone!”
The call for a new Poor People’s Campaign also got some great press coverage in Selma, see the articles that featured or mentioned the campaign below:
Campaign Aims to Foster Popular Uprising Against Crisis of Inequality (Mint Press News)
The Dark Side of Selma the Mainstream Media Ignored (ThinkProgress)
Meet the Selma Foot Soldiers Who Are Still Marching Today (ThinkProgress)