From Civil Rights to Human Rights – Poverty in Selma 50 years after Bloody Sunday

Contact: Shay O’Reilly, 703-868-1473, shay.g.oreilly@gmail.com; Karenna Gore, newpoorpeoplescampaign@gmail.com
What: Community hearing on poverty today in Selma and throughout the South
Where: Brown Chapel AME Church (410 Martin Luther King St, Selma, AL 36703)
When: Friday, March 6th, 2015 at 11am

This March marks 50 years since the Selma voting rights campaign, the march to Montgomery, and the violence of “Bloody Sunday.” Fifty years later, community leaders in Selma are calling for a continuation of the fight for civil and fundamental human rights, not just a commemoration of those events. In Selma and throughout the South, communities are still struggling against injustice, oppression, and exploitation. Everyday people are fighting back against an unfair police and prison system, cuts to public education, the denial of Medicaid expansion, unsafe working conditions and unfair wages, ecological devastation and the dangerous pollution of their communities, and renewed attacks on voting rights. Confronting these realities, religious and community leaders are asking questions like “What does it mean to take up the unfinished business of the movement of the 1960s?” and “What kind of movement do we need to build today?”

From March 5th – 8th, leaders from around the country will be in Selma for the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing. Among them will be 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 Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call, originally made in December 1967, for a Poor People’s Campaign.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 come from organizations around the country – Iraq Veterans Against the War, the United Workers in Baltimore, the Faith Matters Network, Skylight Pictures, the Bridge the Gulf Project, The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and the Union Forum at Union Theological Seminary, Howard University School of Divinity, and more. They’ll be working with community organizations based in Selma and from other parts of the South, including the Alabama Saving OurSelves Coalition, the Alabama Multicultural Fisheries and Seafood Workers 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.

As part of that effort, there will be a Community Hearing at the historic Brown Chapel (410 Martin Luther King St, Selma, AL 36703), a central base of operations for the 1965 Selma campaign, on Friday, March 6th at 11am. Religious and community leaders dealing with the many problems facing the poor today will testify 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, will be 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.