The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival co-chairs Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis will convene the next Mass Meeting of the Poor People’s Campaign tomorrow (Tuesday, October 16) at 7:00 pm EST, at United Presbyterian Church in Binghamton, NY. If you aren’t in Binghamton, you can watch the livestream of the Mass Meeting at the Poor People’s Campaign Facebook page and pledge to join the Poor People’s Campaign online.
The Binghamton Mass Meeting is also the culmination of a series of Truth Commissions on Poverty in New York State organized by the Labor-Religion Coalition of NYS across the summer and fall. The results of the Truth Commission will be announced at the Mass Meeting by Rev. Emily McNeill, the executive director of the Labor-Religion Coalition. You can read the published Truth Commission report here.
Why a Truth Commission on poverty in New York? As the Coalition explains,
Despite New York’s reputation as a progressive bastion, racial and economic injustice continue to devastate and divide communities across the state. New York perennially has the highest income inequality in the nation. Immense wealth is concentrated in the New York City area, but more than 3 million New Yorkers live below the federal poverty line, and millions more struggle to make ends meet. Child poverty has reached a crisis level particularly in upstate New York, where more than half of children in Rochester and Buffalo and over 40 percent of children in Binghamton, Utica, Syracuse, Schenectady, Troy and Niagara Falls are poor. Poverty in our state continues to be highly racialized. Families with a black head-of-household are twice as likely and Latino-headed families are two-and-a-half times more likely to be low-income than white-headed households. In addition, Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo all rank in the top 10 U.S. metro areas with the highest concentration of black and Latino poverty. This gross racial and economic inequality present an urgent moral crisis that calls for a statewide response.
The first Truth Commission was held in the Southern Tier of New York State on July 22, in Cuba, NY. In the western Southern Tier (Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua and Steuben counties) 16 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line and another 30 percent earn less than the cost of living. In all, more than 63,000 households — 45 percent of the region — are struggling to meet their basic needs. Suzanne Flierl Krull, a regional and state commissioner, reflected on the event afterward:
It is my hope, and the hope of the other commissioners who are serving on Truth Commissions across the country, that these events will give others the energy they need to speak up and to speak out. We hope that discussions of poverty will no longer be dominated by content experts who have never personally experienced the trauma which poverty itself forces upon people (no matter how compassionate their advocacy might be). We hope that these conversations will be empowered and energized by those individuals who have truly contextual, lived experience with being poor. They, too, are poverty experts, and our communities need their expertise.
The next Truth Commission was held in the Capital Region, in Schenectady, NY. In Schenectady, Albany, and Rensselaer counties, 4 in 10 households earn less than the cost of living. Testifiers at the event spoke on the struggle for living wages, welfare rights, justice in our broken incarceration system, and immigration. As the Kairos Center’s Shailly Gupta Barnes explained, “poverty is the ‘worst form of violence.’ It is a ‘constant battle’ against an enemy that demands sacrifices of our families, our parents, our children, of everything that we hold dear. And it terrorizes our communities in the places where we think we’re protected.”
Finally, last month, we attended the Long Island Truth Commission in Wyandanch, NY and heard testimony on the lack of access to public transportation, lack of affordable housing, assaults on labor rights, and struggles with the welfare system that Long Islanders face every day. On Long Island, 35 percent of households earn less than the cost of living. Yet even in the midst of these realities, testifiers at the event refused to stop fighting. Kairos co-director Larry Cox said at the end of the Truth Commission, “The power in this room is raw and inspiring — nobody gives us this power. This is how change happens.” For more on the Long Island Truth Commission, view the Kairos Center’s Twitter moment for the event here.
The Truth Commission on Poverty in New York State has vividly proven that poverty and its attendant evils are a constant daily reality for millions of New Yorkers. It has indicted our current system as broken and systematically violent against the poor and dispossessed. But as Shailly concluded in her reflection on the Capital Region Truth Commission, violence and terror don’t have the last word:
While the relentless and systemic violence we’re facing relies on our fear and isolation, it does not account for the amazing bravery that is standing up in Schenectady . . . It does not account for the people who say, first, “I shouldn’t have to live like this,” and then the community that says, “we shouldn’t have to live like this.” This move from “I” to “we” is a love that the enemy we’re up against does not account for, because it cannot conceive of it. But it is deep in that love — in the ability to see each other and ourselves for who we truly are and what we hold and fight for together — that we will win.
Tomorrow, join us in Binghamton for the culmination of the Truth Commission process in New York as we make that move from “I” to “we” with the New York launch of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and as we continue our call to unite the poor and dispossessed across the nation for a moral revival from below that will end poverty forever.