Creating A ‘New & Unsettling Force’ Beyond 40 Days of Action
This week marks the end of 40 Days of Action with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Saturday, during a national rally in Washington D.C to confront the distorted moral narrative, kicks a multi-year effort of the poor and dispossessed to challenge poverty, racism, militarism and ecological devastation. This is just the beginning.
On Monday, June 18, for the sixth consecutive week, more than 100 poor people, clergy and advocates flooded the statehouse as the Pennsylvania Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival to confront the distorted moral narrative. This week marks the sixth consecutive and final week of a historic season of nonviolent direct action. Across the country, just shy of activists have been arrested with the campaign, including 235 in its final week (so far.)
Participants in Monday’s nonviolent direct action carried signs that read, “This is just the beginning” and “We are a new and unsettling force.” During the rally, the crowd heard from those most impacted by the inseparable evils.
“I’m here today standing with the Poor People’s Campaign to keep families united,” said Yvonne Newkirk. “Families have been torn apart by over incarceration, border patrol, job insecurity, lack of healthcare including care for mental health, and lack of resources in our communities. Our politicians have lost sight of humanity, of empathy, or caring about families. We need the politicians we put in office to respect true family values and to truly care and support us.
During the rally, the crowd sang, prayed, and chanted together:
“We are a new and unsettling force and we are powerful! A new, unsettling force and we’re here — A new and unsettling force for liberation…and we’ve got nothing to lose but our chains!”
The ‘new and unsettling force’ references the the unfinished work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who envisioned a non‐violent army, this ‘freedom church’ of the poor, of the poorest citizens from ten different urban and rural areas, who would to lead a sustained, massive, direct action movement in Washington.
“The dispossessed of this nation ‐ the poor, both white and Negro ‐ live in a cruelly unjust society,” said
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967. “The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose.
If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
In Pennsylvania, there are millions of people with little or nothing to lose:
At $7.25/hr, Pennsylvania’s minimum wage in lower than in all of the states surrounding it, and has not been raised in over 10 years. More than a third — approximately 37% — of Pennsylvania residents earn less than $15/hour, which for a full-time, full-year worker would be about $31,000 a year.
Women and people with disabilities earn less than their male and able bodied counter-parts.
Too many Pennsylvanians cannot afford their homes. Cost-burdened homes (meaning one pays 30% of their monthly income to rent) impacts many of the states residents. In Philadelphia: 53.4% of Philadelphia renters are cost-burdened and inPittsburgh, 26% of renters are cost-burdened.
With over 48,034 people incarcerated in Pennsylvania, more than 81,000 children in Pennsylvania have a parent who is incarcerated (disproportionately poor people and people of color.)
There are dozens of undocumented women and children detained at Berks Detention Center, forced in live in inhumane conditions for decades.
In some parts of Pennsylvania (like Clearfield, Adams, and Indiana and other counties,) the veteran unemployment rate is more than double Pennsylvania’s average.
With thousands of active wells, fracking has destroyed the livelihood of Pennsylvanians, and denied their access to unpolluted water and air.
Life expectancy varies across the state based on where you live, your income, and your race. White Pennsylvanians will on average live five more years than their black counterparts.
Over 700,000 Pennsylvanians still remain without insurance
Pennsylvanians have the third highest rate of cancer incidence in the nation, only behind Kentucky and Louisiana. Interestingly enough, these three states all share a highly extractive fossil fuel economy.
All the while, the very polluters, developers, manufacturers, detainers, that are destroying our communities, pump millions of dollars through campaign donations and gifts to our elected officials.
These are the people that have come together this year and over the last six weeks to demand change. Nearly 100 participants have been arrested and 1500 have rallied at the State Capitol as part of the Poor People’s Campaign during these 40 Days of Moral Action.
Nationwide, more than 2,000 Poor People’s Campaign activists have been arrested in the most expansive wave of nonviolent direct action in U.S. history. The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has chapters in three dozen states.
These six weeks are just the beginning.
On Tuesday, a delegation representing organizations from the Pennsylvania Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee will travel to Washington D.C to spend the week attending nonviolent training, mass meetings, workshops, interfaith services, cultural arts, a door-to-door canvass to build support for the Campaign and develop leadership skills needed for the next leg of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
This week of organizing concludes on Saturday, June 23, when thousands of activists from across the country with the Poor People’s Campaign will convene in Washington D.C to demand an end to the inseparable evils of poverty, racism, militarism, and ecological devastation with a final rally, led by national co-chairs Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz TheoHarris.
Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to action 50 years ago, in his I Have a Dream Speech to, “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed,” advocates will return to Pennsylvania following the June 23 rally to continue their organizing efforts with an eye toward voter registration and mobilization, political education and power building from the bottom up.
