Rev. William Barber on the Political Power of Poor People: 'We Have to Change Our Whole Narrative'

DEC. 5, 2019
Rev. William Barber on the Political Power of Poor People: ‘We Have to Change Our Whole Narrative’
By Sarah Jones

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/rev-william-barber-on-the-political-power-of-poor-people.html


Reverend William Barber speaks to the press in 2016. Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images


Not long before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. announced the formation of the Poor People’s Campaign. The project would eventually unite poor whites from Appalachia with farmworkers, indigenous people, and black civil-rights activists. After King’s death in 1968, the campaign marshaled a significant mobilization in Washington, D.C., and then went quiet — until 2017. Revived by Reverend William Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis, the renewed Poor People’s Campaign continues the mission set out by King and his allies so many decades ago. Its ambitions are broad: On its website, it says it intends to “lift up and deepen the leadership of those most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation.” It goes on to state, bluntly, that “people should not live in or die from poverty in the richest nation ever to exist.”

Since its revival, the multiracial, interfaith campaign organized six weeks of civil disobedience last year in addition to bus tours of impoverished communities. Earlier this year, the campaign also hosted several Democratic candidates for president, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, at a forum so they could answer questions from activists. (Another candidate, Pete Buttigieg, spoke at Barber’s Goldsboro, North Carolina, church in recent days.) In June 2020, the campaign intends to organize a march in Washington, D.C., to coincide with its first ever Poor People’s Assembly, which will train the nation’s attention on poverty and related issues ahead of the presidential election. That work serves the campaign’s principal goals: to force a more honest conversation about the state of inequality in America, and to make sure that conversation leads to substantive political change.

The new Poor People’s Campaign builds in part on the Moral Mondays movement, which began in 2013 as a series of demonstrations against the policies of North Carolina’s then-governor, Pat McCrory. Barber, known to many as one of the lead organizers of the Moral Mondays protests, spoke to Intelligencer two weeks ago about the Poor People’s Campaign, the upcoming election, and the obstacles in the way of a more equitable American future.

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed for length.

Polling suggests that Americans tend to think of themselves as middle class, even if their household incomes are low. But historically, the Poor People’s Campaign has fractured that myth by emphasizing poverty. Why is it so important for struggling people to understand themselves as poor or working class?
This campaign is being built from the bottom up. It is poor people, impacted people saying it’s time for us to unite together and transform the reality that they do not have to be. And they were the ones that told us we need to make this clear: that in this nation, a nation that gives trillions of dollars of tax cuts to benefit 75,000 or 100,000 people, there are also 140 million poor and low-wealth people. Some of them are three- or four-hundred dollars from pure economic destruction. Many of them are also living on the street.
Snip...
Much more at the link.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/rev-william-barber-on-the-political-power-of-poor-people.html