America once fought a war against poverty – now it wages a war on the poor

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The Guardian
By Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
April 15, 2018

In 2013, Callie Greer’s daughter Venus died in her arms after a battle with breast cancer. If caught early, the five-year survival rate for women diagnosed with breast cancer is close to 100%. But Venus’s cancer went undiagnosed for months because she couldn’t afford health insurance. She lived in Alabama, a state that refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Venus’s death is not an isolated incident – more than 250,000 people like her die in the United States from poverty and related issues every year.

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2 Ministers Are Trying To Revive The Campaign To End Poverty That MLK Started: Interview with Huffpost

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Huffpost
By Julia Craven
April 10, 2018

He couldn’t stop thinking about them, their wide eyes and the silent hunger that lay behind them.

Staring up at the ceiling from his motel bed, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told his closest confidant, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, that the impoverished children they visited earlier that day were cemented in his mind.

It was June 1966 and the pair had stopped by an early Head Start facility in Marks, Mississippi, which is the seat of Quitman County, a devastatingly poor area in the alluvial plains of the Mississippi Delta that was thought to be the most impoverished in the country at the time.

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Land of the Rich, Home of the Poor: America’s Poverty Crisis: Interview on News Beat

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News Beat
March 21, 2018

The United States is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and by certain fiscal parameters, the wealthiest. It’s richest citizens own roughly 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Yet, about 40 million Americans are living in poverty, and about 20 million are mired in extreme poverty, scraping by on less than $2 a day. At the same time that the top 1 percent are increasing their vast fortunes, the income inequality gap is ever-widening, and the middle class is dissolving. For tens of millions of Americans, the rose-colored portrait of a booming U.S. economy is pure fiction. Instead, they’re spending every waking moment simply trying to survive.

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Huge Organizing Effort, ’40 Days of Action’ Launching to Fight Poverty: Interview by Eleanor J. Bader

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AlterNet
March 4, 2018

The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the recently launched Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of three kids in a family she describes as deeply committed to improving life for the excluded and marginalized.

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other peace and anti-apartheid activists were frequent guests in her home, and even as a child, Theoharis understood that religious faith—in her case, Presbyterian—had to be linked to social justice.

This coupling—faith and justice—led Theoharis to work with the National Union of the Homeless as a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate. “Their organizing was inspired by the Poor People’s Campaign led by Dr. King in 1967 and ’68, and I quickly learned the extent of the unfinished business that still needed to be done,” she begins.

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Reverend William Barber & Rev. Liz Theoharis: The New Poor People’s Campaign: Interview by Marc Steiner

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The Marc Steiner Show
February 13, 2017

We are approaching the 50th Anniversaries of the assassination of Martin Luther King and his last great movement, the Poor People’s Campaign. The Poor People’s Campaign in its 21st Century form is surging back as a national movement founded by Rev. Dr. William Barber, who created the Moral Mondays Movement and is chair of the chair of the NAACP’s Legislative Political Action Committee, and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, founder and co-director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, and coordinator of the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary. Rev.s Barber and Theoharis are touring the country working with local groups breathing a new life into the Poor People’s Campaign.

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Why we’re fighting for MLK’s final cause

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CNN
By William Barber and Liz Theoharis
February 12, 2018

(CNN) Fifty years ago today, hundreds of black sanitation workers in Memphis walked off their jobs after two of their brothers were crushed to death by their truck’s faulty compactor. For more than 60 days, the striking workers made daily marches from the local church to city hall, wearing signs that declared, “I AM A MAN.”

Their demands were simple. They wanted a wage they could live on, the recognition of their union and the basic dignity and respect all of us should be afforded as children of God. And their struggle became an anchor of the original Poor People’s Campaign, a cross-racial fusion movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others aimed at ending the the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism.

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Meet Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: Interview by Ben & Jerry’s

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Ben & Jerry’s
January 30, 2018

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is the co-director of the Kairos Center and the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, a National Call for Moral Revival. Building on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last, great unfinished project, the Poor People’s Campaign is taking on systemic poverty, systemic racism, environmental degradation, and militarism in an effort to end the war on the poor and transform our country.

We feel lucky to have had the chance to speak with Rev. Theoharis recently about her life, the Poor People’s Campaign, and how all of us, if we come together, can help save the soul of our democracy.

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MLK

A different kind of MLK Day

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The Hill & Newsweek
By Rev Dr. William J. Barber, II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
January 15, 2018

On the night before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, he invoked a lesson from biblical Egypt in a speech that is often called “Promised Land.” Pharaoh’s favorite formula for perpetuating slavery, he reminded us, was to keep the slaves fighting among themselves, for joined together they were too strong to subdue.

On that fateful eve in 1968, King used some of his final words to call for people of all colors to unite in a human rights revolution that would end destructive, entrenched poverty and prompt a radical redistribution of political and economic power. This outline for a path toward a modern day promised land was more than rhetoric. In fact, he and other leaders had already launched the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement that would bring together 50,000 of the nation’s poor for a march on Washington the next week, and that was supposed to kick off an extended fight against dehumanization, discrimination and poverty wages in the richest country in the world.

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Fighting for the Dream of Economic Justice: Interview by Shaun King

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The Takeaway
PRI & WNYC
January 15, 2018

It has been 50 years since the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his major push for economic justice.

Dr. King’s 1968 “Poor People’s Campaign” was a call for underprivileged people around the country to rise up and demand better jobs, wages, education and more. Dr. King touched on issues of poverty during a speech, on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated. At a church in Memphis, Tennessee, he spoke in support of sanitation workers in the city who were on strike in protest against low wages and unfair working conditions.

Now, half a century later, there’s a new effort underway to renew Dr. King’s campaign against poverty.

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Poor People’s Campaign Revival: A Season of Organizing: Interview by Sharmini Peries

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The Real News
December 17, 2017

As the 50th anniversary of MLK Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign approaches, organizers want to take up King’s mantle to “unite the bottom of this country, to bring about real change, to shift the narrative that is demonizing people for the problems they’re facing and to build power from the bottom up,” says campaign co-chair Dr. Liz Theoharis

SHARMINI PERIES: It’s the Real News Network I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. In 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along with other civil rights leaders launched a Poor People’s Campaign. It was an effort to end poverty, racism and militarism in America.

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