Poor People’s Campaign Grows

By SETH SANDRONSKY

What is old is new. Consider the revival of a Poor People’s Campaign picking up where it left off 50 years ago, when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. animated it. Then and now, systemic racism and poverty, a military economy, and bankrupt morality plague the land, as the eco-crisis threatens all of humanity.

These linked issues require movement politics, a focus of the Northern California Poor People’s Campaign (PPC). It held a Moral Monday mass meeting in Sacramento three days after US-led missile attacks against Syria. “We welcome everyone and exclude no one,” according to Rev. Dr. Pamela Anderson, moderator of the Presbetery of Sacramento, told The Progressive Populist at the event in Trinity Cathedral, which hundreds of people attended.

That big-tent approach has a history. MLK helped to join poor and working people together to fight for improved economic and political rights from Dec. 4, 1967 to April 4, 1968, when an assassin killed him in Memphis, Tenn. Black uprisings across the US followed his death.

The PPC of King’s day and time had a history that dates back a century. The first PPC emerged during Reconstruction after the US Civil War ended in 1865, according to Anderson, citing Rev. Dr. William Barber’s historical analysis. “We are part of the third reconstruction, she said, calling the current PPC begun Dec. 4, 2017, a “fusion movement.”

It is currently active in 41 states. In Northern Calif., PPC backers range from the Fight for $15, Sacramento Area Black Caucus to Western Center on Law and Poverty, Hooked on Fishing Not on Violence, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Yuba County Homeless Union, Coalition Of Labor Union Women, Brown Berets de SacrAztlán, CA Dreamers and B’nai Israel Synagogue.

The special focus of the PPC has grown from what King termed the triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism to the ecological crisis of polluted air, land and water. A case in point, according to Anderson, is the poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s drinking water. There, and in other high-poverty, nonwhite areas that author and journalist Chris Hedges calls “sacrifice zones,” a recurring pattern of environmental racism has reared its ugly head.

Organized labor, by and large a financial arm of the Democratic Party, is the biggest group, certainly of women, that can potentially turn the tide against the corporate-state juggernaut smashing these communities and people. The PPC’s linking up with progressive unionists appears to be a beneficial point of departure for both groups.

What is ahead for the PPC? Tactically, “nonviolent direct moral actions” are on tap at state capitols across the US and Washington, D.C., according to Anderson. Accordingly, the fledgling movement will confront politicians of both political parties that have been driving neoliberal policies that shift income and wealth from the bottom and middle to the top, as Pres. Trump and his surrogates urge whites to scapegoat immigrants and minorities as the root causes of national problems such as inequality and poverty. Nobody ever said that movement politics is easy, just necessary to avoid a descent into a more dystopian future that could make the present moment look like a day of leisure.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2018

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