Social justice movement veterans help Poor People’s Campaign

CARTHAGE, N.C. » As the Poor People’s Campaign launches a new initiative, its charismatic leader is working with the generation of civil rights leaders who stood by the Rev. Martin Luther King’s side and continued his efforts to stamp out poverty and racism after his assassination.

“The movement for love and justice and truth is always a continuation. It’s never completed,” said the Rev. William Barber, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign. “And you never approach any movement for justice as though you were the first one.”

Leaders who have battled injustice since the 1960s — the Rev. Jesse Jackson, children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman, and attorney Al McSurely — say the work of the Poor People’s Campaign is urgently needed as income and wealth inequality grows.

“Fewer and fewer have more and more, subsidized by the government,” Jackson said in an interview at his office in Chicago. “And more and more have less and less.”

On Saturday and continuing through October, the campaign will launch a drive to register people for the movement and to vote, piloted by volunteers. Barber said he expects more than 5,000 volunteers to participate in 26 states this weekend.

Volunteers will go beyond merely registering people to vote by emphasizing the connection between joining the movement and casting a ballot and by educating people about the Poor People’s Campaign issues, Barber said.

The registration drive is the second phase of action this year. The first, 40 days of activism, ended in June with a rally attended by thousands in Washington, D.C. It was followed by appearances earlier this month by former Vice President Al Gore in North Carolina. Gore spoke at a service at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, where Barber is the minister, and at a rally the next day in Greensboro.

King had announced the Poor People’s Campaign in December 1967 and planned to hold a massive demonstration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. But four months later, he was felled by an assassin’s bullet. The demonstration that King had planned still took place. Edelman moved to Washington, D.C., to lead the campaign. Protesters set up camp, with Jackson serving as “mayor” of what they called Resurrection City. McSurely brought in busloads of Appalachian residents.

Today, Jackson is president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Edelman is founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund. And McSurely, whose home was firebombed in 1968, is an attorney in Carthage, North Carolina, and serves as adviser to the campaign. He paid for law school with funds from a settlement he received after the federal government wrongly tried him for contempt of Congress.