Call to action made
Capital Region Poor People’s Campaign gets ready for more protests
Capital Region Poor People’s Campaign gets ready for more protests.
The Capital Region Poor People’s Campaign is heading into its second active year with a call for moral revival, a push for more protests, and bills for thousands of dollars from the city of Albany that it doesn’t plan to pay.
The national Poor People’s Campaign, inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., says it’s fighting against what it calls a moral crisis — millions of people living in poverty in the U.S., according to census data. Half of New Yorkers can’t meet basic needs and are living paycheck to paycheck, said the Rev. Emily Mcneill, director of the state’s Labor-religion Coalition, which is active in the campaign.
At the group’s first public meeting in 2019, three dozen citizens filled the pews of Troy United Presbyterian Church on Monday evening. They were diverse in gender, age and race.
A middle-aged woman crocheted mats for the homeless from recycled plastic bags. A white-haired lady in a pink pussy hat from the Women’s March took notes. A nun from the St. Joseph’s order leaned in with a hand on her hearing aid to catch the conversation reviewing last year and looking forward to this year.
In 2018, the campaign staged 40 days of action across the country against poverty, racism, militarism and environmental degradation. The group planned six protests and 50-plus other events in Albany. More than 1,000 people joined in, and 125 were arrested for civil disobedience, said Joe Paparone, lead organizer for the Labor-religion Coalition.
Paparone said the campaign intentionally didn’t notify police
when it was staging a protest.
“We made a political decision not to do that,” he told the group Monday. “When you’re challenging the structures of power and people of power, if you’re shaking hands with them all the time, they know you’re not really a threat or a risk to them.”
“A little bit of unpredictability can be a good thing when you’re trying to speak truth to power,” he added.
Last summer, the city of Albany issued four bills totaling thousands of dollars to the group for unplanned police presence required at protests. The group’s attorney, Mark Mishler, said the campaign already communicated to the city that it doesn’t plan to pay.
“It’s a non-issue and a dead issue. No bill has been paid. No bill will be paid. I think the city understands,” Mishler, who is also an active member in the campaign, said.
David Galin, Mayor Kathy Sheehan’s deputy chief of staff, said the bills are still outstanding and are going through the “regular collection process,” which means the city’s legal department follows up with letters when bills go unpaid. At Monday’s meeting, there was no mention of the unmet payments. Instead, the campaign is moving forward this year into phase two of its organized actions.
Mcneill said the first goal is to change the moral narrative — that poverty is a fringe issue, that being poor is not an accident or poor people’s fault, and that there are not enough resources or expertise to solve the issue. The next steps are building power and influencing policymakers, Mcneill said.
“We want to shift people’s expectations and in so doing, shift what’s politically possible,” she said.
This year, the group’s Capital Region subcommittee, one of seven in the state, plans to canvass to learn what the community needs and wants, organize Poor People’s Hearings to listen to stories of the impoverished, and host freedom schools for political education. They’ll also stage more protests at the Capitol as they gear up for another national mass mobilization in June.
Paparone said the campaign will focus this year on Rensselaer County because of strong membership from the area and organizations already active on issues like policeinvolved shootings and immigrant sanctuary city status in Troy and environmental justice in Hoosick Falls. “If we can knit things together through Rensselaer County,” he said, “there’s a real possibility for change.”