‘This is just the beginning’

NJ Poor People’s Campaign Advocates to Flood Statehouse as Season of Nonviolent Direct Action Enters Final Week 

Local Advocates to Head to Washington, DC to Join March on U.S. Capitol, Kick Off Second Phase of Campaign

Trenton, NJ —Poor people, clergy and advocates will flood the statehouse Monday marking the sixth and final week of a historic season of nonviolent direct action by the NJ Poor People’s Campaign.

Participants in Monday’s nonviolent direct action are expected to carry signs that read, “This is just the beginning” and “We are a new and unsettling force.” Following Monday’s protest, a delegation of NJ Poor People’s Campaign participants will travel to Washington, D.C., for a week of trainings and actions culminating in a massive rally at the U.S. Capitol June 23 to launch the second phase of the campaign. Campaign participants travelling to DC are available for interview.

Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to action in his I Have a Dream Speech to, “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed,” advocates will return to NJ following the June 23 rally to continue their organizing efforts with an eye toward voter registration and mobilization, political education and power building from the bottom up.

Over the last six weeks, scores of participants have been arrested and hundreds have rallied in NJ as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. Nationwide, more than 2,000 Poor People’s Campaign activists have been arrested as part of the most expansive wave of nonviolent direct action in U.S. history. The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has chapters in three dozen states.

WHO:                   Participants in the New Jersey Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and advocates from throughout the state.

WHAT:                  Protest at NJ statehouse

WHERE:               State House Annex Steps, located at 131-137 West State Street, Trenton, NJ

WHEN:                  Monday, June 18, 2018, 2PM Rally

BACKGROUND:

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is co-organized by Repairers of the Breach, a social justice organization founded by the Rev. Barber; the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary; and hundreds of local and national grassroots groups across the country.

On May 14, campaign co-chairs the Revs. William Barber and Liz Theoharis kicked off a six-week season of nonviolent direct action demanding new programs to fight systemic poverty and racism, immediate attention to ecological devastation and measures to curb militarism and the war economy. For five consecutive weeks, protesters have taken to state capitols across the country, with thousands arrested nationwide for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience.

On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings convened a two-hour hearing on Capitol Hill to examine poverty and hear testimony from people organizing with the Poor People’s Campaign around the country.  They heard firsthand accounts from an undocumented California woman struggling to raise a family; from an Alabama woman whose daughter died in her arms because the state refused to expand Medicaid; and from a Flint woman who is fighting for clean water in her community. Sen. Warren had the last word: “What Has to Come out of this is ‘Don’t Waste My Pain.’ We are going to make change from this.”  Watch the hearing here.

The protests from coast to coast are reigniting the Poor People’s Campaign, the 1968 movement started by Dr. King and so many others to challenge racism, poverty and militarism. The Campaign is expected to be a multi-year effort, but over the first 40 days, poor and disenfranchised people, moral leaders and advocates are engaging in nonviolent direct action, including by mobilizing voters, knocking on tens of thousands of doors, and holding teach-ins, among other activities, as a moral fusion movement comprised of people of all races and religions takes off.

For the past two years, leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival have carried out a listening tour in dozens of states across this nation, meeting with tens of thousands of people from El Paso, Texas to Marks, Mississippi to South Charleston, West Virginia. Led by the Revs. Barber and Theoharis, the campaign has gathered testimonies from hundreds of poor people and listened to their demands for a better society.

A Poor People’s Campaign Moral Agenda, announced last month, was drawn from this listening tour, while an audit of America conducted with allied organizations, including the Institute for Policy Studies and the Urban Institute, showed that, in many ways, we are worse off than we were in 1968.

The Moral Agenda, which is guiding the 40 days of actions, calls for major changes to address systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative, including repeal of the 2017 federal tax law, implementation of federal and state living wage laws, universal single-payer health care, and clean water for all.

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