https://archive.md/REnv9
"In the summer of 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. visited homes in the hamlet of
Marks, Mississippi. Later he remembered the hundreds of children who lacked
shoes. A mother told King that her children had no clothes for school. The
Nobel laureate wept openly. “They didn’t even have any blankets to cover their
children up on a cold night,” he recalled. “And I said to myself,
God does not
like this.” Then he vowed, “We are going to say in no uncertain terms that we
aren’t going to accept it any longer. We’ve got to go to Washington in big
numbers.”
In March 1968, King brought together a group of more than 50 leaders
representing Black Belt sharecroppers, Appalachian coal miners, Chicano
farmworkers, and American Indians, among others, to join the Poor People’s
Campaign. The poor, “both white and Negro, live in a cruelly unjust society,”
he said. “If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a
freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent
national life.”
America’s sickness was spiritual—and would be terminal, King insisted, unless
we experienced a “radical revolution of values.” A shift to the left or the
right could not save us; only a movement that changed the moral narrative could
refocus our priorities on building a society that honored the dignity of every
person. This country had to be born again—not only in budgets and policy
decisions, but in spirit.
The preacher in King knew that such a moral revival could not simply be spoken
into existence. Poor people, who are so often pitted against one another,
needed to unite in a national campaign of direct action to save America’s soul,
King told the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Today we face a national crisis that is in many ways an intensifying of the
storm that rocked America in 1968. But too often, our attempts to diagnose what
ails us cannot get past the tired debates of left-versus-right politics. King’s
analysis was that interlocking systems of violence, literal and
metaphorical—which he called racism, poverty, and militarism—blinded most
Americans to the lives of people in places like Marks. Until a Poor People’s
Campaign compelled Americans to see “them” as “us,” the ideal of America would
remain beyond reach."
Original at
<
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/a-new-poor-peoples-campaign/552503/>
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
