Frances Madeson
Pennsylvania Capitol police officers peacefully arrested twenty-four people who were blocking the hallways with banners that read: “Deportation is War on the Poor, Mass Incarceration is War on the Poor.”
It was her first arrest ever.
On May 21, Jill Bartoli of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was handcuffed and carted off through the hallways of the Pennsylvania state capitol. Under opulent statuary and William Penn’s high-minded sentiments inscribed on the rotunda—That we may do the thing that is truly wise and just—Capitol police officers peacefully arrested her and twenty-three others who were blocking the hallways with banners that read: “Deportation is War on the Poor, Mass Incarceration is War on the Poor.”
“I’m seventy-three years old,” Bartoli said concerning her arrest. “It’s time.”
This spring, in thirty-five state capitols and in Washington, D.C., the Poor People’s Campaign is engaging in coordinated, nonviolent “moral fusion” to change the national narrative about poverty. Moral fusion, a term used by the Reverend William Barber, is an inclusionary practice of bringing people and issues together and seeing the interconnectedness of them by drawing on faith traditions.
The six weeks of marches, rallies, actions and teach-ins that began May 14 will culminate in a mass rally in Washington, D.C. on June 23. Between now and then, the Poor People’s Campaign—originally launched fifty years ago by Martin Luther King Jr.—has commitments from thousands of participants nationwide, many willing to risk arrest.
The two dozen protesters arrested in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania during the second week of the protests received citations and misdemeanor charges. The week focused on the link between racism and poverty, including voting rights, immigration, xenophobia, and the mistreatment of indigenous communities.
Frances Madeson
Overall, the goal is to build an intergenerational, cross-racial and multi-faith mass movement led by poor and dispossessed people. Joining this movement requires a commitment to the principles of nonviolent direct action, and to the goal of pressing the nation’s policymakers to end poverty on moral grounds.
“We’re building a nonviolent army of the poor,” explained Desi Burnett of Movement of Immigrant Leaders in Pennsylvania, who emceed at the rally preceding the arrests. “What Martin Luther King Jr. called a ‘freedom church of the poor’ and ‘a new and unsettling force.’ We’re here gathering as family, taking up the torch to take it across the finish line together.”
In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the Poor People’s Campaign will devote the next few years to building power to shape policy.
“This is a launchpad for that,” said Burnett.
Added Kempis “Ghani” Songster, a member of Coalition Against Death by Incarceration who co-emceed the rally with Burnett, “There is nothing immoral about being poor; it is poverty that is the sin,” a slogan of the Poor People’s Campaign. Songster had been serving a sentence of juvenile life without parole, but after thirty years behind bars he was re-sentenced and released from prison last December.
Frances Madeson
Pennsylvania is a useful microcosm for understanding how the linked problems of racism and poverty are playing out across the nation—and a model for how to organize against them.
Poor people and people of color are disproportionately represented among the approximately 5,000 Pennsylvania inmates sentenced to life without the possibility of parole; the state is one of only six that permit such a sentence.
According to the audit report prepared and released by the Pennsylvania Poor People’s Campaign, black men in the state are more than twenty times more likely to serve life without parole, and black women are more than seven times more.
From the May 21, 2018 report:
As of March 2018, eighteen out of the twenty-five Pennsylvania-run correctional institutions are over capacity, while all community corrections centers, federal prisons, and contracted facilities are at full capacity. There is money to be made at keeping our prisons full—full of our mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, comrades and friends.
“We are good people,” Songster intoned from the podium. “We are beautiful people who want simple things. We don’t want to rule the world or bomb anybody. We want help, full dignity for our families and children.”
The Pennsylvania campaign is entirely volunteer-driven under the leadership of Nijmie Dzurinko, a founder of Put People First! PA, a grassroots, multi-issue, base-building organization. In Dzurinko’s favored model of organizing, locals and out-of-towners gather the night before an action in a church. They share a meal, conduct political education on the week’s themes, and create banners and signs with slogans like “Starving a child is violence” and “The war on the poor is immoral” to bring to the march.
People who wish to march and rally with Pennsylvania’s Poor People’s Campaign go through a basic training on nonviolence, and those willing to risk arrest receive another training more specific to the action they’ll undertake. Everyone involved signs a Covenant of Nonviolence and commits not to wear masks, not to destroy life or property, and to create an environment where people feel welcome.
“Why are we doing nonviolent civil disobedience?” asked Rabbi Michael Pollack at the training. “Because it forces a moral crisis. When we put ourselves on the line it forces a decision—are we going to allow this immoral system to continue?”
The movement’s philosophy is informed by Gandhi’s practice of Satyagraha, translated by some as “truth force.”
“We put the truth in front of people. We’re suffering. Too many people live in poverty, and systemic racism is baked into the system,” Pollack said, likening the moral witnesses to ambulance drivers sounding their sirens. “To get to the wounded we’re rushing through our social upbringing that tells you ‘Don’t make trouble!’ ”
For Burnett, Trump’s recent characterization of immigrants as “animals” is part of the overall dehumanization of poor people.
“In this particular instance, he insulted immigrants because immigrants are poor people,” she said. Meanwhile, “White poverty is made to be invisible. The idea of white supremacy is used to control society as a whole, and doesn’t benefit anyone.”
There are plans for the Pennsylvania Poor People’s Campaign to return to the state capitol for protests throughout the six-week campaign.
Frances Madeson is a freelance journalist and author of the comic novel Cooperative Village, a satire on the War on Terror.