Rozsa Keller
Wisconsin Poor People’s Campaign across the street from the state capitol in Madison in June 2018, as part of the “Forty Days of Moral Action.”
On May 14, 2018, scores of protesters descended on the grounds of Wisconsin’s state capitol in Madison. They were there to highlight the fact that more than half of all U.S. children—nearly 52 percent—live in poor or low-income families. The following week they were back, linking poverty to systemic racism, as reflected in minority voter suppression, Islamophobia, and the subjugation of immigrant and indigenous populations. In the third week, they connected gun violence with militarism and the war economy; some protesters were ticketed when they blocked a nearby street.
Week four focused on health and environmental devastation. Week five was on education, jobs, and a living wage. The sixth and final rally, on June 18, presented an uncompromising diagnosis wrapped in a fiercely passionate prescription. In answer to the disparate struggles they had chronicled over the preceding weeks, the campaign called for forging “A New and Unsettling Force”—poor people, moral leaders, and activists, rising up and building power. Their mission: “Confronting the Distorted Moral Narrative.”
‘We’re not trying to be an umbrella organization for others. We’re trying to be a partner.’
The protesters were part of the Wisconsin branch of the national Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and what happened over those six weeks in Madison happened across the country. The Poor People’s Campaign was launched in late 2017 by the Reverend William Barber II and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, and made its formal national debut with the “Forty Days of Moral Action” in May 2018.
Engaging in nonviolent, public civil disobedience in which more than 2,500 activists were arrested nationwide, the campaign called on the nation to reorder its political and social priorities to favor the poor and marginalized. At the concluding march and rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Barber declared that the six-week campaign events marked the beginning of a “moral uprising across America.”
In larger cities, the Poor People’s Campaign drew some media attention. In Madison, it was largely ignored, with coverage mainly confined to alternative outlets. Yet for those who took part, it was a momentous occasion.
“I had the honor of being arrested,” says Anita Abraham, a Wisconsin Poor People’s Campaign leader and a fixture at the Madison events. Abraham grew up in Chicago and has lived in Milwaukee since 2012. Now in her fifties, she has volunteered with MoveOn and organized support for “Dreamers”—undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children with their families. After the Affordable Care Act passed, she and her teenage daughter began going out to public events to encourage people to sign up for the program.
During all those years of working for social justice causes, Abraham says, “it was so mind-boggling to see how everyone was all over the the place but not together.” She sees the Poor People’s Campaign as fostering collaboration among many groups and amplifying their messages. “It’s like a dream come true.”
Wisconsin is one of more than thirty states where the Poor People’s Campaign has launched a chapter and seems to be on fertile ground. The state’s recent history of retrenched rightwing political muscle has made it a laboratory for policies that enrich corporate power and private wealth, escalating economic inequality and racial segregation. But those same forces have given rise to progressive popular resistance throughout the state, including last fall’s ouster of Republican Governor Scott Walker by Democrat Tony Evers.
Now the Wisconsin Poor People’s campaign is making a renewed effort to increase its visibility. And like the national campaign, it is focused on the long game, aiming for changes that will take years to achieve.
“This isn’t an organization,” says Abraham. “It’s a movement.”
Martin Luther King Jr. helped launched the original Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, the last year of his life. He and other organizers aimed to go beyond the struggle against racial discrimination to challenge militarism and incorporate demands for economic justice.
In the months after his assassination on April 4, 1968, successors proceeded with the Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C., that King had been helping to plan. There they erected Resurrection City, a tent camp on the National Mall. By the end of June, however, the camp was shut down and the campaign King had envisioned essentially went dormant.
Fifty years later, Barber, a former North Carolina NAACP president and Theoharis, a Presbyterian minister and scholar, have resurrected the movement. Although it was reborn in the first year of the Trump Administration, Barber has made it clear that the new Poor People’s Campaign—like King’s before it—is nonpartisan and would have arisen regardless of who had won the 2016 presidential election.
“Well before Trump, we have needed a revival of our deepest religious and Constitutional values in this country as it relates to the issues of love, justice, the common good, the general welfare, the establishment of justice,” Barber told The Progressive last year.
The campaign is deeply rooted in faith. Barber is a Disciples of Christ minister. Theoharis directs the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, where she also serves as coordinator of the seminary’s Poverty Initiative.
But the perspective of the Poor People’s Campaign could not be more different from the nationalist strain of white evangelical Christian identity that remains central to the Trump coalition. It embraces, as did Barber’s NAACP Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, a multifaith constituency and welcomes justice-minded atheist and secular participants—to create what Barber has called “a fusion coalition.” Its agenda includes confronting and rolling back voter suppression, securing fair wages and strong union rights, and ending racist practices in the criminal justice system. It also allies itself with the LGBTQ community.
“Our movement accepts all people,” says Abraham, who is the Milwaukee zone chair for the Wisconsin branch of the campaign. “You don’t have to believe in a higher power or a creator in order to join our movement. You just have to believe that the injustices that are going on in our world nowadays are wrong. It’s not as religious as people think. It’s a moral revival.”
The Poor People’s Campaign doesn’t aim to supplant other struggles for social justice, says the Reverend Dale Stohre, a retired United Church of Christ minister who lives in the Milwaukee suburb of Franklin, Wisconsin, and is one of the campaign’s three state chairs. Rather, it seeks to bring together and amplify the work of activists for poor and marginalized communities.
“So much of the justice work that’s being done is being done by people on the margins, who are doing some imaginative and creative things,” Stohre says. “We’re not trying to be an umbrella organization for others. We’re trying to be a partner.”
While Abraham is virtually a lifelong activist, Stohre, now seventy-two, is a relative newcomer.
A second-generation pastor, Stohre retired in 2013 from parish ministry. Over the previous forty-five years, his political leanings had evolved from the mainstream conservative outlook of his youth. He recalls, as a teenager, reading his Bible and being struck by social justice messages about peace and about justice for the poor—“things they weren’t teaching me about at church.”
In 1967, Stohre heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak at an anti-war rally in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I went as a skeptic about him as a person and was drawn in by the clarity of his vision, his sense of himself, his commitment to justice,” Stohre says.
Yet those early stirrings, he admits, didn’t produce action during his career as a parish minister. Over the course of that time, he moved from a Baptist denomination to the more liberal United Church of Christ. But until he retired, “social justice as a practice was not on my radar.”
The police killings of two unarmed black men, Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee in April 2014 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August of that year, changed that. “It was time to get off the couch,” Stohre says. He and his wife joined the public protests that followed in Milwaukee and took part in the Coalition for Justice, founded by Hamilton’s brother to call attention to police brutality.
In October 2017, as part of the run-up to the Poor People’s Campaign’s formal launch, Barber spoke in Milwaukee. The Stohres signed up for nonviolent civil disobedience training. The following May and June, they joined the campaign’s weekly protests in Madison. “It’s not just a social issue,” he says. “It is profoundly spiritual—and for us, inescapable.”
The campaign is rooted in the idea that people banding together can effect change. “The challenge for me is to keep that hope alive,” Stohre says. “Because it’s easy to get cynical, and I just refuse to settle for that. Right now, the political process is driven by fear and anger—fear of change, fear of ‘the other.’ We’re trying to be a voice of hope. We don’t have to motivate by fear. I’m looking for political leadership that inspires, not frightens people.”
Stohre’s role with the campaign includes reaching out to other pastors, especially in small towns, and trying “to be an advocate for justice within my own white community.” He maintains a Facebook page in which he touts the work of Barber and the campaign, and gives sermons on social justice issues when he’s invited to other pulpits as a guest minister.
And while he is one of the campaign’s statewide leaders, Stohre is acutely aware that he’s neither poor nor a person of color. “The best way to find out what is happening is to talk to the poor, to talk to people of color. I don’t want to take their voice,” he says, calling himself “a placeholder” for others who have those experiences. “I want to be a foot soldier, and I’m content with that.”
A more recent Wisconsin participant in the Poor People’s Campaign is Carl Fields, the program manager for a drop-in center for the homeless and near-homeless based at an Episcopal church in Racine. At thirty-nine, he is the former vice president of a group called EXPO (Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing), made up of former prisoners and their allies.
After his mother was killed in a random shooting in Racine in the year 2000, Fields says he “fell apart emotionally.” Spiraling downward, he wound up in a confrontation with police during which he fired shots in their direction. He still speaks with regret and pain about that: “I initiated the whole thing because of where I was emotionally.”
Convicted of reckless endangerment, Fields spent nearly sixteen years in prison; he was released in 2016, but will remain on extended supervision and be unable to vote until 2033.
EXPO advocates for penal reform, including an end to mass incarceration and solitary confinement, and for ban-the-box laws barring employers from asking job applicants about criminal convictions. EXPO is a project of a statewide, interfaith social justice organization called WISDOM. Fields has also been active with WISDOM’s affiliate in nearby Kenosha.
“As a community organizer, I was trained in the faith-based way—the values-based way—of organizing,” Fields says. He learned about the Poor People’s Campaign from friends, and this past fall attended a rally for the campaign at a Racine church where Theoharis, the campaign’s co-founder and co-chair, spoke.
What drew him in? “Not just that it’s led by pastors and reverends. Not just that the values-centered focus is there.” Fields appreciates what he called the campaign’s strategic approach. History books don’t pay attention to the fact that King’s leadership of the civil rights movement “was about strategy as much as it was values,” he says. “The Poor People’s Campaign has lifted that up.”
The campaign, he adds, is also working to “change the narrative”—the racist narrative that blames African Americans who are poor for their poverty and assumes the criminality of people of color. But he also hopes the campaign can reach low-income whites, especially in rural areas.
“A poor, rural person needs aid and assistance, the same as a person who lives in the city,” Fields says. “Why are we voting against each other? We should be voting on the same track.”
In February, the Poor People’s Campaign announced a series of bus tours to spotlight poverty conditions from New York to California. The tours in March and April will be followed by a gathering in Washington, D.C., for a People’s Moral Action Congress on June 17–20, and the release of a proposed federal budget to rein in inequality. In June of next year, plans call for a follow-up event: a national Moral March on Washington, D.C., Theoharis tells The Progressive.
‘The best way to find out what is happening is to talk to the poor, to talk to people of color. I don’t want to take their voice...I want to be a foot soldier, and I’m content with that.’
On the day in February that the campaign announced its plan, about a dozen members of the Wisconsin campaign gathered once again in Madison. This time there was no civil disobedience or arrests. Instead, there was a press conference on the fourth floor of the capitol building. “We’re back, and this won’t be the last time,” said Yolanda Adams, who, along with Stohre and Gregory Jones of Madison, is one of the campaign’s Wisconsin tri-chairs.
The group split up and paid visits to the offices of Republican and Democratic legislative leaders, as well as those of the newly installed Democratic Governor Evers and Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes.
While the officials were not present to meet with them, campaign members spoke with staffers and handed them a letter that filled two sides of a sheet of paper. “Although we are the majority of those who you represent, our issues are rarely represented in the political arena, partly because of voter suppression tactics that keep thousands from voting,” the letter stated.
The letter shared key statistics: Some 2.3 million Wisconsin residents, about 40 percent of the state’s population, are poor or low income, including more than 700,000 people of color and 1.5 million white people. Some 1.2 million workers, or 44 percent of the state’s working population, earn less than $15 an hour, and about half that number—664,000—receive SNAP (food stamp) benefits to help pay their grocery bills.
Meanwhile, in contrast, “Wisconsin has spent about $4 billion in public subsidies for corporations in five years”—a number, the letter noted, that did not include the state’s controversial public subsidies for a new Foxconn plant, which could total more than $3 billion. Meanwhile, “the richest 1 percent of Wisconsin residents will absorb 28 percent of the benefits of the new federal tax law.”
The letter concluded with a declaration that “we know there are enough resources in this land of plenty to address our basic needs and more.” It warned that the Poor People’s Campaign is “holding you accountable to our needs and demands.”
At Barnes’s office, an aide welcomed the visitors with a smile and declared his admiration for Barber. He took the letter, and then obligingly took pictures of the group as they stood in front of the office door. Then, as they did at every office, the knot of Poor People’s Campaign members concluded with a brief call-and-response chant.
“Two steps forward!” said Jones, the designated spokesman for most of his group’s visits. “Not one step back!” the rest replied.
Among the group was Barbara J. Mosley, seventy-three. After growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Mosley was married at sixteen to a man who would later abuse her. She ultimately left him and became a nurse, living and working in Wichita, Kansas. In 2012, she moved to Milwaukee to care for an ailing relative.
Mosley, who had been active in causes including anti-racism work during much of her life, joined the Poor People’s Campaign and was delighted to come out on this cold and snowy day.
“This is my second chance,” she said. “I didn’t, in my youth, get to be part of the movement.”
Don't miss Erik Gunn's interview with Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign.