“I went to the rich man’s house, / and took what he had stolen from me, / I regained my humanity, / my dignity. / I went to Wall Street and got back what was stolen from me. / I will not let the system roll over me,” chanted hundreds of protesters from the Poor People’s Campaign – the revival of Reverend Martin Luther King’s last initiative half a century ago – as they marched in front of the New York Stock Exchange yesterday.
This march, one of 12 regional mobilizations in preparation for a major national “morale march” by and for the poor and low-income workers, which will call for a rally at the historic Trinity Church, which presides over Wall Street, where the co-director of the Campaign Rev. William Barber stated that the aim is to “save this country from itself”.
With songs of social struggle old and new, the march surprised the heart of the financial sector as well as tourists from around the world as it marched through this capital of capital, with the multi-ethnic and multi-generational mosaic of protesters repeating verses of solidarity and social dignity, and carrying banners of the proclamation: “Everyone has the right to live” and “We all rise as we rise from below”.
The booming Southern accented voice of Reverend Barber, one of King’s heirs, rang out in the church that “this country needs a heart transplant” as something is very wrong in a nation that has been going through a pandemic and still lacks overall health has insurance.
He deplored the fact that “our policies are caught in the lie of scarcity, the neoliberal lie…where they blame the poor for poverty,” a country where nearly half the population – 140 million – lives in poverty or living with conditions of low income, lowlands, where about 250,000 people a year die of poverty and where the world’s richest country lacks only a “moral conscience”.
He denounced systemic racism, ecological devastation, the war economy and militarism, the “false narrative of Christian nationalists,” and reiterated that “we need a moral revival.”
Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-director of the Poor People’s Campaign, explained that this “fusion” movement of different sectors and social struggles aims to be “disruptive” and has as its central demand “a radical redistribution of political and economic power”. in this country. .
During the march, which culminated in the church, Barber and Theoharis invited other religious leaders – Christians, Jews and Muslims – to make short messages about why they are in this movement. At the same time, there were “testimonies” from those who fought against their conditions of poverty and exclusion and who are now protagonists of this campaign, including a Long Island Indigenous woman who pointed out that wealthy politicians, such as the former mayor of that city , billionaire Mike Bloomberg, always talks about how “he will help us, but they have their mansions on the land they stole from us”.
A young barista who works at a Starbucks in Ithaca, New York, revealed that she and her co-workers just joined a union three days ago despite the company’s anti-union offensive, declaring that “our solidarity is stronger than ours Wealth. of executives”. Others spoke of their struggles for racial justice, for housing, for access to health care, for gay rights.
“We will not move,” they intoned in Spanish the verses of this old song of social struggle that now has young voices, and with it King’s movement for social and economic and anti-imperial justice in this country makes us dream again.
More information at https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/