Today, we bring you audio from our lead-up program to the national Poor Peoples Assembly and Moral March on Washington, D.C. Digital Gathering, hosted on Saturday, June 20, 2020. At the assembly, poor and low-income people from across the country testified about their experiences of systemic poverty, systemic racism, the war economy and more. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King first announced that a Poor Peoples Campaign was to gather in June of 1968. He wanted to ensure that the gathering was multiracial, Black, Latino, Native American, White, Urban and Rural. He said the poor live in a cruelly unjust society and must organize a revolution against that injustice. He said that we have to stand against the structures that refuse to lift the load of poverty off millions of people. He was assassinated months before the event took place, but it did, and thousands of people from across the country made their way to Washington, D.C.
Now, the Poor Peoples Campaign is back, under the leadership of co-chairs Rev. Dr. William J. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a multiracial team. They relaunched the movement under the banner, Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. It is a fusion movement bringing together what they call the pillars of the campaign: the evils of racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nations distorted moral narrative.
Today, you will hear our one-hour special in the lead up to the national Poor Peoples Assembly and Moral March on Washington's Digital Gathering, which took place on Saturday, June 20, 2020. For this one-hour lead up, we will be hearing the voices of Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, and several of our guests, including from Thailand, the UK and Haiti.
