PPEHRC affiliate CHANGER--Chattanoogans and North Georgians for Economic
Rights-- demanded jobs today, MLK's birthday, with scores of other
organizations and individuals. Marching with our youth leaders were people
of all colors and faiths in the shadow of Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, TN.
"From Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, let freedom ring!" --MLK

Labels: CHANGER, Martin Luther King

Eyes & Ears
Seeing is Believing
Source: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0911&article=seeing-is-believing

Creating a better world first requires an act of imagination.
by Danny Duncan Collum

One day this past July I abandoned my blueberry patch to drive to Louisville and sit in a gathering of artists and activists—black, white, and Latino—who all said they wanted to help change the world. There were teenage rappers from the Mississippi Delta and young video artists from southeast Louisiana. It was a workshop session at the national conference of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.

The campaign, made up of more than 90 organizations around the country, aims to “unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty … through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job.” Some of the campaign’s affiliates do things such as mass occupations of property to prevent home foreclosures. The campaign itself marched on the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis last year and is planning a march from the Mississippi Delta to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in 2010. They seem to be picking up the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign that fell after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

Not long ago, talk of changing the world, much less abolishing poverty, would draw, at best, a cynical snort. But that was before “yes, we can” and all that. Today, hope is still a four-letter word, but you can say it in public again. But as we near the end of the first Obama year, it is also becoming painfully clear that even electing a smart and sane former community organizer—with big majorities in Congress to boot—was not enough to change the world. The last time I checked, big money still held the upper hand in Washington. There’s been a lot more help to mega-banks than to foreclosure victims. The smart and sane solution on health-care reform (single-payer) never even got a hearing, while the insurance and pharmaceutical companies were stroked and placated at every turn.

But presidents don’t change the world. People do. Presidents are pulled along behind great waves of popular uprising. That’s what happened during our last Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt knew it. That’s why he once famously told a group of progressive activists that he agreed with their proposal. “Now,” he said, “go make me do it.” And that’s what happened again in the 1960s when the civil rights movement forced President Kennedy to become a better man than he ever meant to be.

The Poor People’s Campaign meeting I attended this summer focused on the role of artists in a grassroots movement for economic human rights. Again, looking back at those two great periods of social change in the 20th century, they both were accompanied by a renaissance of popular art. Writers, artists, actors, painters, and photographers all had a place in the New Deal and the labor movement that fueled it. In the 1960s, African-American religion and music fueled the civil rights movement and all the ripples of social change it inspired. Acting for a better world requires, first and foremost, an act of imagination. You have to see the potential for change—in yourself and in your community. That act of the imagination can even lead one to see, as one rapper put it in Louisville, “that capitalist society is not eternal.”

That’s why, to the Poor People’s Campaign organizers, the arts aren’t just an add-on to political action. They are powerful motivators that can crack the shell of our American isolation.

Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing writer, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky.



Seeing is Believing. by Danny Duncan Collum. Sojourners Magazine, November 2009 (Vol. 38, No. 10, pp. 55). Eyes & Ears.

Labels: Building the Unsettling Force: A National Conference to Abolish Poverty, Martin Luther King, Obama, PPEHRC, Sojourner Mazagine

POOR PEOPLE'S ECONOMIC HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN

For immediate release

Contact: Cheri Honkala, 267 439-8419

Marching to Fulfill the Dream: Campaign Will Mobilize Thousands to Claim Economic Rights

"Martin Luther King dreamed not only of racial justice, but of organizing across racial lines to secure economic justice for all. In 1998 the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) picked up the mantle of MLK and vowed to work until the dream was fulfilled. If you think we're there, you can ignore this. But if you're hurting, or your mother or your brother or your neighbor or friend is hurting, put on your walking shoes," said Cheri Honkala, National Organizer of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC).

At its national conference in July, nearly 400 representatives of PPEHRC member organizations voted to organize the next phase of the campaign—a march from the Katrina-torn Gulf through the Mississippi Delta and on through the Rust Belt.

The march will culminate in Detroit at the 2010 US Social Forum, which expects upwards of 20,000 participants from around the country and the globe.

As was the case in the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, other marchers will follow Freedom Roads from other parts of the country to join the main branch, which will visibly unite south and north in their common cause.

In 2003, PPEHRC recreated the 1968 Poor People's March, caravanning from Marks, Mississippi to Washington, DC. Commemorating the 35^th anniversary of the campaign planned by King before his assassination, organizers of that march pointed to the shameful lack of achievement of the original economic justice goals of jobs, housing, and health care. Since then things have gotten worse—much worse.

"In 1968 the white middle class liberals who had supported civil rights largely abandoned the struggle for economic rights," said a PPEHRC organizer, "but today whites and people of all colors increasingly understand out of their own experience that poverty is not the result of moral failure and laziness. They have worked hard, educated themselves and their children, served their communities and their country, and yet they are losing their homes and their health care. Robots are doing their jobs, and if they can find a job they work harder and longer for less."

Another PPEHRC leader elaborated on today's growing understanding of poverty. "People who have followed all the rules of 'middle class America' are having to choose among their basic human rights: Shelter or medicine? Food or clothing? Education or basic necessities? Water or pre-natal care? That's the nature of poverty. It's structural. Millions who thought of themselves as middle class are awakening to that fact—that securing economic human rights for all is not a safety net for the fallen, but a foundation on which the people of this country can rebuild this country. We are calling them to this march and to the US Social Forum to create a people's solution to the economic crisis."

Marian Kramer, Co-Chair of the National Welfare Rights Union, announces PPEHRC plan to continue pursuing MLK’s dream in 2010 national march for economic justice.”

The plan to undertake the march was announced by Marian Kramer, Co-Chair of the National Welfare Rights Union, at the July PPEHRC event, "Building the Unsettling Force:A National Conference to End Poverty," held in Louisville, KYIt was endorsed enthusiastically by the participants, most of whom represented over 60 of the 131 member organizations of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC). The theme of the conference was based on Martin Luther King's call to organize the "dispossessed of the nation" into an unsettling force to demand economic human rights. The conference was co-sponsored by the Social Welfare Action Alliance, and hosted by Women in Transition, both PPEHRC member organizations.

Labels: Detroit, Economic Justice, Marching to Fulfull the Dream, Martin Luther King, Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, PPEHRC, SWAA, USSF 2010, WIT