Steve Pavey
Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, left, and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis are the national co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
When activists reached out to Sunny Kurhajetz in the fall of 2021 about getting involved in the Dane County chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign, she was immediately interested.
In her day job at the Dane County Department of Human Services, Kurhajetz sees how people get stuck in poverty, even when they are doing everything they can.
“Even if they weren't dealing with mental health or trauma, [they are] trying to figure out how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, when a lot of people don't even have bootstraps,” Kurhajetz says. “I wanted to be part of the movement because I want to be part of the solution to change these structures of capitalism that are keeping people poor.”
Inspired by the Poor People’s Campaign led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the current movement addresses a wide array of intersecting issues, and collaborates with other organizations working on such issues as militarism, wages and workers’ rights, and housing.
“We actually call this the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, militarization, and the distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism,” says Sarah Weintraub, one of the co-chairs of the Wisconsin Poor People’s Campaign. “We see those things as being so interconnected and interlocking so that our policy approach also has to be comprehensive.”
The Poor People’s Campaign is holding a rally on March 28 at 4:30 p.m. at the intersection of State Street and North Carroll Street, followed by a march and then another rally at First United Methodist Church, 203 Wisconsin Ave. Child care will be provided.
The Madison event is part of a mobilization tour across the country that will culminate in a “March on Washington” on June 18.
Among the speakers are the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a native of Milwaukee, who is the national co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and director of the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary, and Rabbi Bonnie Margulis of Madison, who is with Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice. Jason Rivera, a UW-Madison student will talk about food and housing insecurity as well as the broken immigration system.
In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967, King spoke of a “revolution of values,” calling for the United States to shift from a “‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.”
“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” King said. “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice, which produces beggars, needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”
Organizers of the March on Washington mobilization want to send the message that poverty is not an inevitability, but the result of policy decisions. And that while the issue of personal responsibility has dominated conversations about poverty and economic assistance programs, it shouldn’t determine whether or not someone can access their basic needs.
Kurhajetz acknowledges there’s a place for personal responsibility. But, she says the reason we have lawmakers and government bodies like Congress is to ensure that everybody has the right to housing and healthcare and that their basic human needs are being met, “regardless of where they come from or what they do for a career.”
In Dane County, for example, there’s been a lot of discussion about housing affordability, but Kurhajetz says that housing insecurity is interconnected with such issues as access to education, health services and well-paying jobs.
“We also are living in a country with these different systems that our policy makers seem to choose to not fix or make better for everybody. They seem to benefit a select group of people,” she says.
Weintraub points out that Congress failed to pass Build Back Better, which had several poverty-alleviating provisions, but did manage to approve a $778 billion defense budget for 2022 alone.
“We are at all levels of government making policy choices, where we choose to fund militarism at a far higher rate than we fund very basic fundamental needs for people in our communities,” Weintraub says.
The Poor People’s Campaign is in this fight for the long haul. As its website says, the June 18 rally in Washington, D.C., is “NOT just a day of action.”
It is a “declaration of an ongoing, committed moral movement” to “shift the moral narrative, build power and make real policies to fully address poverty and low wealth from the bottom up.”
[Learn more about the Poor People’s Campaign here and the Wisconsin chapter and Monday’s rally here.]
