A NEW multiracial mass movement has swept across the US with six weeks of non-violent direct action that was launched on Mother’s Day.

Over 3,000 people volunteered themselves for arrest, and 2,000 people were arrested for civil disobedience while presenting their demands to legislators.

On June 23, thousands of people marched and rallied in 40 states and 10,000 gathered in Washington DC — black, Latinx, Native American, white, and other people who are desperately poor in the richest country in the world, and whose president is a multibillionaire. 

The Poor People’s Campaign describes itself as “a moral fusion of multiracial, multigendered, intergenerational, inter-faith, constitutionally grounded and non-faith participants. It has been growing around the country … It is the new, unsettling force for a new age.”

The PPC carries forward the initiative of Martin Luther King. In 1968, just before his tragic death, Dr King called for a Poor People’s Campaign to march on Washington DC and stay until “definite and positive action is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor.”

Fifty years later, this new grassroots movement is committed to the leadership of those most affected by the “enmeshed evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation” and to building unity across lines of division. 

It has shown itself to be a creative mass movement, with the determination to keep going to end the devastating inequality that is impacting millions of lives. It is the largest grassroots movement in the US today.

The PPC has issued The Souls of Poor Folk, an audit detailing the shattering impact of poverty, and exposing the reality that millions of families and their children face in the US:

• Over 41 million US citizens live in poverty. Many are the working poor
• 64 million people earn less than $15 per hour
• 60 per cent of black people and 65 per cent of Latinx people live in poverty
• Voter suppression laws impact millions of black, brown and poor people; the same states passing voter suppression laws are worst for opposing a living wage, for child poverty, for denying healthcare, and for discriminatory laws against LGBTI people.
• Since 1976 federal spending on prisons has increased tenfold to $7.5 billion a year — the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, almost five times the average for other wealthy countries. 

Margaret Prescod, part of the co-ordinating Group for California’s Poor People’s Campaign, presenter on Radio Pacifica and a member of Women of Colour Global Women’s Strike, will be speaking in London today. 

We will finally hear first-hand about the six weeks of organising, what was learned, and plans for the next stages of this new movement. 

The meeting, hosted by shadow chancellor John McDonnell, will be held today from 7-9pm at the House of Commons, Committee Room 9, Westminster. For more information about the PPC visit www.poorpeoplescampaign.org. For more information about the meeting email [email protected].