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 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.�
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.�
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, KY. It 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.
