Excerpt:
REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Yeah, he gave this, the speech—I would say a prophetic sermon—at Riverside and was killed exactly one year later. But Dr. King was very clear that you can never separate isms, the triune isms of racism, materialism, or classism, and militarism. And he was very clear about that. He knew that the prophetic role of the preacher or religious leader or moral leader is to challenge, if you will, the soul and the heart of the nation. If you listen to his voice and his words, he was very clear. Vincent Harding, who helped him draft that particular speech—and some say that something like 150 newspapers wrote articles against him the next week. Even civil rights organizations passed resolutions against him. Unions did the same thing—not all, but some. I know that there was one place, The Nation magazine, stuck with him, but many pulled away—his own staff. But he understood, as a moral leader, that we had to challenge.
Now, the question is—and the reason we’re at the Press Club today is because Repairers of the Breach and the Kairos Center from Union, we are convening and launching "The Souls of Poor Folk: Auditing America 50 Years After the Poor People’s Campaign Challenged Racism, Materialism, Poverty and Our National Morality," because, you know, after that speech, he went into the Poor People’s Campaign. And the question, Amy and Juan, for the country today is: Where are we on these same issues? Where are we, really, on racism, when we see 22 states in this country passing systemic race-based voter suppression laws and we have less voting rights protection today than we had in 1965 with the gutting of the Civil Rights—of the Voting Rights Act? Where are we, when we have the second-highest level of child poverty, when we have exorbitant and extreme inequalities when it comes to wages? Where are we, when we don’t even hardly use the word "poor" in our public and political conversation? Where are we, when we just a few weeks ago saw an out-of-control military strike kill 200 innocent citizens, and some 400,000 citizens were killed during the Iraq War, that we should have never gone into? Where are we, when we’re talking about expanding an already bloated military budget and spending money, some $54 billion, that if we use that same money in a modern-day war against poverty and a modern call for healthcare and education, we could do so much more? Where are we, when we just saw our Congress debate on a fundamental human rights issue, healthcare, and argue that it was wrong to provide people healthcare, and wanting to engage in the worst attacks on the poor that we’ve seen since the war on poverty?
So, we need a very serious audit, but also we need an action. And many of us are saying we can’t just remember Dr. King’s speech or his actions. So, together, we’ve also called for the national Moral Revival Poor People/Poor Children Campaign to start in 2018, beginning with this audit, but the audit then leading to action. And the audit is going to be chaired by Reverend Dr. Forbes, the former pastor emeritus of Riverside, and Shailly Gupta Barnes, who’s a lawyer and economist, and Dr. Tim Tyson, who’s a renowned historian. And we’re bringing economists and theologians and political scientists and poor people around the table to say not just how we remember, but how do we re-engage and reinstitute the Poor People’s Campaign with all of its trimmings, including civil disobedience, from the state up and even in the capital of this country, Washington, D.C.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/3/silence_is_not_an_option_rev
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