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To hear Rev. William Barber tell it, Wall Street should be an natural ally of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
Barber is co-chair of the campaign, a reboot of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ill-fated Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. Fresh from victories over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King organized protests that demanded full employment, a guaranteed basic income and access to capital for minority businesses.
“[King] believed you could eradicate poverty. He believed that there was enough to go around,” Barber says.
But the planned protest could not survive the loss of its leader. King was assassinated in April of that year.
The revived movement commissioned an audit of the trends of poverty over the past 50 years [1]by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, and decided to demand: a living wage, a single-payer healthcare system, steps to end “ecological” devastation,” and voting rights protections.
Barber, 54, a pastor of a protestant church in North Carolina, is much admired on the left. He built the ethnically diverse Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and is credited for unseating a Republican governor.
Barber says the Poor People’s Campaign agenda would lift people up from the bottom, creating a stronger economy and thus be a boon to Wall Street.
Nearly 140 million people, 43.5%, are either poor or low income, Barber notes.
“You cannot have 43.5% of your people living as low-wealth poor in the wealthiest nation of the world. Eventually that base is going to implode,” he said.
Barber sat down with MarketWatch to discuss his views on King’s legacy and what Wall Street should comprehend about the movement.
First, let’s talk about the reboot of the Poor People’s Campaign. Many people don’t know that Martin Luther King began to focus on the economy at the end of his life. Can you talk about King’s thinking and why it is now a good time to revive his campaign?
Dr. King, in December 1967, did a sermon called “The Meaning of Hope”[2] and in that sermon he talked about two Americas. There was a book that had been written during that period entitled “Two Americas” and he described it as one America being a place where there was plenty of opportunity, and growth, and jobs, and all the above, but then there was this other America. He recognized that the economic trauma and the economic pain of black people from, for instance, Alabama, and white people from Appalachia, were the same pain in terms of their poverty, in terms of their lack of healthcare, in terms of the way of which many of them had been pitted against each other...