Poor People’s Campaign: National Call for a Moral Revival

Bishop William Barber, former head of the North Carolina NAACP, gained national prominence in 2012 for holding Moral Monday demonstrations outside the North Carolina statehouse. His racially and religiously diverse coalition is widely credited with helping to oust the state's Republican governor and disband a conservative supermajority responsible for some of the state’s most regressive legislation in decades.

In 2018, the Poor People’s Campaign performed 40 days of nonviolent action at state houses across the country and outside the Supreme Court, culminating with a rally on the National Mall in June with banners reading “Fight Poverty, Not The Poor.”

In 2020, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC) launched a non-partisan voter outreach drive across 16 states that reached over 2.1 million voters, the vast majority of whom were low-income voters (LIV). In the 2020 elections, LIV made a significant difference in several battleground states.

Since President Biden’s victory, PPC has been the most consistent, persistent coalition demanding the transformative change he had promised. PPC has embodied Frederick Douglass' admonition that “power concedes nothing without a demand,” confidently advocating for what President Biden knows to be true: policies centered on the 140 million poor and low-income people in the country are also good economic policies that can heal and transform the nation.

Look over the long list of articles on PPC’s press page, describing the hundreds of times they have led the charge on so many key issues.

Voting Rights & the filibuster: Taking nonviolent protests directly and repeatedly to Manchin and Sinema as well as McConnell.
Build Back Better: Demanding that various members of Congress pass it intact, including involving Manchin’s constituents in West Virginia and Sinema’s in Arizona
Keeping Build Back Better and Infrastructure together, including asking Manchin to stop playing games with Build Back Better, Infrastructure, Voting Rights, and the filibuster

And now, after the Moral Assembly on June 18, 2022, they have seven key demands, including:

That every member of Congress publicly acknowledge the reality and pain of 140 million poor and low-wealth people – including 43% of our entire population and 52% of our children, who have died at a rate 2 to 5 times higher during this pandemic, and 250,000 of whom died from poverty and inequality every year – and recognize a moral crisis that must be corrected, reckoned with, and repaired through emergency action.
A White House Poverty Summit with President Biden in which this administration meets with a delegation of poor and low-wealth people, religious leaders, and economists, and commits to an Executive Action Plan to Eliminate Poverty in 2022.
A pledge to return to Washington D.C. in September 2022, to join 5,000 poor and low-wealth people and religious leaders, along with 100 economists in nonviolent moral direct action in our next step of declaration and notification of these demands.