Above photo:
Mark 50th Anniversary of Kings’ Poor Peoples Campaign.
Erect Resurrection City in the March For Our Lives
On June 2 in Philadelphia PA from the poorest District in Pennsylvania, Kensington, poor families will gather from across the entire country in the largest poor people’s march to Washington DC in the March for Our Lives.
Kensington is home to the highest death rate of ANY major U.S. city. In 2016, 64,000 Americans died from opioids – more than in the entire Vietnam War (55,000). In Philadelphia, there were 1,200 overdose deaths last year due to mostly opioids. It has quadrupled the murder rate.
Kensington is also home to the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU). The KWRU was created as a direct response to the cuts in public assistance at the same time that no jobs were being created for welfare recipients. Cheri Honkala went on to become the first welfare recipient to testify before congress about the impact of the welfare cuts (see Myth of the Welfare Queen). At the time, politicians were slamming the poor by creating images of welfare queens and dead beat dads instead of telling the real story which was one of poor single mothers and unemployed fathers, entering the prison system in record numbers to become a part of the prison industrial complex. This led KWRU to look for help and models of organizing outside of their own neighborhood and soon they linked with the poor in both urban and rural areas that were facing the same plight and so we formed the People’s Economic Human Rights campaign.
From a neighborhood that once was filled with factories, offering a blue-collar life of making hats and cigars, now is ground zero in a drug war, where the number one source of income is drugs and the second welfare, and where mothers hope daily that their sons come home alive. It is these very real daily lived lives in a war zones that have given rise to the March for Our Lives 2018 being planned for June 2nd. As put by PPEHRC member, Galen Tyler: “We are this new and unsettling force that King spoke of in 1968.”
Yes, we the poor will march and speak for ourselves: the homeless, residents of Puerto Rico robbed of our land and culture, people in recovery, the disability community, the ‘welfare queens,’ the ‘deadbeat dads,’ homeless veterans, the hustlers, young and old, immigrants, the criminals, the ‘undeserving’ poor, black, white and Brown. We will march for our lives and when we arrive we will construct Resurrection city and Reclaim our future for generations to come.
Find out more at https://economichumanrights.or
