Kofi Hunt. By Seán Kinane / WMNF News (2011).
Fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr., participated in the original Poor People’s Campaign to fight what he called the evils of militarism, racism and materialism, a new nationwide movement has sprung up.
WMNF interviewed Kofi Hunt, an organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign — a National Call for Moral Revival. They’re planning a bus trip to the Florida capital on Monday.
“The Poor People’s Campaign — a National Call for Moral Revival is basically an effort to begin to change the conversation as it pertains to poverty and violence in our nation. And calls poverty itself a form of violence. And it takes that from the legacy of MLK — Martin Luther King, Jr. — and when he died he was working on building for the Poor People’s occupation in D.C., which happened, and there’s a lot of programs — like Head Start — that came from that. And now we’re looking to continue that legacy and to go deeper into the conversation about everything that’s going on right now with the environment, with racism, with wages and worker rights, with the sort of way that the religious right has hijacked the moral narrative; issues of veterans. Because these issues are all connected. And they’re all connected based on a sort of violence being perpetrated against working people.”
The Poor People’s Campaign began 50 years ago, but it’s been revived most recently with the Moral Mondays in North Carolina.
“Yeah, so Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis — they worked on the Moral Mondays in North Carolina. So, what they’re doing for this latest iteration here in 2018 with the elections coming up — they didn’t want to focus on the elections — but they want to focus on the conversations we’re having. So they spearheaded with their group Repairers of the Breach and got other coalition organizations and churches on board with this initiative as well as the Fight For 15 pushing for these six weeks.”
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