Campaign seeks to build a ‘coalition of the rejected’ in Eastern KentuckyRep. Michael Meredith speaks on pension crisis in Frankfort

Underpaid farmworkers in the Mississippi Delta and unemployed coal miners in Eastern Kentucky would not appear to have much in common, separated by race, geography, economics, and often, politics.

But poor and exploited people have more similarities than differences and ought to work together for basic rights like jobs, healthcare and education, says a North Carolina minister who’s bringing his message of united moral activism to Eastern Kentucky on Thursday.

“The reality is poor whites, poor blacks and poor Latinos ought to work together,” said Rev. William Barber, the co-founder of the “Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.” “We have to form in this country a coalition of the rejected, and the rejected have to lead a national revival to challenge both Democrats and Republicans.”

Barber and his co-founder, Rev. Liz Theoharis will spend Thursday in Harlan County with local residents to discuss what Kentuckians need most and how they can organize around those issues. There will be an afternoon meeting in Benham at the Schoolhouse Inn.

They were invited by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, the grassroots organization that has fought for issues such as a cleaner environment and tax reform. Member Tanya Turner says many of them have been inspired by Barber and his non-violent protests against voting rights restrictions and other issues in North Carolina.

“That’s why we’re interested in the Poor People’s Campaign, where people are really mobilizing themselves to create some accountability for elected officials,” said Turner, who wants to organize around better protections for public workers and school teachers. “As we’ve seen this year in Frankfort, there’s not a lot of it and horrible decisions are being made that impact our families and our lives.”

“It’s really scary right now, people are looking for answers,” she said. “Rev. Barber has intricately woven this movement to try and build answers together.”

Barber, who is a minister at a Disciples of Christ church in Goldsboro, N.C., has become a national figure whose stature grew after President Donald Trump’s election. He’s been compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. by many, and accepted the comparison enough to reinvent King’s 1967-68 original Poor People’s Campaign, started after King decided that a civil rights movement led naturally to basic human rights such as healthcare and education. King worked on the campaign for a year before his assassination in Memphis.

Barber speaks frequently about creating a moral movement, activism based on the Bible. In a phone interview, he raised the example of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan of Danville who was the sole dissenter in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld Southern segregation statutes in 1896.

“Here is a Kentuckian, someone for whom the one basic common denominator between mountain populism and civil rights is this notion of right and wrong and that you don’t kick people when they’re down,” said Barber.

Barber and Theoharis, a longtime community activist based at Union Theological Seminary in New York, are quick to point out that both major political parties ignore poverty, and that in more than 20 debates in the 2016 presidential election, poverty was never discussed.

That’s why Barber thinks the Poor People’s Campaign can bring people together, even in Kentucky, a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. “We want to talk about systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy, the things that hurt poor people no matter where you’re from,” Barber said.

In his view, people have been artificially divided by debates over the morality of same-sex marriage or abortion.

“When you actually know the Bible, it doesn’t meet the test of the Scriptures because the majority of those have to do with how you treat the poor, the sick, women and children, immigrants and the poor, what Jesus called ‘the least of these,’” Barber said. “If you want to have a discussion about Biblical morality, let’s have it.”

Theoharis said the Kentucky visit will be more of a listening tour, to hear from people in Eastern Kentucky about what they need and how they can organize to get it. The Poor People’s Campaign is already active in 39 states, with an emphasis on community organizing and voter registration. She and Barber have already traveled to Selma, Ala., and will be in Charleston, W.Va. on Friday, where a teachers’ strike recently garnered a pay raise across the state.

In April, the campaign will begin a series of local action, peaceful rallies and protests. Here in Kentucky, organizers recently announced a march in Frankfort on April 4, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of King’s death.

Most of all, Barber and Theoharis hope to change the narrative, away from division and towards a more cooperative spirit towards helping the less fortunate.

“We see this work as being about the heart and soul of our democracy,” Theoharis said. “This is not about Republican versus Democrats, we want to get people talking about the issues that affect people a majority of the time.”

Chase Gladson, 15, is skipping school to be there. He wants to work on issues related to the environment and economy in Eastern Kentucky.

“I don’t hate coal but the coal companies have left Harlan County in a mess,” he said. “They came, they got what they wanted and they left. They don’t care for the people or for the workers and now Harlan County is in a slump, there’s nothing here. The Poor People’s Campaign works to help fight these issues. We have to build the future because it’s out future.”