Making Connections from Alabama to West Virginia
Catherine Flowers of the Equal Justice Initiative and the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise reflects on the common struggles and history in Alabama and West Virginia.
WATCH: On the road in Selma for a new Poor People’s Campaign
As the Poor People’s Campaign tour of Appalachia is about to kick off, watch this short film about our last tour, of Selma and the surrounding areas during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Pettus bridge crossing. Poor people are organizing and building unity and power in Selma, in Lowndes County, and […]
50 Years of Poor People’s Organizing: An Interview with Bob Zellner
Below is an interview with Bob Zellner, edited for length and clarity. Bob is a veteran of the Civil Rights movement. He grew up in rural Alabama, the son and grandson of Ku Klux Klan members and ministers. While Bob was a kid, his father took the dangerous step of renouncing his Klan membership. The […]
Saving Rural Hospitals Means Saving Lives
By Shailly Barnes and Dan Jones We joined The Walk from NC to DC just outside Richmond, Virginia, on Tuesday afternoon. We were the third leg of the Kairos Center’s relay team – Larry Cox and Robert Ascherman started us off on June 1, Adam Barnes and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis took over for them […]
Selma is Now: Building a Poor People’s Campaign for Today
By Charon Hribar This March marks 50 years since the Selma voting rights campaign, the march to Montgomery, and the violence of “Bloody Sunday.” Fifty years later, community leaders in Selma are calling for a continuation of the fight for civil and fundamental human rights, not just a commemoration of those events. By 1965, Dr. […]
Civil Rights to Human Rights: the challenge of Selma today
By Larry Cox …after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. — Martin Luther King. Jr. (May 1967) The victory of Selma 50 years ago, and the blood and lives it took to win it, require profound commemoration but also much more. Selma […]
Community Hearing on Poverty in Selma and Throughout the South
From March 5th – 8th, leaders from around the country were in Selma for the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights campaign and “Bloody Sunday.” Among them was a delegation representing the effort to re-ignite Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call, originally made in December 1967, for a Poor People’s Campaign. These leaders came […]
A Moral Movement of the Poor
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis “For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” I celebrated Valentine’s Day (and 16th anniversary with my husband, Chris) alongside more than 50,000 other justice-seekers at the Historic Thousands on Jones Street’s Moral March in Raleigh, North Carolina last week. The […]
STAND with Dignity
By John Wessel-McCoy “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” – Ephesians 6:12 (NIV) “The history of Louisiana, from 1870 to 1876, reads like a Chinese puzzle to those who forget the great forces […]
A Truth Commission Begins in Bayou La Batre, Alabama
On November 7-8, 2014 our Gulf Coast Poor People’s Campaign team visited Bayou La Batre to hear from community and religious leaders about their struggles. We give thanks to Zack Carter, organizer for Alabama Multi-Cultural Fisher and Seafood Worker-Owned Cooperative, for all of his hard work in organizing our visit and his proven dedication to […]