Sitting in the hot tent I could feel the damp air rising from the ground while I held my two-week old baby.  I found myself in an unintentional sauna in DC. Just two hours before, 25,000 people gathered across the National Mall for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC: NCMR).  This was the culmination of the 40-day launch.  The campaign names four evils: systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation.  Rooted in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign which insisted that the four evils were interconnected and needed a fusion movement to succeed, fifty years later, the Poor People’s Campaign is reignited as the economic gap between the poor and wealthy has gone from a rift in the 1960s to a veritable canyon today.

Across 40 days, people in 38 states engaged in non-violent moral fusion direct actions in their state capitals as well as the nation’s capital.  We were committed to a launch that would develop infrastructure, grounding and relationships in states necessary to sustain a multi-year movement from the bottom up.  Each state included a coordinating committee composed of faith leaders, advocates and directly impacted persons. The vision is a PPC: NCMR that is not for the poor but by and of the poor.

There I sat after 40 long days of marches, actions, calls, meetings, and services.   I should have been tired, but instead I was a wearied kind of ready.  I felt the tears coming down my cheeks as I looked out across the folks who were there.  You would be hard pressed to find a central identity among us—we were a gathered spectrum that had been pressed by the urgency of the work into a fusion movement.

I cried for the bodily experience of beloved community.  We still weren’t there, but something in that gathered group who 40 days prior had been strangers to one another and now, beloved. It gave me a new kind internal push.  It wasn’t hope, something else that ran deeper through me. It was the thing that had led me to put so much of my life on the line for this campaign as I readied to welcome our third child into the world.  I saw that division of movements, the silos of issues and desperate absence of a moral narrative from progressive spaces again and again. So, when the vision for a fusion movement grounded in an intersectional analysis and unapologetic of its moral grounding arose to preach liberation — I was in.

The 40-day launch challenged my own knowledge of how to do civil disobedience and coordinate actions across 38 states.  It challenged many national dynamics where impacted persons are spoken about but not given the mic and certainly not leadership.  It challenged the idea of having a plan all together and instead building movement while doing it. It grew my understanding of my own role (more following, less leading) and deepened my identity as a Unitarian Universalist.

And it was a launch.

I have to keep remembering that as I ready for the next phase.  We are shifting collectively into the next phase. It is still emerging as the learning from the states is gathered and analyzed.  With an abundance of reactivity in these times, it is powerful to see the discipline of reflection and strategy employed.

Of the next steps, one for sure will include community canvassing for a new type of voter registration.  If you ever engaged in a traditional voter registration process, you likely made phone calls or knocked on doors.  You spoke to people you would never meet again. The goal is focused on the election and then it ends. But what if voters were engaged beyond the election? What if they could stay engaged to see where elected officials fulfilled promises to serve the people, most especially the poor?

They say it can’t be done.

But then, I sat in a tent with a two-week-old and watched people–who our country tries desperately to keep separated— suddenly move into a community that won’t be baited into fighting one another to build the empire.

If you want to learn more and join us, look at poorpeoplescampaign.org

Forward Together! Not One Step Back!

Rev. Robin Tanner
Beacon Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Summit, NJ