By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — Low-wage citizens united to fight for a better life Saturday by marching in the streets with the Poor People’s Campaign. The march was the official launch of the group’s ‘40 Weeks of Action’ initiative, during which the organization plans to host community action events every week up until the 2024 presidential election. Nashville was just one of the 30 state capitals nationwide that marched with the Poor People’s Campaign on Saturday. Tri-Chair of the Tennessee Poor People’s Campaign Gordon Myres said the goal of the march, and of the PPC, is to impact policy perpetuating poverty and awaken the “sleeping giant” within the American voter base, that being poor non-voting citizens.
The Poor People’s Campaign said they “demand legislators take immediate action to end the death and poverty in the United States.” Myres said poverty is currently the 4th leading cause of death in the United States, with 800 people a day dying from circumstances related to poverty.
“A lot of times we’ve done things to try to address it and it’s sort of been like whack-a-mole,” Myres said. “You address hunger … and make progress there and wages jump up. You address access to healthcare somewhere else and racism and voter suppression jumps up.”
Myers said low-wage workers who choose not to vote don’t do so because they are lazy, but rather because the platform of the candidates doesn’t address any of the life-or-death concerns they are dealing with daily. He said many are disillusioned at a government that is allowing wealthy companies like Amazon to keep so much of their earnings for shareholders while so many average workers are struggling to maintain a decent quality of life.
“It’s a severe moral indictment that we allow so many people to die every day from poverty,” Myers said. “That we have systems that perpetuate poverty through policy choices, and yet we have trouble mustering the political courage or will, or the moral fortitude, to address them.”
Myres said the goal of the PPC is to reach 50 million working poor people and marginalized folks to motivate them to vote. He said the PPC does not tell people how to vote, though he believes that a democracy can only work with direct engagement from citizens. Myres said there have been several examples of Tennessean locals coming together and impacting local policy for the good of the local community, only for the progress to be undone by the state legislator.
“There’s an attempt to exclude certain groups of people, or prevent, or discourage them from voting,” Myres said. “That’s to the detriment of what democracy is, and should be, and needs to be.”
Myres said the state legislature undoing local progress led by civic grassroots campaigns has been done despite Tennessean concern of larger body government overreach and the promises of the protection of happiness by the state constitution. Myres said one of the most publicized examples of this in action is when his hometown of Memphis’s representative Justin Pearson and Davidson County’s Justin Jones were briefly expelled from their legislative seats, as well the passing of legislation stating once someone’s been removed from the legislature, they cannot be re-elected for a second term.
“It appears, as far as I can tell, to be unconstitutional,” Myres said. “And certainly, violates the spirit of the constitution’s desire to participate and elect their own representatives, but that doesn’t seem to be a concern to the legislature at the moment.”
Updates regarding further action can be found at poorpeoplescampaign.org and their Facebook page under the same name.
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