Our movement must push for political and economic transformation to end police violence and all violence against black, brown, indigenous and poor people. In honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others who have been brutally murdered, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival calls for an end to systemic racism and a comprehensive reconstruction of our society.
We lift up those who are taking action and the relentless work of frontline movements and impacted communities that have been organizing against police brutality, mass incarceration and all forms of violence against black, brown, indigenous and poor people. Our collective, public mourning is an expression of outrage, anguish, and pain from multiple pandemics of police violence, policy violence and economic violence.
We are committed to ending the violence of systemic racism, poverty, militarism, climate crisis and a distorted moral narrative that denies, excuses and justifies violence against us. We demand that our politicians address the full extent of this violence — not only the police violence — that we have been suffering from for generations.
We need sweeping change. The long train of abuses demand it. Too many deaths demand it. And the protests demand it.
Somebody’s been hurting our people for far too long. And we won’t be silent anymore.
The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival makes the following demands on our federal government to end systemic racism and all related injustices:
1. There must be consequences for abuses of police power, and justice for families and communities who have been harmed and terrorized by police violence must be a matter of law. We demand federal legislation that makes officers accountable and liable for abuses of their power through apprehension, investigation, prosecution, conviction and incarceration. This means:
2. Demilitarize the police. End mass incarceration and stop criminalizing the poor. This means:
3. Establish real security by taking care of our health needs in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond and address the poverty and disinvestment in our communities that brought us to this point. This means:
4. Working with frontline movements and impacted communities, establish a National Truth Commission on the violence of systemic racism. The “Truth Commission” model of truth-telling draws on the history of grassroots and community-based responses to state-sanctioned terror in this country and around the world. We demand that frontline and impacted families and communities’ experiences and insights direct federal policy on these injustices. This means:
These demands are part of the Moral Agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and reflect our policy priorities. They were first released in April 2018, have been delivered to Congress and state houses and read aloud in mass meetings, hearings, marches and bus tours in more than 40 states. Lawmakers and legislators — Republican, Democrat and independents — have been put on notice that the Poor People’s Campaign is holding them to account to this agenda.
We will not stop until we can all breathe.
Systemic racism is more than an individual act of hatred. It is state-sanctioned violence that dehumanizes black, brown and indigenous people. Whether through police brutality, mass incarceration, denial of democratic rights, health inequalities or generations of dispossession, systemic racism has denied the humanity of black, brown and indigenous people since the very founding of this country. It has taken the lives of millions of people and criminalized those who assert our humanity.
The recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and others have prompted hundreds of thousands of people to take action together. Generations of injustice are coming to bear on our streets today. Out of this pain, we are also seeing a new and unsettling force rising up to disrupt a system that is killing our people, smothering our communities and disregarding our basic needs in a global pandemic.
The truth is that while our government was totally unprepared for this pandemic, and is taking months to deliberate over whether black, brown, indigenous and poor lives are deserving of housing, health care and economic security, it is fully prepared to quickly mobilize to wage war against us. Over the past decades, the U.S. military’s budget has increased to over $738 billion, taking up more and more of our federal resources, while funding for basic needs like education, housing, food security and water has declined. Military spending is 30 times greater than the federal public school budget, 14 times greater than the federal housing budget and 81 times greater than the EPA budget. Our federal government also spends $100 billion every year on policing and another $80 billion on incarceration. Through the 1033 program, local and state law enforcement agencies have received over 450,000 items, worth $1 billion — rifles, tanks, military aircraft and more — of military equipment from the Department of Defense. Some local law enforcement agencies have received tens of millions of dollars of weaponry.
This is why police are equipped like soldiers and essential workers are wearing garbage bags. This is why our national guard is deployed within hours to multiple cities to protect property, but we still don’t have protection against a virus that has killed over 100,000 people, including approximately 60,000 people of color. In fact, while hundreds of millions of dollars have been sent to federal, state and local law enforcement to address heightened needs during the pandemic, 20 million people still have not received their stimulus checks, 30 million people remain uninsured, 40 million people are unemployed, 50 million people will face hunger in the weeks ahead and 60 million people do not have living wages.
All of this has a disproportionate effect on black, brown and indigenous people, who face higher rates of unemployment, poverty, infection and death. George Floyd had lost his job and survived the coronavirus before he was suffocated on the ground by the police. Breonna Taylor was an emergency medical technician on the frontlines of this pandemic, saving the lives of others before her own life was taken.
We have been facing the pandemic of systemic racism for too long. We have the right to protect ourselves and our communities from a system that is killing us.
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