Public Health and Historical Perspectives on the June 29th Poor People’s Campaign
June 29, 2024
By Christopher Williams, PhD
President, Public Health Liberation
The Poor People’s Campaign recently held its Mass Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on June 29th in Washington D.C. Led by Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, the event featured speakers from affected populations, religious, labor, activist, and lay groups. They shared personal and community challenges caused by stark economic, political, and social inequality in the US. “Poverty is the fourth leading cause of death,” appeared on countless placards. T-shirts, and video clips. The Poor People’s Campaign engages low-income and low-wealth voters with the goal of policy reform and voter mobilization. Its 17-point agenda covers a breadth of issues involving systemic racism, reproductive rights, poverty, environmental harm, healthcare, the war economy, and US political factionalism. The Poor People’s Campaign determines that voter turnover must be encouraged in this year’s elections to affect these issues. The Campaign calls us to a moral revival and reconciliation with human suffering.
After returning home from a full day of volunteering at the event, I sat down to consider why the Poor People’s Campaign is so important. This article briefly contextualizes the Poor People’s Campaign from two major perspectives – public health theory and historical. It argues that the failure of the political establishment to respond to calls for social reform is likely to carry unacceptable costs – the threat of deepening inequality and civil unrest, even war.
I. Public Health Liberation
Public Health Liberation has posited a new public health theory that ascribes persistent health inequity to the lack of engagement with affected populations, lack of diverse strategies for change, and self-interests. In its call for healthcare reform, affordable costs, and increased coverage, the Poor People’s Campaign is modeling the praxis in PHL theory to accelerate health equity. In his opening speech. Rev. Barber exclaimed,
“One study said that 350,000 people of the over 1 million people that died during Covid so far didn't die because of the virus they died because of the lack of healthcare. That is too low down for us to be satisfied when too many times people are having to choose between buying food and buying medicine. That is too low down to be satisfied cities where you can buy unleaded gas, but you can't buy unleaded water.”
Speakers, like Wayne, shared their personal stories that laid bare the vast health inequity in the US.
“My name is Wayne and I'm from Wisconsin. My story starts by saying (that) I had a medical year in 2009. By stating our healthcare system is broken. the most expensive in the world, does not provide world class care, thus denying a basic human right to millions of poor and low-income workers, among others. I was insured but could not access health care because of deductibles for 10 years. By 2009, I could not walk without a bad limp. I had a growth on the back of my neck the size of a 12-in softball… Poverty is the force leading cause of death in the richest country of the world. I personally knew two people who died because they were denied their human right to healthcare. Sadly, these cases are the norm and not the outlier.”
Social progress relies on movements like the Poor People’s Campaign through a process of public demonstration and sustained mobilization. Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), the first and longest-serving president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), summarized it best in this quote that appears on a memorial in Washington, DC.
"No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion. …There is no way whereby our labor movement may be assured sustained progress in determining its policies and its plans other than sincere democratic deliberation until a unanimous decision is reached. This may seem a cumbrous, slow method to the impatient but the impatient are more concerned for immediate triumph than for the education of constructive development." (right panel of Samuel Gompers Memorial, Washington, DC)
The “education of constructive development” as opposed to “immediate triumph,” has defined great social movements. Because it is through a process of public exchange, capacity-building, social capital accrual, and long-term strategies that new moral and social standards are established. Generations, like ours, have benefited from laws, legal theories, and inferior forms of human consciousness that advocates challenged and won. They secured rights and freedoms that we now enjoy and curtailed systems of power, greed, and selfishness. Public health practice must commit to its social contract by seeking long-term strategies in community partnerships and capacity-building until health equity is realized.
II. Converging Crises in the US: Civil Unrest
The breadth and depth of challenges in the current US social order is at a crossroads that has few precedents in the last 100 years. Democratic consensus-building and quality political debate have succumbed to severe political polarization and paralysis, incivility, and elite politics. This portends a dire future because political accountability, however moderate in many instances, characterized the US response during the second half of the 20th century to most major social movements, is no longer. Civil war in the American context is not beyond the realm of possibility. Actual war or its equivalent of frequent violent insurrections is an unacceptable future that will ruin our economy and cause immeasurable public health crises and deaths. The impact on our debt from wartime spending on combating domestic violence and terrorists could likely bankrupt the nation given our current debt-to-GDP ratio, which has only been this high since World War II. The US already pays more on debt interest than military spending. A civil war could also present a major existential threat by hampering our national security and common defense.
Most often, civil wars result from political paralysis and deep polarization between the electorate and elite or between opposing factions that have no political resolution until the conclusion of war. Even that resolution can only give temporary peace. The US should heed the warning signs that its current state of political and economic dysfunction signals major crises ahead.
The US should also apply historical insight to avoid assumptions about its exceptionalism and immunity from intense political instability, even war. The revolutions of 1848 are instructive.
“With the collapses of the 1848 Revolutions many Americans took comfort in the idea that the United States was different from Europe in its stability achieved via a republican revolution. But a decade later this would prove hubris. Then America would undergo a conflict whose upheavals and attendant suffering dwarfed the preceding conflicts in Europe. In their failed quests for greater liberty the 1848 Revolutions did not so much follow the American example of a republican revolution as they themselves provided a glimpse of coming, more comprehensive conflicts of democracy and nation-building on both sides of the Atlantic.”[1]
Blinded by the divine right of manifest destiny and the false hope of lasting compromises on the slavery question, the nation reasoned that it could pursue territorial expansion and maintain a national consensus on slavery to overcome sectional divides in the spirit of national unity. With much of Europe engulfed in revolution in 1848, the US rode high on confidence that it was not like its European counterparts, only for its two goals of expansion and slavery to prove incompatible in less than three generations. Expansion inevitably forced fierce debates about slavery. More slave territories and states only caused greater polarization in the long-term, encouraged by movement leaders, the expanding print media, radical judicial decisions, a slew of mediocre US presidents, and failed rebellions. The US Civil War substituted democratic and legislative processes for warfare to resolve the longstanding political question over slavery.
The postwar period following World War II can also be understood as a pseudo-civil war caused by irreconcilable national priorities and political apathy. The problems of European disintegration that brought world powers into yet another war did not fundamentally alter or stain the nation’s self-image. In fact, its postwar “bump” in world leadership only inflated its sense of moral authority, especially on the issue of democratization.
Despite a 50-year period of unprecedented horror of global warfare and instability in the first half of the 20th century, the US enters a period of postwar economic prosperity with widespread optimism and little immediate concern for its deep moral and social failings on the issues of African Americans’ equality and deep pockets of poverty. The exception was the US judiciary, which was single-handedly dismantling segregation in public education. One could reasonably have assumed that the scale of violence and death due to war and government-sanctioned conduct, forced labor, political violence, exploitation, and disease in the previous 50 years alone would loom large in the American psyche to encourage deep moral reflection and reconciliation.
Despite clear US parallels, Nazis’ ethnic and religious genocidal purges had little import for Americans who saw themselves as decent racists who would never resort to Nazism and the Holocaust. Similar to its posturing in 1848, the US relied on a false narrative of American exceptionalism in the immediate postwar. It wrongly assumed that global instability and devastation in the aftermath of two world wars, independence movements, and violent nationalistic campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward had any import on the home front of relative content and economic expansion. Emerging issues like desegregation were covered in the media, but largely regionalized to the US South. However, US reconciliation that African Americans desired and deserved full citizenship rights and privileges was not taken all that seriously in the immediate postwar period.
While there was increased federal commitment to civil rights (e.g., Civil Rights Act of 1957 and federal troops to enforce desegregation at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas), this was no significant period of political consensus on racial equity prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Obsessed with the exaggerated foreign threat of the Soviet Union and communism, the war economy obscured domestic sources of discontent until social movements forced the point, though not necessarily by direct reference to fifty years of unspeakable human deaths that concerns this article. They affected the detachment and obtuseness of mainstream US political and social discourse. Unresolved and languishing issues of civil rights and segregation, poverty, women’s equality, labor, environmental devastation, forced American Indian assimilation, and reproductive and LGBT rights would soon take center stage and be met with formidable voices for change. It caused a major realignment in the political parties that persists today. These gains were necessary to strengthen the moral fabric and birth a new social order based on the nation’s ideals of equality and justice. It also embodied a necessary evolution in human consciousness to adapt and respond to the realities of the human condition. Civil unrest and agitation defined this period.
US society faces similar problems then as now, except that the current state of politics has devolved to historic lows in political accommodation and democratic accountability. The influence and grip of the economic elite on the people’s democracy has brought the US into a new Gilded Age. The agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign frames these issues well. From environmental classism and racism, deprivation of healthcare coverage, and to stagnant wages, the social unrest and yearning for political action are palpable. The discussion of two periods in US history was intended to illustrate different futures for the US – war as the terms of political settlement or decades-long civil unrest. Neither period, however, provides an analogous context for the US in 2024.
II. Converging Crises in the US: Hardened Oppression
The second looming crisis concerns the effects of oppression. The more that government 1) denies justice for shared prosperity and health, 2) refuses to address the vast social, health, and economic needs of the governed, 3) acts out of ideological purity and political gamesmanship, 4) fails to implement current laws, 5) makes ineffective or guts current laws (e.g., Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dobbs case), 6) upholds the infallibility and special status of interest group and elite politics, 7) fails to cultivate public trust, and 8) fails to take a clear and consistent moral position, the more oppression becomes intractable, entrenched, and institutionalized. It may reach a point that no single law may be able to meaningfully or realistically make inroads on needed reform. As a consequence, revolution may be the only means for the governed to bring government back to itself.
By the time that the slavery question was permanently resolved at the end of the Civil War, pro-slavery justifications for race and racism flourished based on racist rhetoric, false science, perverted religious doctrine, and racist legal, social, and economic superstructures. With the exception of slavery itself (save for non-incarceration status), those ideologies and practices well outlived slavery, taking various adjacent forms for the next 160 years and manifesting in all aspects of life in the contemporary US. The US still lives under the legacy of slavery.
The legislative accomplishments of the Civil Rights era are aging poorly. Residential and educational segregation are stubbornly high. Racial income inequality has worsened since the 1960s. Voting rights are being rapidly eroded, especially in the last 15 years with the US Supreme Court gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though few would argue that the Civil Rights Movement did not accomplish major feats and did not open doors of opportunity for the advancement of African Americans, the promise of racial equality remains unfulfilled. 40% of African Americans are low-income or low-wealth. In part, the government retrenchment from civil rights and racial reform supported regeneration of structural racism. New strategies, ideologies, and practices emerged that were cut from the same cloth as social orders once thought severely curtailed and legally obsolete. For example, gentrification has replaced urban renewal - both widely considered racist policies. The Black Lives Matter movement did not resolve or even begin to resolve deep inequity for African Americans. However, their plight is increasingly shared.
The state of oppression in the US, however, extends well beyond the persistent issue of racial inequity, which has never received adequate government investment and resources to be fully addressed. Social discontent everywhere is palpable and spreading. The historically tolerant forms of oppression and deprivation highly associated with African Americans have generalized in the last forty years into more common forms. If it seems that the US is less equal and free, it is in many ways.
The preamble to the US Constitution reads today as vacuous in light of vast income and structural inequality, voting restrictions, racism, revocation of reproductive rights, environmental classism and racism, declining and stagnant wages, rising healthcare costs, proliferation of firearms and related gun-related deaths, and deference to corporate interests over public interests on issues such as gun safety, fair wages, labor and union rights, and healthcare access, campaign spending, and industry consolidation.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, (e)nsure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The diverse coalition and priorities of the Poor People’s Campaign may appear to be disparate for normal observers who may lack an understanding of oppression in the US. However, for Americans who feel the effects of an unjust system whenever they look for a home, seek decent wages, buy groceries, need to go to a doctor, or want to vote but cannot, the oppression is very much real. They may come to feel, as Thomas Jefferson did in 1787 that, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical". Others may withdraw from political life altogether, effectively causing democratic rot from within. Either of these futures should raise alarm.
The Poor People’s Campaign is not just centrally positioning the voices of affected people for national policy reform. If it continues to be successful, the campaign may very well be saving the US from a period of great civil strife, even war, assuming politicians will listen.
Dr. Christopher Williams is a public health researcher and community leader in Washington, DC. He is President of Public Health Liberation.
https://www.drchristopherwilliams.com/
Photo credit: Christopher Williams
[1] Roberts, Timothy M., and Daniel W. Howe, 'The United States and the Revolutions of 1848', The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849
