March For Our Lives

Poor People to March On Washington, D.C. for 50th Anniversary of MLK's Poor People's Campaign and Resurrection City!

On June 2nd, poor families from across the country will gather in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, the poorest District in Pennsylvania, to march to Washington D.C. in the March for Our Lives.

Please join the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) in this march to mark the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign and Resurrection City erected in 1968 on the National Mall.

To find out more, visit http://economichumanrights.org/march-for-our-lives/ and https://www.facebook.com/events/208024929747920/. Also, please donate $10 today to support this effort at https://org2.salsalabs.com/o/7315/donate_page/ppehrc.

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Kensington is home to the highest death rate of ANY major U.S. city. In 2016, 64,000 Americans died from opioids - more than in the entire Vietnam War (55,000). In Philadelphia, there were 1,200 overdose deaths last year due to mostly opioids. It has quadrupled the murder rate.

Kensington is also home to the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU). The KWRU was created as a direct response to the cuts in public assistance at the same time that no jobs were being created for welfare recipients. Cheri Honkala went on to become the first welfare recipient to testify before Congress about the impact of the welfare cuts (see Myth of the Welfare Queen). At the time, politicians were slamming the poor by creating images of welfare queens and deadbeat dads instead of telling the real story which was one of poor single mothers and unemployed fathers, entering the prison system in record numbers to become a part of the prison industrial complex. This led KWRU to look for help and models of organizing outside of their own neighborhood and soon they linked with the poor in both urban and rural areas around the country that were facing the same plight, forming the People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.

From a neighborhood that once was filled with factories, offering a blue-collar life of making hats and cigars, now is ground zero in a drug war, where the number one source of income is drugs and the second welfare, and where mothers hope daily that their sons come home alive. It is these very real daily lives in a war zone that have given rise to the March for Our Lives 2018.

As put by PPEHRC member, Galen Tyler: “We are this new and unsettling force that King spoke of in 1968.”

Yes, we the poor will march and speak for ourselves: the homeless, residents of Puerto Rico robbed of our land and culture, people in recovery, the disability community, the ‘welfare queens,’ the ‘deadbeat dads,’ homeless veterans, the hustlers, young and old, immigrants, the criminals, the ‘undeserving’ poor, black, white and Brown. We will march for our lives and when we arrive we will construct Resurrection city and Reclaim our future for generations to come.