On June 19, 1968, less than three months after the assassination of her husband, Coretta Scott King issued a challenge from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She asked that the nation take Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights vision in a bold new direction. Before his death, Dr. King had set in motion the Poor People’s Campaign, an unprecedented crusade for economic justice. Speaking to a multi-racial crowd of 50,000, the grieving widow posed a simple question: “What good is the legal right to sit in a restaurant if one cannot afford the price of food?” Still reeling from her husband’s violent murder, she added, “…starving a child is violence…contempt for poverty is violence.”
The 1954 Montgomery bus boycott led by Rosa Parks and Dr. King helped secure African Americans the right to sit at the front of any bus, eat at any restaurant, and, finally, the right to vote. “Whites Only” was becoming a thing of the past. Yet, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, in 1968, 35 million Americans were still living below the poverty line in the richest nation on earth. From the coal hollers of Appalachia to the blighted blocks in the nation’s many “hoods,” growing inequality was literally choking the life out of millions of families and communities—of every color. The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign had only modest success and eventually faded away.
Fifty-six years later, the voices of the poor are still largely ignored even as their numbers increase. In 2022, the poverty rate was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty. That figure and a slew of other “myths” about race and class are exploded in Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II’s new book, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.
The central argument of White Poverty (written with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove) is that systemic racism, discrimination, and the ever-expanding battlefield of culture wars are largely manufactured wedge issues promoted by big-money interests to keep poor people divided and powerless. He writes,
The fundamental structure of inequality in America is shrouded in the myths that plantation owners told poor European immigrants to make them believe that laws which allowed planters to own human beings would ultimately serve the interests of those poor white immigrants…white poverty remains the troubling fact that exposes the lie.
In the tradition of Black preachers who are social justice leaders like Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, and Andy Young, Barber speaks prophetically, scholarly, and plainly about growing economic inequality, not just for Black Americans but also for their white brothers and sisters. The North Carolina minister cites a recent study by Dr. David Brady of the University of California Riverside that finds poverty to be the fourth leading cause of death in America—“more deadly than obesity and diabetes, both of which are exacerbated by poverty, and more deadly than firearms.” Like many before him, Barber calls for a “moral revival” in America. But his is a call with a plan.
His plan, rooted in past successes, is modeled after the multi-racial forces that made possible America’s progressive, if brief, post-Civil War Reconstruction era. He also draws inspiration from a Second Reconstruction, which flourished during the 1960s when people of all faiths and races fought for and won landmark civil rights legislation.
White Poverty is a clarion call for Americans of every race and background to unite for a Third Reconstruction focused on tackling the interlocking problems that have denied us an economy that works for all. Reverend Barber says,
If people fighting for a living wage could link up with people fighting for voting rights; if young folks fighting for climate action could link up with folks trying to pass commonsense gun control; if immigrants struggling to keep their families together could connect with unhoused people fighting for a place to be…if people who don’t think of themselves as political but are fed up with the way things are could link up with the movements that have been pushing for policies that could change the daily reality for most of us—if all of us could get together, that would be a mighty force for change.
He redefines what it means to be poor in America. He notes,
According to the government’s official poverty measure (OPM), an individual who earns $14,000 a year—or a family of four that gets by on $28,000—is not poor. But try existing for a month in America today on $1,167…I’ve met people in America’s cities who earn twice the OPM —sometimes working swing shifts at multiple jobs—and still sleep in their car at night because they can’t afford to pay rent on top of their other monthly living expenses.
He argues that “63 percent of U.S. workers today live paycheck to paycheck,” and “When we look at poverty through this lens of practical necessity, 140 million Americans are poor or low income—a full 43 percent of the country.”
The majority of poor people in this country are white. Reverend Barber explains, “I sound the alarm about white poverty because I am convinced that we can’t expose the peculiar exceptionalism of America’s poverty without seeing how it impacts the very people that our myths try to privilege.” In part two of White Poverty, he challenges myths:
- Pale skin is a shared interest.
- Only Black folks want change in America.
- Poverty is only a Black issue.
- We can’t overcome division.
Barber has been at this work for a long time. After serving as pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, for 30 years, in 2023, he became the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He developed his Moral Fusion philosophy in 2013 when he first led weekly “Moral Monday” rallies throughout North Carolina—while building a multi-racial, multi-cultural coalition focused on lifting poor and low-income people. In 2015, he established “Repairers of the Breach” to train communities in moral movement building. Moral Mondays has expanded into a national movement mobilizing diverse communities “from the hood to the holler” to challenge the status quo and get more poor people to exercise their right to vote.
As I write this, we are only days away from a planned dramatic rebirth of the Poor People’s Campaign. On June 29, Barber and Dr. Liz Theoharis, national co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, are planning a Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. As the reverend puts it, “It’s time for a resurrection, not an insurrection.”
White Poverty is equal parts biblical inspiration, commonsense wisdom, scholarly insight, history lessons, and grassroots strategy. Through religious metaphor, poetic asides, and real-life anecdotes, Reverend Barber captures what ails America and what is needed to lift more people out of poverty and nourish our “impoverished democracy.”
His Moral Fusion movement is firmly rooted in the call of Christianity—and all religions—to care for the sick, the forsaken, and the poor. Paraphrasing Isaiah, he says, “If you loose the bands of wickedness…if you pay people a living wage, if you care for the poor…if you even invite them into your home and treat them like family, then your light will break forth like dawn and your healing will be complete…then you will be called a repairer of the breach.”
Reading this book, I recalled my own experiences of growing up in poverty in Baltimore. The stories that Barber tells about the people he has met living in their cars, pleading with the local church for help to pay an electric bill, or who have to live with an illness because they do not have health insurance sounded all too familiar. Living paycheck to…sometimes no check, I felt both the physical and emotional trauma of poverty. White Poverty reminded me that poverty is color-blind.
While much of America and the media seem fixated on political scandals, partisan bickering, and culture wars, 140 million Americans struggle against a rising tide of poverty and neglect. Reverend Barber intends to wake this sleeping giant through “a movement that won’t shut up until America faces our exceptional poverty and does right by the people who built this nation and keep it running every day.”
