William Barber II Quotes

Where we see churches who say that the moral issue is hate, disliking gay people, standing against a woman’s right to choose, standing up for guns and tax cuts for the wealthy and building a wall to block people from this country, not only are they wrong – because there are more than 2,000 Scriptures in the Bible that speak to how we should treat the poor, the stranger and the least of these...

Not only will Pence and Trump not acknowledge racism when it comes to police violence, they are not even acknowledging the disparate racism in economics and in healthcare, and so forth and so on. So, on the one hand, while Pence and — while Biden and Harris may not be every, fully where the Poor People’s Campaign are, they are in the world of wanting to do more.... wanting to make sure that the people have what they need, as opposed to wanting to only secure the wealthy and the greedy.

North Carolina was the scene of the crime of the worst voter suppression, after the case out of Alabama and when the Supreme Court gutted Section 5. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that it’s like putting away your umbrella — the Shelby case, it was — putting away your umbrella in a rainstorm. And in North Carolina, Amy, when it was done, the Republicans there said, “Now that the problem has — the headache has been removed, we can do what we want to.” And guess what. Everything Pence just said, we heard in 2013. And they tried to roll back every progressive way of voting. And they actually went to the books and looked at how did it benefit Black and Brown people and young people, and those were the rules they tried to roll back. And the court said it was surgical — surgical racism. And what I saw in North Carolina, what we defeated in North Carolina, what we filed suit against in North Carolina, is now what Trump and Pence are talking about doing on the national level: surgical racism with surgical precision.

This is not the time for trickle-down solutions. We know that when you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. There are concrete solutions to this immediate crisis and the longer term illnesses we have been battling for months, years and decades before. We will continue to organize and build power until you meet these demands. Many millions of us have been hurting for far too long. We will not be silent anymore.

With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor or a $400 emergency away from being poor.

We are a nation crying out for security, equity, and justice. We need . We need good jobs. We need quality public education. We need a strong social safety net. We need health care to be understood as a human right for all of us. We need security for people living with disabilities. We need to be a nation that opens our hearts and neighborhoods to immigrants. We need safe and healthy environments where our children can thrive instead of struggling to survive. With the coronavirus pandemic bringing our country’s equally urgent poverty crisis into stark relief, we cannot simply wait for change. It must come now. America is an imperfect nation, but we have made important advancements against interconnected injustices in the past. We can do it again, and we know how. Now is the time to fight for the heart and soul of this democracy.

Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness—that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior. It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer—even while our real is full of gaping holes. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship. The way the U.S. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size—and it’s still the way we today.

It doesn’t say rest on your laurels, but to keep on pushing. In this work, sometimes you get heavy criticism. People do say ugly things, ‘You just want money.’ I just want other people to have health care. You know, Jesus healed everybody and never charged a co-pay.

Decades after Depression-era reforms, Wall Street fought successfully to deregulate the , paving the way for the 2008 financial crash that caused millions to lose their homes and livelihoods. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back.

War is a crime against the poor civilians of Iran, Iraq, and the whole Middle East region, who pay for U.S. wars with the destruction of their lives, their health, their homes and their country’s environment. It’s a crime against the poor of the U.S. as well who pay with their tax dollars going to the Pentagon instead of to jobs, health care and a green new deal.

Please God, grant us wisdom, grant us courage, until the poor are lifted, the sick are healed, children are protected, and civil rights and human rights never neglected. Grant us wisdom for the facing of this hour until love and justice are never rejected.
Grant us wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour until, together, we make sure there is racial justice and economic justice and living-wage justice and health care justice and ecological justice and disability justice and justice for homeless and justice for the poor and low-wealth and working poor and immigrant justice—until we study war no more and peace and justice are the way we live.
This is the only path to domestic tranquility and healing. So God, grant us as a people; grant us as an entire nation, grant our new President; grant our new Vice President; grant every preacher; grant every politician; grant every person, Black and white, Latino, Native, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, people of faith, not of faith but with a moral conscience, every human being created by God, documented or undocumented; gay, straight or trans, young or old. And what a day it will be when our children’s children call us what you have called us to be: repairers of the breach. Amen.

It should not have taken a pandemic to raise these resources. In June 2019, we presented a Poor People’s Moral Budget to the House Budget Committee, showing that we can meet these needs for this entire country. If you had taken up this Moral Budget, we would have already moved towards infusing more than $1.2 trillion into the economy to invest in health care, good jobs, living wages, housing, water and sanitation services and more.

64 million poor and low-wealth people were eligible to vote in the last election. That’s nearly one-third of the electorate. Thirty-four million did not vote. And a study that we just recently did, called power unleashed — “Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low-Wealth Voters,” said that the number one reason that poor and low-wealth people did not vote — this actually was a tri-reason...

The United States has always been a nation at odds with its professed aspirations of equality and justice for all—from the genocide of original inhabitants to slavery to military aggression abroad. But there have been periods in our history when courageous social movements have made significant advances. We must learn from those who’ve gone before us as we strive to build a movement that can tackle today’s injustices—and help all of us survive.

We forget that it was the religion of abolitionists that led them not to pray against slavery but to stand against slavery.