Dear Maryland Activist,

The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival will undertake 40 Days of Action to launch a massive movement to address the evils of poverty, racism, militarism, and ecological devastation. Every week for six weeks all kinds of people across the country will congregate at their state capitals to raise awareness about the unique and common ways they are affected by the evils.

The theme of the 2nd week of action will be---Linking Systemic Racism and Poverty: Voting Rights and Immigration.  

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has emerged from more than a decade of work by grassroots community and religious leaders, organizations and movements across the nation. We are united together to fight systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy, and to shift the nation’s distorted moral narrative. The Campaign aims to build a broad and deep moral movement – rooted in the leadership of poor people and moral leaders, and reflecting our deepest constitutional and faith traditions – to put before the nation a moral agenda.

50 years ago, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and many others called for a “revolution of values” in America, inviting people who had been divided to stand together against the “triplets of evil”--militarism, racism, and economic injustice--to insist that people need not die from poverty in the richest nation to ever exist. Together with poor people in communities across America--black, white, brown and Native--they responded by building a Poor People’s Campaign. We draw on the history, vision and unfinished work of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign and take as our task reigniting that campaign to unite the poor, disenfranchised, and marginalized to take action together and become what Dr. King called “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival will necessarily be a multi-year undertaking. In the spring of 2018 the Campaign will launch by engaging in 40 Days of Moral Action across the nation. By engaging in highly publicized, non-violent moral fusion direct action, over a 6-week period in at least 30 states and the District of Columbia between May 13 and June 23, the Campaign will force a serious national examination of the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy during a key election year while strengthening and connecting informed and committed grassroots leadership in every state, increasing their power to continue this fight long after June 2018. During these 40 days of Moral Action, the Campaign will push forward a concrete moral agenda, and draw on art, music, popular education and religious traditions to challenge the nation’s distorted moral narrative.