Nov 01
The Struggle for Voting Rights and the Poor People's Campaign
Description
Black America is singular as the oppressed group denied citizenship, economic justice, and voting rights in the USA. If there was a New Deal for White America, then there was a Raw Deal for Black America. As an alternative to the Raw Deal for the “Other America” and understanding that economic justice was linked to voting rights, Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King championed the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis are leading today’s new Poor People's Campaign, challenging racism, voter suppression, poverty, militarism, and environmental devastation. Professor Gloria Browne-Marshall is the author of The Voting Rights War: The NAACP and the Ongoing Struggle for Justice. Together they will discuss what is at stake in the 2018 elections.
Speakers
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Reverend William Barber
Poor People's Campaign
The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is the president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. A visiting professor of public theology and activism, Rev. Dr. Barber is the author of The Third Reconstruction and Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing.
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Gloria Browne-Marshall
John Jay College, CUNY
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY). She teaches classes in Constitutional Law, Race and the Law, Evidence, and Gender and Justice. She a civil rights attorney who litigated cases for Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Professor Browne-Marshall is the author of many articles and several books including The Voting Rights War: The NAACP and the Ongoing Struggle for Justice and Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present. Her forthcoming book is titled She Took Justice, about Black Women and the law from warrior Queen Nzingha to today's activists.
Professor Browne-Marshall is a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She has been the recipient of several honors including the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Justice Award for her work with civil rights and women's justice issues.
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Reverend Liz Theoharis
Poor People's Campaign
The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival with the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II that organized the largest and most expansive wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in US history. She is the Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary. She has spent over the past two decades organizing amongst the poor in the United States, working with and advising grassroots organizations with significant victories including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Vermont Workers Center, Domestic Workers United, the National Union of the Homeless and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.
Liz received her BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, her Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in 2004 where she was the first William Sloane Coffin Scholar, and her PhD from Union Theological Seminary in New Testament and Christian Origins. She has been published in Time Magazine, The Guardian, Sojourners, The Nation, The Christian Century, among other outlets.
Liz is the author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor. She is co-author of Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing. Liz is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.