The District’s Shiloh Baptist Church hosted its 27th Annual Martin Luther King Memorial Prayer Breakfast. The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, used the event to call for a new Poor People’s Campaign.

In the wake of King’s death in 1968, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy made good on Dr. King’s call for a “Poor People’s Campaign,” bringing about 3,000 people to DC who set up makeshift campsites in the shadows of the Washington Monument.

The Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, issued a call for a new Poor People’s campaign during the King Memorial Prayer Breakfast. (Photo by Hamil R. Harris)

“We are doing a multi-year campaign to engage more than 100 million people who sometimes never even hear their name or their condition,” Barber said. “We are dealing with the systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative that is promoted by Christian nationalism that is contrary to our deepest Christian values.”

During his speech Barber reminded those gathered of how Martin Luther King was very unpopular after he spoke out against the Vietnam War on April 4th, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City. “He was killed one year to date after that sermon,” Barber said. “ J Edgar Hoover labeled him as the number one enemy of America and there were others in Black leadership who challenged him.”

Shiloh Baptist Church Pastor, the Rev. Doctor Wallace Charles Smith, welcomed Barber to a breakfast that took place on the Saturday morning after the federal government was shut down. The fellowship hall was packed with federal workers, former White House appointees, and veterans of the Civil Rights battles that many thought were won in the 1960s.

“This demonstrates that the church is fighting on and we will not give up,” Smith said. “Even though the government is shut down, the church is still open . . .”

The Rev. Thomas L. Bowen, minister of Congregational Life at Shiloh and director of Religious Affairs for Mayor Muriel Bowser said,” There has never been a time like this and the stakes are raised.”

“We are picking up where Dr. King left off. The dream has to be one that uplifts everyone and we have much more work to do,” said Bowen.

Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said during Black History month he will lead a national effort where people will protest in various sites across the country in groups of 2,500. “Fifty years after the Poor People’s Campaign, it is about motor mobilization. It is a launch, we are not commemorating the Poor People’s Campaign, we are reigniting it.”

“We need to remember that the real Martin Luther King found himself having to take on a society that had a neurotic sickness and a septic commitment to racism, poverty, and war that was literally destroying the soul of this nation and ripping apart its moral promises,” Barber said. “When Dr. King rendered this diagnosis and committed to raise a Poor People’s Campaign for a moral revolution of values with those who had nothing to lose, he was declared even more an enemy of the state and a threat to the powers that be.”

In the same way King became disliked, Barber said, ministers today must be willing to become unpopular if social change is going to come.