What We “Cannot Not Know in America”: 400 Years of Inequality and Seven Sins

The 400 Years of Inequality Project was created to call organizations to observe the 400th anniversary of the first Africans landing in Jamestown in 1619. The project focused on the broad ramifications of inequality. Used as a justification of chattel slavery, structures of inequality continue to condition the lives of many groups in the US. Over 110 organizations joined this observance and held 150 events. The highlight of the year was the homily given by Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, who described the “seven sins” that link the concept of inequality to every aspect of national life, from politics to militia. These “seven sins” help us to analyze and address crises, such as the COVID pandemic.

Red Squads and Black Radicals: Reading Agency in the Archive

Scholarly accounts of racial formation have regularly focused on the role of state actors or non-state oppressive subjects administering racial systems against a dominated population. Challenges or resistance to state racialization practices by dissenting communities, on the other hand, have not received commensurate engagement, particularly at the level of race-making. Judith Weisenfeld demonstrates in New World A-Coming that African American religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Peace Mission were not merely protesting a racial system but also inventing new racial subjectivities. This account of Black radical agency is deeply consequential for understanding the religious dimensions of Black radical politics and the agential architecture of racialization. In this article, I apply Weisenfeld’s method of mapping radical agency from the underside of state archives. The focus is on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Chicago campaign of 1966 and the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) that culminated in the summer of 1968. I argue that Black radical activists, despite being targeted by counterintelligence operations of law enforcement, nevertheless transformed the politics of race and power with lasting consequences by exceeding in specific ways the efforts of state actors to destroy Black liberation projects. The archival records of state entities themselves render the import of Black agency. This implies, among other things, that scholarship on Black religion and racialization broadly must shift significantly to account for a central argument of Weisenfeld’s book: dominated peoples have been agents of racial histories and not merely objects of racial governance.

The Poor People’s Campaign

This chapter assesses Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and the effects of poverty on health. In 1968, Dr. King had encouraged the civil rights movement to broaden its mission and demand full employment, housing, guaranteed basic income, and “an economic bill of rights.” Dr. King knew that poverty, like civil rights, is a moral issue and should be addressed with the same urgency as other forms of societal injustice. However, taking the political steps to address poverty as a moral crisis remains controversial, polarizing Americans. This is likely, in part, because people have trouble conceptualizing the effects of poverty. The key to discussing poverty lies in addressing its effect on health. If people can agree that poverty is a public health problem, they can address it with public health solutions.