WILPF Partners with the Poor People’s Campaign to Build America’s Third Reconstruction

Members of the WILPF San Jose branch called on all California representatives to embrace the 3rd Reconstruction Resolution at Representative Zoe Lofgren’s office (CA 19th District). 

By Dorothy Van Soest
WILPF Liaison to the Poor Peoples Campaign
WILPF Women, Money & Democracy Committee
Member, Washington State Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee

July 2021

The threat to our democracy underway today characterized by a wave of reactionary legislation across the country is the greatest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s.

The Poor People’s Campaign is now pushing, with 500 days of action, toward the Third Reconstruction. In late May, a congressional resolution, aptly titled “Third Reconstruction: Fully Addressing Poverty and Low Wages from the Bottom Up,” was introduced by U.S. Representatives Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal. Read the full text of H.Res.438.

Following that, on June 7, more than fifty local delegations across the country visited their representatives’ offices to demand they support the resolution. And WILPF, as a national mobilizing partner of the PPC, was there!

WILPF branches and members from California, North Carolina, and Washington state sent photos of their actions delivering the resolution to reps. View the slideshow here.

You can also watch an inspiring video of the California Poor People’s Campaign (CAPPC) action at the San Francisco federal building.

Why We Are Building a Third Reconstruction

We’ve been here before and when history circles back on itself like this, it’s worth paying attention.¹

Especially now, as we enter America’s Third Reconstruction that – like the first two – is emerging during a time of momentous political turmoil, socioeconomic change, and racist assaults on people and democracy. 

For a decade after the Civil War, when we had our First Reconstruction, the United States experienced the most significant wave of democracy this country had ever seen. And what followed was a virulent and violent racist backlash, when Black and white leaders were terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan and white citizens councils in both the north and the south, and a Jim Crow system was created to codify our country’s strict racial caste system.²

From the 1940s to 1970s, the Second Reconstruction, often labeled the Civil Rights era, ushered in the end of legal segregation and Jim Crow, expanded voting rights, and other significant legislation. And what followed, once again, has been fifty years of counterattack, encoded in politics as the Southern Strategy and characterized by racist dog-whistle language being used to roll back the rights of the poor and people of color. 

Today, we are building the Third Reconstruction, the inception of which Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-founder of the Poor People’s Campaign, connects to the year 2013. That was when 17 people in North Carolina were arrested for protesting that state’s assault on the rights of the poor and people of color and the passage of the worst voter-suppression laws in a generation. What began as a small action was followed by others like it, and it grew quickly into the largest civil disobedience campaign in American history.   

Here’s how you can be part of building the 3^rd Reconstruction: 

• Join the campaign by registering at www.poorpeoplescampaign.org.
• Contact your congressional representative and ask them to co-sponsor and support the resolution,Third Reconstruction: Fully Addressing Poverty and Low Wages from the Bottom Up: www.3rdreconstruction.org
• Participate in 365 days of action pushing toward a mass rally in Washington, D.C. on June 18, 2022.

Send photos of your participation to Dorothy Van Soest at wilpf4ppc@gmail.com for future eNews articles about WILPF’s mobilizing partnership with the PPC. 

Footnotes
¹ This article is drawn from: When You Lift from the Bottom, Everyone Rises: How we have entered America’s Third Era of Reconstruction by Liz Theoharis. TomDispatch, June 22, 2021. https://tomdispatch.com/when-you-lift-from-the-bottom-everyone-rises/

² Wilkerson, Isabel (2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Random House.