Poverty was the fourth-leading cause of death, in 2019 among Americans 15 or older, behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking, and ahead of dementia, obesity, accidents, chronic lung disease, stroke, suicide, and homicide. Yet poverty in the United States receives far less research attention than other causes of death. Politicians rarely speak of it, and this has been the case for many decades.

And that is why, in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others launched the Poor People’s Campaign. The goal was to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor communities across the country. The campaign called for a “revolution in values.” In the summer of 2018, the 50th anniversary of MLK’s initiative, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival renewed this celebrated struggle under the leadership of Bishop William J. Barber, Jr. and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis.

Today the Poor People’s Campaign is a national movement to address fundamental injustices in the United States: not just poverty, but racism, environmental devastation, militarism, and the distorted morality of religious nationalism used to justify and sustain other injustices. We are a movement to bring the political power of 140 million poor and low-wealth Americans to Congress and state legislatures across the country. Our goal is to generate policies that remedy poverty and other injustices — policies that guarantee livable wages, affordable housing, voter rights, environmental justice, and health care for all, to name just a few.

On Saturday, March 2, the Poor People’s Campaign will hold assemblies in 31 state capitals across the country, including at the State House in Augusta.

We will march and rally to bring the demands of poor and low-wealth people for living wages, health care, housing, education, environmental justice, and voting rights directly to the governors and lawmakers of those states. From here in Augusta to Texas and California to the Carolinas, thousands of poor and impacted people, clergy and advocates will call for an end to poverty in the richest nation on earth.

As examples of the challenges poor people face every day, here is basic information about two of these injustices:

The lack of affordable housing is a true crisis in Maine. Our state’s minimum wage just increased to $14.15 an hour, but according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a Mainer working full-time (40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year) would need to earn $24.73 an hour to afford fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental home, without paying more than 30% of their income. Put another way, a person earning Maine’s minimum wage would have to work 70 hours per week to afford that home.

Similarly, health care is increasingly beyond the reach of many Mainers. Despite the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion, over 75,000 Mainers are still uninsured. And hundreds of thousands more are underinsured — that is, they have insurance but still can’t afford health care because their plans come with significant co-pays and deductibles as high as $10,000 per year. Consequently, far too many Mainers go without care, and far too many are saddled with medical debt, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

We know the many injustices we fight interlock with one another. Poor people paying more than 30% of their income on housing — and many pay more than 50% — have little money left over to address health issues. Consequently, they may postpone seeking medical care or not fill prescriptions for critical medications.  In turn, un- or under-treated health problems may lead to work absences that diminish wages or lead to job loss.

And so the Poor People’s Campaign is a fusion movement because we know that to succeed, we must come out of our silos and collaborate across issues. We are a moral movement because we are rooted in religious and constitutional values that demand justice for all. We are a movement that lifts from the bottom — every race, religion, class, sexuality, and community — because when we lift from the bottom, everybody rises.

Those of us working on the Maine Poor People’s Campaign ask every Mainer who shares our goal of racial and economic justice for all to join us in Augusta on March 2 for the Maine State House Assembly. Visit tinyurl.com/3mknrcpd to learn more.