A Daughter’s Story: White Supremacy and the Poor People’s Campaign

May 18, 2022 | 1:20 pm
Ann Meador, Cool Revolution/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Kate Cell
Senior Climate Campaign Manager

UCS is honored to be a mobilizing partner for the Poor People’s Campaign, a nonviolent call to moral revival. If you can join us in Washington, DC on June 18th in solidarity with their march and assembly, I hope you will.

Buffalo. Charlottesville. El Paso. Pittsburgh. Charleston.

I’ve been fortunate to visit all these great cities.

Each has its own character, architecture, arts scene, mix of peoples and histories, its delicious foods and its distinctive accents. Now, they and too many other US hometowns share one terrible trait: in recent years, they have been the settings for white supremacist rage and violence.

Those of us who are sick about this, are sick of this, who cannot stand by while our brothers and sisters are slaughtered, need to come together. We need a way of understanding white supremacy as an ever emboldened and central fact of our country’s political life. We need a powerful and empowering analysis that shows who would divide us and how we act together for change.

The Poor People’s Campaign offers one such analysis. It explains how racism is used as a tool to divide natural allies, to splinter from combined action all who are hurt by our economic system, our environmental degradation, our eroding civil rights, our democracy’s enfeebled state. It gives us an opportunity to organize our activism together to address these problems. It is a direct successor to Dr. Martin Luther King’s unfinished work from 1968.

1968: The last Poor People’s Campaign

Bishop William J. Barber II is one of the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign. Like me, he is a child of North Carolina. He is the past president of the NC branch of the NAACP, the president of Repairers of the Breach, and a co-founder of the Moral Mondays campaign in NC. He is an astute political thinker, a powerful public speaker, and a man who has been arrested many times for his convictions.

In founding the Poor People’s Campaign, Dr. Barber and other leaders are continuing an approach used by Dr. King in 1968: like him, they are bringing together poor and low-income people from all races and ethnicities to demand an end to “interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism.” So much of Dr. King’s work has been left incomplete since that terrible year when US soldiers massacred more than 500 people at My Lai in Vietnam and both Robert Kennedy and Dr. King were murdered.

As it happens, one of my first memories is of April 1968. My dad came home at night in a police car.

I was not yet three, Dr. King had just been assassinated, and my dad, a young history professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was involved in the “Silent Vigil,” which included a student-supported strike by dining-hall and custodial workers. There was a curfew in Durham after Dr. King’s assassination, and the police escorted home those who were out after curfew for certain purposes.

It was confusing for a toddler to see her father in a cop car—it took a few years for me to understand that he was there for doing something right, not something wrong. But the lessons of 1968, the Silent Vigil, and our white family’s relationship to race and racism reverberate through my life to this day.

The highest stage of white supremacy

My dad was an historian of the British empire, so the concept of white supremacy and its integral connections to colonialism was core to his scholarship. But the Silent Vigil stayed with him and caused him to reflect, for the rest of his life, on the segregated North Carolina society he grew up in and his role in it. Fourteen years later he published his finest book, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy, a comparison of the origins of segregation in South Africa and the American South.

In our family, when a parent was proofreading a set of galleys, a child was required to read the manuscript out loud. At age 17, on a camping trip, I read The Highest Stage of White Supremacy out loud to my dad by the light of a Coleman lantern. The book has two main theses: first, that both Southern segregation and South African apartheid were the “solutions to the race problem” preferred by white political and social moderates: “people,” my dad said wryly, “who probably looked like me and thought as I was supposed to.”

Secondly, my dad demonstrated that when white people are a smaller percentage of the population, white supremacy becomes more violently oppressive. As bad as the Jim Crow South was, apartheid South Africa was manifestly more intrusive and restrictive.

This is why the hope that the US demographic shift would help secure our progress has always seemed naïve to me, and why we are seeing the convergence of loss of reproductive, voting, and other civil rights and concerted efforts to dehumanize and kill Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color and LGBTQ+ people, and the intensification of fascist ideology, including eco-fascism.

My dad wasn’t alive to connect his thinking to the reality of mass incarceration, and I often wonder if he would have considered incarceration, conferring as it does greater invisibility for people of color among white people, a still higher stage of white supremacy. Whatever he might have thought, certainly white supremacy in the US is alive and not well—it is sickening us all. And all of us, especially white people, must confront it in ourselves and in our society.

Undermining white supremacy

Sometimes people ask me why I remain committed to environmental and climate justice: this story, and other stories of acting against the racism I witnessed growing up, are the reason. When people ask me if I think we can act against white supremacy, I always say yes. We can choose to undermine white supremacy rather than stand by as it undermines our nation.

The theory of change of both the historical and current Poor People’s Campaigns is that the power of love and nonviolent confrontation are the best tools for dismantling white supremacy as a pillar of US society. There are certainly other theories and approaches, but this approach, reviled in the 1960s by conservatives and moderates, desegregated the South, at least de jure if not de facto.

Like its predecessor, today’s Poor People’s Campaign seeks to defeat injustice, not people. It resists evil and the violence of the spirit as well as the body. It chooses love over hate. It is more than an event: it is an analysis, an approach, a practice, a solution to the radical evil among us. Please join UCS in Washington DC on June 18th for the March and Assembly.

About the author

More from Kate

Kate Cell is the Senior Climate Campaign Manager for the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In her role, she manages the UCS Climate Campaign, leading a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, policy analysts, legislative affairs staff, and outreach and communication experts working to achieve policies that can reduce global warming emissions and increase resilience to climate change impacts. Her team is focused on demonstrating and alleviating the disparate burdens climate change poses to environmental justice communities, low-income communities, and communities of color.