Dozens of feet of banner unfurled in the wind amid the soaring chants and cries outside the Ohio Statehouse on Monday. Painted a deep red, each banner had been crafted to resemble a brick wall. Powerful demands, like graffiti, were scrawled along its length.

“Equal Pay for Equal Work”
“End Poverty Now”
“Tear Down the Wall, Build Up the People”

Written in different colors, but in the same bold, heavy, handwriting, these demands echoes those of the Poor People’s Campaign. In it’s sixth week, the Campaign returned once more to the statehouse with a new and more powerful message: “we are a new and unsettling force”

Those words were first spoken by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he called upon the poor and disenfranchised peoples of 1968 to unite, and to combat the ills of poverty together. Fifty years later, those same words would fall from the lips of this new campaign, revived a half century after King’s original.

The protestors at the statehouse were indeed an unsettling force, though not quite as new as when King first coined the phrase. The poor of today have been dealing with the same problems and situations as from fifty years ago. Lead runoff unchecked in the poor and overlooked neighborhoods of Cleveland. Gun violence rising to new heights. A minimum wage that isn’t a living wage. These are old problems.

The people gathered here, however, were quite the unsettling force. Wrapping around the Statehouse block, they walled off the statehouse with a long stretch of red brick. They had built their own walls, not to keep anything or anyone out, but because they could. These walls were made in love and concern, not hate. They were made to show that a determined and self-organized force of people could do anything—if they could put up a wall (even symbolically), they could take one down. They made the wall banners out of paper.

The paper crackled as the wind got ahold of it. Small rips crept up and through its surface, between the points that strong, steady hands held on to. Already, it was as if the force of will these protestors marched with was the wind, invisible and unrelenting. Already the wind tore at the paper and at the painted brick walls. They would come down. The movement would make them fall.

The protestors marched in silence for the first lap. The mild roar of cars in the city, the hefty footsteps of over 150 people, the cracking of a paper banner in the wind—these sounds gave way to the steady beat of a few drums scatted along the block-long line of people. The sanitized, standard life of the city seemed very distant to this funerary procession. Drums beat on like a heartbeat, the people marched with the heartbeat.

Six people were arrested by a police force that was waiting. They had chosen to oppose the law and engage in civil disobedience by blocking one lane of State St. As the officers cuffed and removed these six, the chants grew louder. The whole movement stood in solidarity with these six who had chosen to be arrested. 

Posted by Kevin Tang