“We are here to tell the stock exchange and Wall Street to stop trading our lives, that we want living wages and healthcare and clean air and voting rights.”

Demanding a new political discourse in which the poor are no longer blamed for their poverty in the wealthiest nation in history, hundreds of impoverished and low-income activists on Monday rallied in New York City and marched on Wall Street to take their demands directly to the center of U.S. wealth.
The Moral March on Wall Street, led by the New York Poor People’s Campaign, began at the Museum of the American Indian before heading to the New York Stock Exchange and then Trinity Church Wall Street for a mass meeting where activists and faith leaders spoke.
“We are here to tell the stock exchange and Wall Street to stop trading our lives, that we want living wages and healthcare and clean air and voting rights,” Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, said during the march. “And we want them now! And if we don’t get them, we’ll shut it down.”
Addressing the church meeting, Kelly Smith, a tri-chair of the New York Poor People’s Campaign, confided: “I worry for my son. I worry that he’ll be able to find a living wage. I worry that he lives in a world where his Black skin is valued less than my white skin.”
“And I could worry and worry and worry and wring my hands. Or, I could stand up. I could speak up. I could fight,” she added. “Well, we are going to stand up. We are going to speak out. And we are going to mobilize for June 18th in Washington, D.C.”
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