by Leonard Riley, South Carolina Poor People’s Campaign
Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the most beautiful and most visited cities in the country. The irony in Charleston, and the irony in the state of South Carolina is that we are creating new homeless people every day!
Leonard Riley, South Carolina PPC
The eviction rate is off the charts. I find myself, along with my core activist friends, fighting every day just to keep people in their apartments. Mortgages are past due. Foreclosures are raging.
We’ve got homeless people who don’t have health care, and we’ve got people with homes who don’t have health care! We need health care for all. We’ve got to save people’s lives!
But there’s also disparity in medical treatment. Poor people face double jeopardy, because if you’re the wrong hue, you’re not going to be high priority on the list for who receives treatment.
We are creating new poor people every day. People that had a job and saw themselves as “middle class,” and now, because of this pandemic and the politics, they find themselves applying for food stamps (SNAP benefits).
We need another COVID relief/stimulus package like we had back in May. We’ve got some of the largest employers in South Carolina right here in Charleston, such as the Medical University of South Carolina and Boeing. They’ve laid off people, furloughed some people for a while. Now they’ve sent them a note saying, “You are not coming back.”
“We are going to continue to put pressure on our senator to pass a relief bill for all workers.
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We’ve got to address ALL of this!
I’m fortunate, because I’m a long-shoreman. I load and unload cargo onto ships. If we stop, then world trade stops. And we’re willing to lend our voice and our platform to the struggle. We are going to continue to put pressure on our senator to pass a relief bill for all workers.
Guess what? We outnumber them! There are way more poor and low-income people in the world than greedy rich people. We just need to get together and organize and participate and take action. We have the power, the moral power, to change things. We just have to use it now!
This article was originally published in issue three of the Forward Together street ‘zine.