Poor People's Campaign

Contact: Martha Waggoner | [email protected]

Country music legend Willie Nelson will speak when the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival holds a motorcade on Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday in West Virginia. 

Nelson will join poor and low-income West Virginians online as they speak out about how Sen. Manchin suppresses voting rights and economic justice when he hides behind the coward’s filibuster. 

The Mass Moral Motorcade on Manchin begins at noon ET Thursday in Madison, West Virginia, and gets to the Statehouse in Charleston, West Virginia, about 2:30 p.m. ET. There, speakers will address the participants as they drive around the Statehouse and listen to the program on WSVQ 92.1 FM. 

The program also will be live-streamed worldwide here.

Nelson performed in Austin, Texas, where the Poor People’s Campaign ended a four-day, 27-mile Moral March for Democracy on July 31. 

Invited by the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign, the national campaign and its partners are demanding that Sen. Manchin stops hiding behind the “coward’s filibuster” and supports all provisions of the For the People Act; full restoration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour. 

The co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, will participate in the motorcade and speak at the StateHouse. 

The motorcade is gathering in Madison to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain, where miners facing stolen wages and working abuse rose up in the greatest multiracial uprising in the country as they fought for a living wage and respect. It also marks the 151st anniversary of the signing of the 15th amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote. 

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