The morning of Sept. 30 in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, was beautiful. It was also uplifting as some three dozen “pilgrims” began the second annual Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour at the Mississippi State Capitol.
The tour, organized through the efforts of Waikinya Clanton, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi state office and her team, consists of five days of meetings and workshops across the towns and cities of central Mississippi and the Delta region. The goal is to bring legislators, social activists and nonprofit organizers together with people they are trying to serve, especially in some of the nation’s most underserved rural communities.
“People, we need a new war on poverty in this country that recognizes the dignity and humanity of every person in this country,” Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president and CEO, told people gathered in the Mississippi State Capitol’s rotunda. “Whatever their race, their creed, their sexual orientation, their religion, their beliefs, we are all entitled to that under this Constitution. The SPLC will continue to fight every day to protect the constitutional values that we hold dear. The 14th Amendment and the First Amendment are not for sale.”
After the session at the Capitol, the group participated in panel discussions over a working lunch. There they heard from several groups about their work providing services to underserved communities as well as from the clients their efforts had helped.
“The state of Mississippi just passed a $2.2 billion budget cut in a state that is the poorest state in the country that has only a $7 billion budget,” said Mississippi state Rep. Robert Johnson III. “We don’t have Medicaid expanded. We don’t provide extra money to hospitals. We’re talking about cutting money out of public schools. Look, there is an idea in this country, in this world that is in the Bible where it says the poor will always be with us. That didn’t mean that people who are poor now will always be poor. That means we’ll always have people who are poor and it’s our job to take care of the poor.”
Johnson closed with an exhortation to the people of Mississippi to take stock of their power and bring the growth they want for their state.
“So if you want to change — if you don’t want to be homeless, if you don’t want to starve, if you want to get medicine, if you want to have good schools to go to — let’s educate the people about what’s about to happen and get them out to vote.
Image at top: Bryan Fair, interim president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, speaks inside the Mississippi State Capitol rotunda on Sept. 30, 2025, the first day of the SPLC’s second annual Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour. (Credit: Dan Anderson)