While Rev. Jesse Jackson mobilized a crowd yesterday outside Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium with his cry against poverty, an undercurrent rippled through the crowd as Ohio University students and Athens residents read literature urging them to reject Jackson’s ideas.
The civil rights leader, two-time presidential candidate and founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition spoke at OU to remember former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty and to urge students to support the creation of a White House Commission on Poverty, Malnutrition and Human Need.
During the moments preceding Jackson’s speech and continuing into his introduction, students representing the OU organizations Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty passed out fliers urging those in attendance to “help the poor; reject Jackson’s ideas.”
“We heard Jackson was coming to speak, and we thought, ‘Well, he’s kind of wrong about everything,’” said Nathan Kelly, a junior studying English education and a member of Students for Liberty.
Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty, both created in the past three years and currently comprising about two dozen members combined, promote personal liberties, freedoms and civil rights. Students for Liberty focuses more on education, while Young Americans for Liberty works through activism and demonstrations; however, the two groups work together frequently, Kelly said.
The groups meet at 7 p.m. Wednesdays in Bentley 009, according to their flier.
Students for Liberty co-founder and member Anthony Hennen, a senior studying journalism, said that Jackson’s campaign, inspired by Johnson’s War on Poverty, isn’t an effective way to fight poverty.
Federal assistance for poverty creates dependence on the government rather than effectively eliminating poverty, he said.
Instead, local initiatives that create ways for the poor to help themselves should be emphasized, Hennen said. These include abolishing minimum wage laws and removing barriers on trading.
“Instead of throwing money at the problem, Rev. Jackson could advocate a platform of individual empowerment and sound economic logic to mitigate the destructive forces of poverty,” the flier states. “We applaud Rev. Jackson’s crusade against poverty, but his remedies amount to a weak placebo.”
Jackson emphasized the Johnson initiatives that had come to fruition as legislation — Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and meal programs for schools. However, Hennen said, these initiatives are no longer enough.
“We always remember LBJ doing this great, fantastic thing, but it seems that to a longer-term extent, these things are irrelevant or failing,” Hennen said.
Ibrahim Alassaf, president of Young Americans for Liberty and a former Democratic candidate for Athens City Council and current candidate for Athens County Commissioner, helped organize the flier initiative.
“We’re just trying to show that 45 years after LBJ’s speech, we’re still facing the same problems,” Alassaf said. “People are still in poverty. The idea that Jackson’s plan will completely eradicate poverty is just nonsense.”
Alassaf and Kelly argued that imposing greater taxes on people and small businesses to create money for poverty initiatives hurts those who were taxed. Although Kelly helped distribute fliers at the press conference Jackson held outside the Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium, Hennen and Alassaf were unable to hear Jackson speak.
“The question of poverty is not something that one person or group has all the answers for,” Hennen said. “I think the more varied approaches that are offered, the better off we’ll be.”
rm279109@ohiou.edu
