The Rev. Jesse Jackson will be speaking at a rally on College Green Tuesday at noon to promote the Rainbow/ PUSH Coalitions new Reinvest in America: Put America Back to Work! campaign. The stop is part of his bus tour through Appalachian Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania June 6-9.
Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said the tour will promote the need for better-paying jobs, greater access to health care and improvements in education.
We're now caught in a war between the rich and the poor
and Appalachia is losing lives money and its national honor Jackson said. I'm convinced that Appalachia may be the key to putting a focus on working people's agenda ... the working poor and youth.
Voter registration and participation in the democratic process need to be increased, Jackson said.
We lose huge elections by the margin of despair -people's disconnection from the democratic process. The Appalachian vote in Ohio is a huge factor in state elections and determining the president. I want the Appalachian voters to come alive to vote their economic interest and not their fears.
The coalition estimates 334,000 manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia have been lost since 2000. In Ohio, 12 percent of the population does not have health insurance, compared to 14 percent in West Virginia and 10 percent in Pennsylvania.
Roberts said he has been working with Jackson for 15 years and he is concerned for the jobs Appalachia has lost recently.
America is at a crossroads. We want to move forward and be part of this debate for the presidential election
Roberts said.
Athens County's poverty rate is higher the national average. In 2000, statistics indicated a poverty level of 27.4 percent compared to the national rate of 12.4 percent, according to the coalition.
David Bradley, executive director of the National Community Action Foundation, said fighting poverty should be a bipartisan issue.
Both parties should be involved
Bradley said. The government partnering with communities can play a positive impact on people's lives
and that's what I want to emphasize on this tour.
The tour begins in Pittsburgh Sunday at the United Steelworks of America headquarters. It will then move through Pennsylvania and West Virginia before coming to Athens Tuesday. Afterwards, it will go back to West Virginia before concluding in Portsmouth Wednesday.
For more information on the bus tour, go to http://www. reinvest-in-america.org.
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Megan Cotten
