Columbus is one of the 15 cities broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West will visit this fall during their “Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience.”
Smiley and West host the public radio program “Smiley and West” and announced The Poverty Tour on CNN”s “Piers Morgan Tonight,” Wednesday.
“The bus tour will highlight the plight of the poor of all races, colors and creeds so they will not be forgotten, ignored or rendered invisible during this difficult and dangerous time of economic deprivation and political cowardice,” according to a press release posted at smileyandwest.com.
The road trip will begin on Aug. 6, with a gathering of the nation”s Native Americans on the Lac Coutre Oreilles Indian Reservation near Hayward, Wis. The Poverty Tour also will stop in Washington D.C, and wrap in Memphis on Aug. 12, with a town-hall conversation and a visit to the historic Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, while in town for a march with poor sanitation workers. Smiley and West will meet with some of the 1968 sanitation workers.
“We are taking Smiley and West into America”s communities,” Smiley said. “We want those people who are struggling in this current economy to know that they are not alone and not forgotten.”
“We hope to speak truths about the suffering of everyday people, so that poor and working folks are empowered by the legacy of Brother Martin,” added West.
Stories gathered from the tour will be heard weekly on the radio program, “Smiley and West,” and be featured on “Tavis Smiley” on PBS.
The Poverty Tour is sponsored in part by the AARP Foundation and the National Education Association.
According to The Associated Press, on their bus trip, Smiley and West will travel through Hayward, Eau Claire and Madison, Wis.; Milwaukee; Chicago”s South Side; Joliet and Pembroke, Ill.; Lima, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Columbus and Clarksdale; before finishing in Memphis.
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