Civil Rights Events

Poor People's Campaign

 “I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life for those who have been left out…This is the way I’m going.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Civil Rights Movement had led to landmark legislation. Public opinion had shifted to support Civil Rights, and King had a Nobel Prize. And yet the tide was rolling out again rapidly. At the time of his death, King faced a fierce backlash — including from many of his former allies — for his criticism of the war in Vietnam, and of the ravages of economic inequality.

On the other hand, younger, more radical activists had grown tired of the Civil Rights mainstream’s ongoing commitment to nonviolent resistance as white supremacists continued to maim and kill, and much of the general white populace persistently rejected integration in practice even while praising it in theory. The younger activists wanted to shift energies toward building black self-determination under the banner of “Black Power.” In the midst of all this conflict, the man Nina Simone referred to as the King of Love was murdered, and conflagration spread across America (Perry 1-2).

Dr. King and his organization were embarking on one of their boldest projects yet, a Poor People’s Campaign that would bring a multiracial coalition to the nation’s capital to demand federal funding for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, anti-poverty programs, and housing for the poor. Announcing their new initiative, King said, “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC] will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C., next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all.”

The idea for the Poor People’s Campaign had been sparked by Senator Robert Kennedy, in a simple message passed by Marian Wright (later Marian Wright Edelman) to King months earlier. At the close of a conversation between Kennedy and Wright, the senator had said, “Tell Dr. King to bring the people to Washington.”

If Kennedy’s comment provided a final catalyst, the seeds of the Poor People’s Campaign can be found a year earlier in the Mississippi Delta. In June 1966 King and his closest associate, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, were visiting a Head Start daycare in Marks, Mississippi, a tiny town in Quitman County—the poorest county in the country. It took them a moment to notice that the bright-eyed children were malnourished. At lunchtime, the teacher brought out a brown paper bag of apples and a box of crackers.

When she cut an apple into quarters, and gave one slice, and four or five crackers, to each of the waiting, hungry students, King and Abernathy exchanged solemn glances. This was all the children had for lunch, they realized with shock. Neither man had ever seen poverty like this. Dr. King began weeping, and had to leave the classroom. That night, lying on a motel bed and staring at the ceiling, King said, “Ralph, I can’t get those children out of my mind.”

For the next year, King weathered setbacks in Chicago, challenges to his leadership from the emerging advocates of the Black Power movement, questions about the relevance of nonviolence in the face of increasing urban rebellions, and a storm of controversy over his stand against the war in Vietnam. But the issue of poverty never left his mind (Dellinger 1-2).

One day in early December 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. laid out his vision for the Poor People’s Campaign, his next protest in Washington, D.C.,: “This will be no mere one-day march in Washington, but a trek to the nation’s capital by suffering and outraged citizens who will go to stay until some definite and positive active is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor.”

… Seeing how poverty cut across race and geography, King called for representatives of American Indian, Mexican-American, Appalachian populations and other supporters to join him on the National Mall in May 1968. He sought coalition for the Poor People’s Campaign that would “demand federal funding for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, anti-poverty programs, and housing for the poor” (Diamond 1).

"For King and many others, there's a very depressing realization in 1965 that what they thought would represent victory turns out not really to represent anywhere near the degree of fundamental change that they previously had imagined it would," David Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said in an interview with American Radio Works.

According to Stanford University's Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute, King believed that African Americans and other minorities would never truly achieve full citizenship until they had economic security (Desmond-Harris 4).

As a first step in building the power needed to achieve the goal of a radical redistribution of political and economic power King, along with other leaders of the poor …, helped work out the major elements of the platform for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. An important aspect of the Campaign was to petition the government to pass an Economic Bill of Rights as a step to lift the load of poverty.

$30 billion annual appropriation for a real war on poverty

Congressional passage of full employment and guaranteed income legislation [a guaranteed annual wage]

Construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year until slums were eliminated

The Campaign was organized into three phases. The first was to construct a shantytown, to become known as Resurrection City, on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. With permits from the National Park Service, Resurrection City was to house anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 Campaign participants. Additional participants would be housed in other group and family residences around the metropolitan area. The next phase was to begin public demonstrations, mass nonviolent civil disobedience, and mass arrests to protest the plight of poverty in this country. The third and final phase of the Campaign was to launch a nationwide boycott of major industries and shopping areas to prompt business leaders to pressure Congress into meeting the demands of the Campaign.

Although Rev. Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, on April 29, 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign went forward. It began in Washington where key leaders of the campaign gathered for lobbying efforts and media events before dispersing around the country to formally launch the nine regional caravans bringing the thousands of participants to Washington: the “Eastern Caravan,” the “Appalachia Trail,” the “Southern Caravan,” the “Midwest Caravan,” the “Indian Trail,” the “San Francisco Caravan,” the “Western Caravan,” the “Mule Train,” and the “Freedom Train.”

The efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign climaxed in the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom on June 19, 1968. Fifty thousand people joined the 3,000 participants living at Resurrection City to rally around the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign on Solidarity Day. This was the first and only massive mobilization to take place during the Poor People’s Campaign (Vision 2-4).

Lenneal Henderson , a student at University of California, Berkeley, was one of the activists who traveled to Resurrection City.

I was raised in the housing projects of New Orleans and San Francisco, and my parents were very strong community advocates. I also witnessed the Black Panther Party emerge in Oakland in 1966. Stokely Carmichael's call for Black Power focused on the need to transform our communities first in order to get ourselves out of poverty.

I took a Greyhound bus from San Francisco. But I diverted to New Orleans to see my relatives. I was there when King was assassinated and the very next day, I got back on the Greyhound bus and headed to Washington. From the perimeter of the town, I could see the flames and the smoke of the city going up and the rioting that was taking place. It was pretty sobering. I stayed with a family in D.C. until the Resurrection City was ready to move into (Diamond 2).

At its peak, the number of protestors reached nearly 7,000 but still far short of the expectation of 50,000 people (Cho 1).

Lenneal Henderson:

Life in the camp was kind of frenzied; it was very, very busy. There were things going on every day, there were people going back and forth, not only organized demonstrations, but to meet with agencies like the Department of Agriculture, Labor and [Housing and Urban Development]. I went to about seven or eight different agency meetings.

I went to some meetings of the D.C. government, and I also went to meetings of D.C.-based organizations that were part of the coalition of the Poor People's Campaign like the United Planning Organization and the Washington branch of The National Urban League. At the camp, we also had something called The University, which was a sort of spontaneous, makeshift higher education clearing house that we put together at the camp for students who were coming from different colleges and universities both, from HBCUs and majority universities (Diamond 2).

[Jesse] Jackson became mayor of the encampment, which was called Resurrection City. Conditions were miserable.

"You know, what I remember I suppose the most about it was that we set the tents up at the foot of Lincoln's memorial," he [Jackson] says. "It seemed to rain without ceasing and became muddy and people were hurt, and we were still traumatized by Dr. King's assassination. Then while [we were] in the Resurrection City, Robert Kennedy was killed."

The demonstrators were discouraged and disheartened, says Jackson, so he tried to give them hope through words.

"I am. Somebody," he told protestors. "I am. God's child. I may not have a job, but I am somebody" (Lohr 2).

Lenneal Henderson:

I was there all 42 days, and it rained 29 of them. It got to be a muddy mess after a while. And with such basic accommodations, tensions are inevitable. Sometimes there were fights and conflicts between and among people. But it was an incredible experience, almost indescribable. While we were all in a kind of depressed state about the assassinations of King and RFK, we were trying to keep our spirits up, and keep focused on King’s ideals of humanitarian issues, the elimination of poverty and freedom. It was exciting to be part of something that potentially, at least, could make a difference in the lives of so many people who were in poverty around the country.

I saw Jesse Jackson, who was then about 26 years old, with these rambunctious, young African-American men, who wanted to exact some vengeance for the assassination of King. Jackson sat them down and said, "This is just not the way, brothers. It's just not the way." The he went further and said, “Look, you've got to pledge to me and to yourself that when you go back to wherever you live, before the year is out you're going to do two things to make a difference in your neighborhood." It was an impressive moment of leadership (Diamond 3).

Resurrection City closed June 19, 1968.

Henderson recalled: The closing was sort of unceremonious. When the demonstrators’ permit expired on June 23, some [members of the House of] Representatives, mostly white Southerners, called for immediate removal. So the next day, about 1,000 police officers arrived to clear the camp up of its last few residents. Ultimately, they arrested 288 people, including [civil rights leader and minister Ralph] Abernathy (Diamond 3)

… regarding the Poor People’s March and demands for economic equity, it’s … important to note the following: it is the simple profound statement that the reason people are treated differently by those in power is generally for profit. So that would include racism and economic inequities. King was attempting to change that equation by striving to give workers more power. He was about to threaten the profit accumulation by taking a forthright stance on the side of economic equity for the black community overall. This was compounded by his planning to bring the massive civil rights community and activists with him to Washington to make these economic demands. King was stepping on dangerous ground. It is not ironic that he was killed in Memphis while demanding rights for garbage workers (IBW21 4).

Perhaps part of the reason we don't talk as much about the Poor People's Campaign when commemorating King's life is that there's no real consensus about whether it was a success.

The demonstrations fizzled out when the encampment's permit expired on June 24, 1968, shortly after a confrontation between police and some of the inhabitants of Resurrection City led to a tear gas attack on the remaining people there. Some refused to leave, and a total of 288 protesters were jailed — making July 13 the anticlimactic official end of the campaign.

In a 2014 reflection on the effort, NPR dubbed it "a dream unfulfilled," noting that many participants deemed it a failure because they didn't see immediate changes. And there's no question that the demands were never met, and that Americans continue to live in poverty

The other view is that of SCLC co-founder Rev. Joseph Lowery, who said that as a result of the effort, "the nation became conscious of the fact that it has an expanding poor population."

As a historian assessing the campaign, [Michael] Jeffries said he chooses to defer to organizer Marian Wright Edelman, who saw it as a success. "She has said the campaign itself and the pressure that was bought to bear on the federal government resulted in major federal investment and, at minimum, nationwide nutrition programs. Food stamps. School lunches. Did it end poverty? Obviously not. Was it ever going to? No. But did it succeed in bringing attention to poverty in American and did it result in some federal intervention to alleviate the terrible conditions that so many were facing in America? Yes, it did" (Desmond-Harris 8).

Lenneal Henderson:

Even though the Economic Bill of Rights we were pressing for was never passed, I think it was successful in many ways. For one, the relationships that those folks built with one another carried on way beyond 1968 (Diamond 4).

Works cited:

Cho, Nancy. “Poor People’s Campaign (December 4, 1967 – June 19, 1968).” BlackPast. November 22, 2009. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/poor-peoples-campaign-december-4-1967-june-19-1968/

Dellinger, Drew. “The Last March of Martin Luther King Jr.” The Atlantic. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/mlk-last-march/555953/

Desmond-Harris, Jenee. “The Poor People's Campaign: the Little-Known Protest MLK Was Planning When He Died.” Vox. April 4, 2016. Web. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/18/7548453/poor-peoples-campaign-mlk

Diamond, Anna. “Fifty Years Later, Remembering Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968.” Smithsonian Magazine. May 2018. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/remembering-poor-peoples-campaign-180968742/

“Dr. King’s Vision: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1967-68.” Poor People’s Campaign. Web. https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/history/

IBW21. “King’s Poor People’s Campaign.” The Institute of the Black World 21st Century. September 4, 2018. Web. https://ibw21.org/commentary/kings-poor-peoples-campaign/

Lohr, Kathy. “Poor People's Campaign: A Dream Unfulfilled.” NPR. June 19, 2008. Web. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91626373

Perry, Imani. “For the Poor People’s Campaign, the Moonshot Was Less Than a Triumph.” The New York Times. July 16, 2019. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/for-the-poor-peoples-campaign-the-moonshot-was-less-than-a-triumph.html