Poor People's Campaign

REQUIRED READING

Martin Luther King announced the Poor People’s Campaign at a staff retreat for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in November 1967. Seeking a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other,” King planned for an initial group of 2,000 poor people to descend on Washington, D.C., southern states and northern cities to meet with government officials to demand jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education for poor adults and children designed to improve their self-image and self-esteem.

The Poor People’s Campaign was seen by King as the next chapter in the struggle for genuine equality. Desegregation and the right to vote were essential, but King believed that African Americans and other minorities would never enter full citizenship until they had economic security. Through nonviolent direct action, King and SCLC hoped to focus the nation’s attention on economic inequality and poverty. “This is a highly significant event,” King told delegates at an early planning meeting, describing the campaign as “the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity” (SCLC, 15 March 1968). Many leaders of American Indian, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and poor white communities pledged themselves to the Poor People’s Campaign. 

The Poor People’s Campaign officially began in Washington on April 29, when a delegation of 100 leaders, representing poor communities from across the country, met with government agencies to present a poor people’s list of demands. On April 30, Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), presented the campaign’s objectives in his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment, and Poverty. Although some demands were unmet by the end of the campaign, with extensions to existing federal programs and the creation of new ones, Congress enacted legislation that helped reshape the nation’s economic and cultural landscape.

At the start of the campaign, a multiethnic coalition of representatives from poor communities nationwide presented the movement’s demands and objectives. Among the demands were collective bargaining rights for farm workers; an emergency food program for 256 of the nation’s poorest counties; and partnerships between public and private entities to create 1 million jobs in 1968 and another million jobs by 1972.

Most agencies responded positively to the movement’s goals. In a memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz reported, “I anticipate that we shall be able to offer solutions in some areas through administrative actions (investigating complaints of discrimination in employment… getting services into isolated areas, etc.) and that these actions will constitute a very substantial response... Of course, solutions in some areas can only be reached through legislation.”

After King’s assassination in April 1968, SCLC decided to go on with the campaign under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy, SCLC’s new president. On Mother’s Day, 12 May 1968, thousands of women, led by Coretta Scott King, formed the first wave of demonstrators. The following day, Resurrection City, a temporary settlement of tents and shacks, was built on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Braving rain, mud, and summer heat, protesters stayed for over a month. Demonstrators made daily pilgrimages to various federal agencies to protest and demand economic justice. Midway through the campaign, Robert Kennedy, whose wife had attended the Mother’s Day opening of Resurrection City, was assassinated. Out of respect for the campaign, his funeral procession passed through Resurrection City. The Department of the Interior forced Resurrection City to close on 24 June 1968, after the permit to use park land expired. 

Although the campaign succeeded in small ways, such as qualifying 200 counties for free surplus food distribution and securing promises from several federal agencies to hire poor people to help run programs for the poor, Abernathy felt these concessions were insufficient.

QUESTIONS

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