Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

December 4,1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign, a movement to broadly address economic inequalities with nonviolent direct action.

“It must not be just Black people,” argued King, “it must be all poor people. We must include American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and even poor whites.”

The idea for the push came from Marian Wright Edelman, who had recently taken U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy to witness poverty firsthand in the Mississippi Delta. When she shared the idea that Washington officials should meet the nation’s poorest citizens, King embraced the vision, telling reporters,
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“We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until America responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. ...In short, we will be petitioning our government for specific reforms and we intend to build militant, nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.”
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King talked of a debt that the nation owed African Americans, who were set free in 1863, “yet they were not given any land to make that freedom meaningful.”

He compared it to an imprisoned man whom authorities learn is innocent, “then going up to the man saying, now you are free. And you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any clothes to put on his back. You don’t give him any money to get on his feet in life again.

The whole code of jurisprudence would rise up against this and yet, this is what America did to the Black man.” King didn’t live to see this dream through, assassinated five months later.
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The Poor People's Campaign, or Poor People's March on Washington, was a 1968 effort to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States. It was organized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King's assassination in April 1968.

The campaign demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.

The Poor People's Campaign was motivated by a desire for economic justice: the idea that all people should have what they need to live. King and the SCLC shifted their focus to these issues after observing that gains in civil rights had not improved the material conditions of life for many African Americans. The Poor People's Campaign was a multiracial effort—including African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans—aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race.

According to political historians such as Barbara Cruikshank, "the poor" did not particularly conceive of themselves as a unified group until President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty (declared in 1964) identified them as such. Figures from the 1960 census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Commerce Department, and the Federal Reserve estimated anywhere from 40 to 60 million Americans—or 22 to 33 percent—lived below the poverty line.

At the same time, the nature of poverty itself was changing as America's population increasingly lived in cities, not farms (and could not grow its own food). Poor African Americans, particularly women, suffered from racism and sexism that amplified the impact of poverty, especially after "welfare mothers" became a nationally recognized concept.

By 1968, the War on Poverty seemed like a failure, neglected by a Johnson administration (and Congress) that wanted to focus on the Vietnam War and increasingly saw anti-poverty programs as primarily helping African Americans. The Poor People's Campaign sought to address poverty through income and housing.

The campaign would help the poor by dramatizing their needs, uniting all races under the commonality of hardship and presenting a plan to start to a solution. Under the "economic bill of rights," the Poor People's Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with a $30 billion anti-poverty package that included, among other demands, a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure and more low-income housing.

The Poor People's Campaign was part of the second phase of the civil rights movement. King said, "We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty".
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King wanted to bring poor people to Washington, D.C., forcing politicians to see them and think about their needs: "We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, 'We are here; we are poor; we don't have any money; you have made us this way ... and we've come to stay until you do something about it.'"

The Poor People's Campaign had complex origins. King considered bringing poor people to the nation's capital since at least October 1966, when welfare rights activists held a one-day march on the Mall. In May 1967 during a SCLC retreat in Frogmore, South Carolina, King told his aides that the SCLC would have to raise nonviolence to a new level to pressure Congress into passing an Economic Bill of Rights for the nation's poor.

The SCLC resolved to expand its civil rights struggle to include demands for economic justice and to challenge the Vietnam War. In his concluding address to the conference, King announced a shift from "reform" to "revolution" and stated: "We have moved from the era of civil rights to an era of human rights."

In response to the anger that led to riots in 1967 in Newark (July 12–17) and Detroit (July 23–28), King and his close confidante, Stanley Levison, wrote a report in August (titled "The Crisis in America's Cities") which called for disciplined urban disruption, particularly in Washington:

"To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to society but not wantonly destructive. Moreover, it is more difficult for government to quell it by superior force.

Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed, they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society. Civil disobedience can utilize the militancy wasted in riots to seize clothes or groceries many did not even want.

Civil disobedience has never been used on a mass scale in the North. It has rarely been seriously organized and resolutely pursued. Too often in the past was it employed incorrectly. It was resorted to only when there was an absence of mass support and its purpose was headline-hunting. The exceptions were the massive school boycotts by Northern Negroes. They shook educational systems to their roots but they lasted only single days and were never repeated.
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If they are developed as weekly events at the same time that mass sit-ins are developed inside and at the gates of factories for jobs, and if simultaneously thousands of unemployed youth camp in Washington, as the Bonus Marchers did in the thirties, with these and other practices, without burning a match or firing a gun, the impact of the movement will have earthquake proportions. (In the Bonus Marches, it was the government that burned down the marchers' shelters when it became confounded by peaceful civil disobedience).

This is not an easy program to implement. Riots are easier just because they need no organization. To have effect we will have to develop mass disciplined forces that can remain excited and determined without dramatic conflagrations.

Also in August, Senator Robert F. Kennedy asked Marian Wright Edelman "to tell Dr. King to bring the poor people to Washington to make hunger and poverty visible since the country's attention had turned to the Vietnam War and put poverty and hunger on the back burner."

At another SCLC retreat in September, Edelman transmitted Kennedy's message to King and suggested that King and a handful of poor people hold a sit-in at the Department of Agriculture. Stanley Levison proposed an even more ambitious crusade that modeled itself on the Bonus Army of 1932.

PLANNING
The SCLC's major planning before announcing the campaign took place during a five-day meeting (November 27 – December 1, 1967) in Frogmore, SC. With King's leadership, the group agreed to organize a civil disobedience campaign in Washington, D.C., focused on jobs and income. King wanted the demonstration to be "nonviolent, but militant, and as dramatic, as dislocative, as disruptive, as attention-getting as the riots without destroying property".

Not all members of the SCLC agreed with the idea of occupying Washington. Bayard Rustin opposed civil disobedience. Other members of the group (like Jesse Jackson) wanted to pursue other priorities.

Dissent continued throughout the planning of the campaign.

King traveled to Washington in February 1968 in order to meet with local activists and prepare the resources necessary to support the campaign.

Marchers were scheduled to arrive in Washington on May 2. Some planners wanted to target specific politicians; others wanted to avoid "begging" and focus on movement-building and mutual education.
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PUBLICITY
The SCLC announced the campaign on December 4, 1967. King delivered a speech which identified "a kind of social insanity which could lead to national ruin."

In January 1968, the SCLC created and distributed an "Economic Fact Sheet" with statistics explaining why the campaign was necessary. King avoided providing specific details about the campaign and attempted to redirect media attention to the values at stake. The Poor People's Campaign held firm to the movement's commitment to non-violence. "We are custodians of the philosophy of non-violence," said King at a press conference. "And it has worked."

In February 1968, King announced specific demands: $30 billion for antipoverty, full employment, guaranteed income, and the annual construction of 500,000 affordable residences.

The media often discouraged those within the movement who were committed to non-violence. Instead of focusing on issues of urban inequality and the interracial efforts concerted to address them, the media concentrated on specific incidents of violence, leadership conflicts and protest tactics.

King toured a number of cities to raise support for the campaign. King's visits were carefully orchestrated and the media tightly controlled; meetings with militant Black leaders were held behind closed doors.
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On March 18, 1968, he visited the town of Marks, Mississippi. He watched a teacher feeding schoolchildren their lunch, consisting only of a slice of apple and some crackers, and was moved to tears. A few days after the visit, he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.: "We're coming to Washington in a poor people's campaign. I was in Marks, Miss., the other day, which is in Quitman County, the poorest county in the United States. And I tell you I saw hundreds of black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear."

He decided he wanted the Poor People's Campaign to start in Marks because of the intense and visible economic disparity he'd seen there.

Recruitment
The SCLC recruited marshals, who came to a training workshop in Atlanta in March then returned home to recruit participants, raise funds, and solicit organizational support. Participants were required to sign an agreement to use non-violence and to obey the marshals.

Reactions to the campaign were mixed, and some were outright hostile based on their perceptions of King and the SCLC. Leaders and recruiters had to construct their images carefully in order to appeal to potential marchers across lines of wealth and denomination—they de-emphasized their middle-class status, wearing denim instead of suits. They faced the delicate challenge of simultaneously appealing to radicals and moderates (including campus liberals).

Marchers
Campaign leaders recruited across the country, first in the East and South, and then increasingly westward, reaching poor people in Texas and the Southwest, as well as California and the West Coast. People of all walks of life came from across the nation. Many volunteers were women and many had been involved in other civil rights protests.
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People commenting on their reasons for participation explained that they wanted to participate in the decisions that affected their lives, and to explain how federal programs, intended to help them, sometimes left them behind completely. They stressed that they were deprived of their basic human rights, and they wanted to make their situations known in the nation's capital. Most did not own their homes or have basic utilities where they lived. Many did not receive federal benefits of any sort.

Minority Group Conference
In one of the campaign's more important recruitment efforts, SCLC hosted about 80 representatives of other poor, often minority groups in Atlanta, with whom the civil rights organization had had little to no relationship up to that point. On March 14, 1968, delegates attended the so-called "Minority Group Conference" and discussed the upcoming campaign and whether or not their specific issues would be considered.

Among the delegates were Chicano Movement leaders Reies Tijerina, Corky Gonzales, José Ángel Gutiérrez, and Bert Corona; white coal miners from Kentucky and West Virginia; Native American and Puerto Rican activists; and Myles Horton, organizer and founder of the Highlander Folk School. With a skeptical and fast-weakened Cesar Chavez occupied by a farm workers' hunger strike, Reies Tijerina was the most prominent Chicano leader present.
At the end of a long day, most delegates decided to participate in the campaign, convinced that specific demands that often revolved around land and treaty rights would be honored by campaign organizers.

ENDORSEMENTS
The National Welfare Rights Organization and the American Friends Service Committee were key partners in the campaign's organizing, including developing demands, fundraising, and recruitment.

The American Federation of Teachers promised to set up "freedom schools" for children in the camps; the National Association of Social Workers also said it would help with child care The Youth International Party held its own rallies in support.
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The campaign received an endorsement from the YMCA.

Volunteer advocates from the Peace Corps and VISTA formed a speakers bureau, which helped publicize the campaign and educate outsiders.

Organizers already in D.C. were enthusiastic about the campaign, and by March 1968 over 75 people were meeting in committees to prepare for the incoming marchers. The campaign was endorsed by a variety of local organizations, especially religious congregations.

The campaign received a limited endorsement and financial support from SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC (soon to change its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee) announced that it would not march with the Poor People's Campaign in D.C. because it did not believe in strict adherence to nonviolence. SCLC also reported receiving major financial support for the march from middle-class whites.

The Steering Committee Against Repression (SCAR)—which included members from SNCC as well as from a variety of other groups—also gave a partial endorsement, urging the SCLC to focus the campaign on state repression, surveillance, persecution, and political prisoners.
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The campaign had support from within the organized labor movement, including endorsements by The Daily Worker, United Steelworkers, and Walter Reuther. However, the official leadership of the AFL–CIO—particularly President George Meany—would not endorse the campaign because of disagreement over the Vietnam War.

Government reaction and preparations
The prospect of an occupation of Washington by thousands of poor people triggered fears of rioting.

Johnson administration
The Johnson administration prepared for the campaign as though it might attempt a violent takeover of the nation's capital.

Congress
Some members of Congress were outspoken about their fear of the campaign. Democratic Senator Russell B. Long called for the censure of congresspeople whom he accused of "bending the knee" to the campaign, also saying: "When that bunch of marchers comes here, they can just burn the whole place down and we can just move the capital to some place where they enforce the law."

Another Democratic Senator, John L. McClellan, accused the SCLC of attempting to start a riot, and decried a recent court decision that he said would allow marchers "to go to Washington one night and get on welfare the next day", rendering D.C. a "Mecca for migrants".
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Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon, campaigning for the 1968 presidential election, asked Congress not to capitulate to the campaigners' demands.

Military preparations
20,000 army soldiers were activated and prepared for a military occupation of the capital should the Poor People's Campaign pose a threat.

Operation POCAM
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) strove to monitor and disrupt the campaign, which it code-named "POCAM".

The FBI, which had been targeting King since 1962 with COINTELPRO, increased its efforts after King's April 4, 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". It also lobbied government officials to oppose King on the grounds that he was a communist, "an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine the nation", and affiliated with "two of the most dedicated and dangerous communists in the country" (Stanley Levison and Harry Wachtel).

After "Beyond Vietnam" these efforts were reportedly successful in turning lawmakers and administration officials against King, the SCLC, and the cause of civil rights. After King was assassinated and the marches got underway, reports began to emphasize the threat of black militancy instead of communism.
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Operation POCAM became the first major project of the FBI's Ghetto Informant Program (GIP), which recruited thousands of people to report on poor black communities. Through GIP, the FBI quickly established files on SCLC recruiters in cities across the US. FBI agents posed as journalists, used wiretaps, and even recruited some of the recruiters as informants.

The FBI sought to disrupt the campaign by spreading rumors that it was bankrupt, that it would not be safe, and that participants would lose welfare benefits upon returning home.

Local bureaus reported particular success for intimidation campaigns in Birmingham, Alabama, Savannah, Georgia, and Cleveland, Ohio. In Richmond, Virginia, the FBI collaborated with the John Birch Society to set up an organization called Truth About Civil Turmoil (TACT). TACT held events featuring a Black woman named Julia Brown who claimed to have infiltrated the civil rights movement and exposed its Communist leadership.
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Events, 1968
Memphis sanitation strike
In February–March 1968, King directed his attention to the Memphis sanitation strike.

Although King continued to tour to raise support for the marches to Washington, he declared the Memphis strike to be a major part of the campaign itself.

On March 28, unusual violent incidents in Memphis brought negative media scrutiny to the Poor People's Campaign. The FBI released negative editorials for newspaper publication, implying that the Memphis outbursts foreshadowed mass violence by the Poor People's Campaign in Washington.

The SCLC released counter-editorials which included the statement, "The issue at stake is not violence vs. nonviolence but POVERTY AND RACISM".

Assassination
King flew back to Memphis on April 3 and was murdered in the evening of the following day. The assassination of King dealt a major blow to the campaign, leading to greater emphasis on affirmative action than on race-blind policies such as King's recommendation of basic income in his last book.

At King's funeral on April 9, 1968, tens of thousands marched through Atlanta with Coretta Scott King—following King's casket on a mule-drawn wagon.
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The SCLC, now led by Ralph Abernathy, held a retreat in Atlanta on April 16–17. They resolved to proceed with the campaign after learning that the Memphis strike had ended in relative success.

The SCLC applied for a permit to camp on the Washington Mall and reoriented the campaign away from civil disobedience and towards the creation and maintenance of a tent city.

The edition of April 16 Look magazine carried a posthumous article from King titled "Showdown for Nonviolence"—his last statement on the Poor People's Campaign. The article warns of imminent social collapse and suggests that the campaign presents government with what may be its last opportunity to achieve peaceful change—through an Economic Bill of Rights.

Source: Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Jerry Mitchell

Source: Wikipedia