Poor People's Campaign

From May 12 through June 24, 1968, a multiracial coalition of approximately 3,000 poor people from across the United States joined forces under the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership [Page 1141]Conference (SCLC) and caravanned to Washington, D.C., where they built a temporary city—Resurrection City—on the National Mall. Their goal was to expose the living conditions of impoverished people. In addition, the participants held daily protests at various government institutions calling for jobs, food, housing, and other basic needs. The Poor People's Campaign represented politically diverse participants from impoverished African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, white Appalachian, and American Indian communities. On June 19 approximately 50,000 people attended the campaign's Solidarity Day march to the Lincoln Memorial. The participants continued to launch daily protests from Resurrection City until June 24, when Congress refused to renew the group's permit and ordered over 1,000 police to forcefully remove the remaining residents.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC staff had begun planning the Poor People's Campaign in late 1967 in response to the severely impoverished conditions they witnessed when registering voters and organizing marchers in the Deep South. Throughout 1966 and 1967, King had shifted SCLC's focus from desegregation and voter registration to the issue of poverty. After tackling slums in Chicago in 1966, King publicly opposed the Vietnam War in 1967, arguing that the war's cost was undermining the war on poverty. King initially envisioned a mass movement of civil disobedience in the nation's capital, with thousands of poor people flooding the streets. Instead, one of King's top advisers, Stanley Levison, recommended repeating the 1932 Bonus Army's creation of a tent city in the nation's capital. King officially announced plans for the Poor People's Campaign on December 4, 1967, casting it as a last resort to remedy the problems that had caused the urban riots of the mid-1960s.

King reached out to a diverse coalition of participants from economically disadvantaged communities and sought out activists from a wide range of political perspectives. In March 1968, King met with Chicano Movement leaders, American Indian Movement activists, and leaders of a group of poor whites from Appalachia and invited them to join the campaign. To accommodate the diverse demands of these groups and facilitate the daily needs of running Resurrection City, two levels of leadership were established. The SCLC executive staff, which included Dr. King and Reverends Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, James Bevel, and Jesse Jackson, developed the tactics of the campaign and planned the logistics of Resurrection City and Solidarity Day. The Committee of 100 and the Poor People's Organizing Convention, two democratically elected bodies, which included equal representation from each ethnic group, provided grassroots leadership for the daily protests. In addition, the organizing convention elected leaders from each group—Reies Tijerina represented Mexican Americans, Hank Adams for American Indians, Dionicie Paden for Puerto Ricans, Ted Wulpert for poor whites, and Corneilus Givens for African Americans.

The campaign was originally designated to begin on April 22, but the SCLC's involvement in the Memphis Sanitation Worker's Strike and King's assassination in Memphis on April 4 caused the project to be postponed. On April 29, the SCLC's new leader, Ralph Abernathy, and the Committee of 100 traveled to Washington to present Congress and the president with a list of demands that, if unmet, would result in the progression of the campaign. The government refused to respond to the group's demands. Intentionally broad, the demands included establishing a living wage, a guaranteed income and free food stamps for the unemployed, job-training programs, housing for low-income families, and the creation of 2 million jobs. Despite staunch opposition from the government and the press, the group took the rejection as justification to proceed. In the following week, hundreds of legislative bills were proposed to block or at least curb the campaign, but on May 10 the Department of the Interior granted the National Park permit for the proposed encampment in the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

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