Poor People's Campaign

POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN. The idea for the Poor People’s Campaign originated from a 1966 visit Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made to a Head Start day-care center in Marks, Mississippi. Four children had sat there, eagerly awaiting a lunch that consisted of nothing more than a quarter of an apple. And King, normally composed, had broken down into tears. “I can’t get those children out of my mind,” he later told SCLC activist Ralph Abernathy, who had visited the poor, sharecropping community with him. “I don’t think people really know that little schoolchildren are slowly starving in the United States of America.”

By 1967, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had grown critical of Johnson’s War on Poverty, which claimed to prioritize “maximum feasible participation” by the poor but did nothing to encourage— and at times discouraged or excluded—— the political organization of poor people. Many in the Johnson administration subscribed to a cultural-deficit model for understanding the problem of poverty and its solutions (which held that the problems of the poor were located in behaviors that needed altering), ignoring the structural racism that produced poverty in America. Moreover, the escalation of the war in Vietnam had caused cuts in funding to education, job training programs, and social services. A mass mobilization of poor people would force the issue into public consciousness and move Congress to action.

At a December 1967 press conference announcing the Poor People’s Campaign, King zeroed in on the federal government’s “primary responsibility for low minimum wages, for a degrading system of inadequate welfare, for subsidies to the rich and unemployment and underemployment of the poor.” The nation had developed ways to ignore and hide the impacts of poverty—and part of activists’ aim would be to force the country to “see the poor.”

The idea was to build a large-scale Poor People’s Campaign (PPC), a multiracial group of poor people from across the nation who would descend on the Capitol and stay until their needs were addressed by Congress and the president. They demanded “$30 billion annual appropriation for a real war on poverty; Congressional passage of full employment and guaranteed income legislation [a guaranteed annual wage]; and Construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year.” The PPC’s first gathering took place in Atlanta in March 1968, a month before King’s assassination, and brought together more than fifty organizations representing poor African Americans, whites, Latinos, and Native Americans. “It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters,” King observed during a February 1968 trip to Mississippi, “but now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”

After King was assassinated, the work did not stop. Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, and poor people leading across the country kept going. On May 12, 1968, PPC organizers broke ground in Washington, DC, setting up a tent city of plywood shanties on the National Mall that they named Resurrection City. Nine caravans of poor people of all races and ethnicities began making their way across the country to DC. The most visible Black caravan with one hundred people and seventeen mule-drawn wagons started out from Marks, Mississippi, the poorest county in the country. Coretta Scott King launched a caravan from Memphis. the site of her husband’s assassination. Two buses of poor whites came from Appalachia, And caravans of Native American and Latinx people traveled thousands of miles from California and the Southwest.

A combination of local, state, and FBI officials kept the Mule Train under constant surveillance as it traveled the thousand miles to DC. About 2,500 people stayed at Resurrection City, but heavy rain made the conditions of the tent city hazardous. Many poor people stayed elsewhere; an encampment of Chicanos lead by Rodolfo Gonzales and Reies Tijerina set up at the Hawthorne School, and many Native Americans congregated at a nearby church.

The high point of the campaign came on June 19, Solidarity Day. Some 50,000 people gathered to hear Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, and others address the crowd. Scott King gave a powerful speech that day, calling on American women to “unite and form a solid block of women power” to fight racism, poverty, and war. Challenging the idea that people caused their own poverty, the speakers demanded programs for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and the construction of more affordable housing. A month earlier, at the beginning of the encampment, Coretta Scott King had joined 7,000 welfare recipients to decry the violence of poverty and social neglect, as she did again on Solidarity Day. She reminded the nation: “Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. . . . Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of will power to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.”

Despite its well-defined demands for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and construction of more affordable housing, the Poor People’s Campaign was criticized by many in Congress and the media as “unruly” and needing “clarity.” The FBI had massively monitored each of the caravans and many of the PPC organizers. The Pentagon had 20,000 troops on standby as soon as the campaign had arrived in DC. Resurrection City was torn down by police on June 24. While it made poverty visible, it did not succeed in getting Congress to act. It did, however, alter relations with local officials and cultivate leadership of poor people of all races across the country. One PPC leader Bertha Burres Johnson of Marks, Mississippi, explained: public officials were “very nice to me because I guess they were afraid not to because they thought I would call the SCLC.” And access to social assistance opened up for many following the PPC.

Fifty years later, on Mother’s Day 2018, original members of the PPC and poor organizers from across the country joined co-chairs Reverend William Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis to kick off a new Poor People’s Campaign.

Freeman, Roland. The Mule Train: A Journey of Hope Remembered. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1998.

Jackson, Thomas. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Theoharis, Jeanne. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.

Wright, Amy Nathan. “The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Marks, Mississippi and the Mule Train,” in Emilye Crosby, ed. Civil Rights History from the Ground Up. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.