Poor People's Campaign

This article is about the 1968 US anti-poverty campaign. For the 2018 US anti-poverty campaign, see Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival.

Poor People's Campaign
Part of the civil rights movement
Demonstrators in the Poor People's March at Lafayette Park and Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. in June 1968
DateMay 12 – June 24, 1968
Location
Washington, D.C.
Resulted inSee Aftermath and impact
Parties
Lead figures

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 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.[1][2]

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.[3] 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).[4]

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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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".[8]

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.'"[9]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lampinen 1968 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Mantler 2013, p. 5.
  3. ^ Wright 2007, pp. 37–38: "Barbara Cruikshank argues that the government's War on Poverty actually transformed those in poverty from a disparate group often in conflict with one another into 'the poor'—a multiracial, regionally diverse political interest group. During this era poor people joined forces to protest their condition and the government's failure to help them and at the same time fostered a sense of pride and dignity in being poor."
  4. ^ Mantler 2013, p. 19.
  5. ^ McKnight 1998, pp. 13–14: "King's emergent radicalism was fostered by his mounting despair over the callous and reactionary political climate in Washington. The White House's earlier boastful assurances of 'guns and butter' was proving a cruel hoax. Johnson's 1966 civil rights bill containing the strong open housing title died in the Senate, largely because the White House, distracted by the Vietnam War, never bothered to lobby the leaders of the political opposition in the upper house. Before the year ended the Congress slashed the budget of the Office of Economic Opportunity, reducing the War on Poverty funds by half a billion dollars ..."
  6. ^ Bishop, Jim. The Days of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1971.
  7. ^ "To All Souls. "The ill fated second phase of the civil rights struggle."". April 8, 2007.
  8. ^ Burns, Stewart. To The Mountaintop. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, 2004.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference Engler15Jan10 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).