Thursday, August 08, 2019

From The Archives -Poor People's Campaign 2018

From The Archives -Poor People's Campaign 2018-Oh What Might Have Been But Instead Nothing But Ashes, Bitter Ashes

By Josh Breslin

Sometimes in this profession you get assignments that you are clueless about or don’t care about. That is not the case here as I asked, no begged editor Greg Green for the assignment after I had already attended a few meetings of the National Committee that was putting together a 50th anniversary edition of the Poor Peoples Campaign which was either stillborn or destroyed in 1968 after Doctor King, the originator of the ides and program had been killed. Sadly, poverty, poverty among blacks and poor whites is still with us and a national disgrace in such a well-fixed country and so those 50 years ago ideas still had some echo power in 2018.  

I should say that it was not by happenstance that I had attended the first National meetings down in Washington. I had been tipped off that a movement was aborning by my friends from Veterans Peace Action Sam and Ralph who had been delegated by their National organization to represent that group in the preliminary meetings to see what actions if any VPA would take in support of the efforts. As a result of those first meetings and wondering about the first PPC’s fate I had done a far among of research about 1968 and why the terms “stillborn” and “destroyed” were the only ones I had been able to find to describe what had happened back then. Although I had heard about some of the stuff, mainly the constant rainy weather that swamped the camps and made life miserable for the refugees there I had been in California with others living off the glow of the Summer of Love, 1967 on Captain Crunch’s converted yellow school bus zooming up and down the Pacific Coast Highway under a very different sign-drug, sex and rock and roll.

That research though was the kicker to win Greg to my side in covering the PPC since he and I agreed that if the 2018 version was to avert the 1968 fate then knowing the pitfalls was important even if I was only covering the events planned for the late Spring of 2018. Beyond the weather by the way, beyond the critical loss of Doctor King, and beyond the other issues of the day like Vietnam which were putting domestic social concerns in the shade the whole operation was beset by internal bickering, cross purposes and the not unusual internal leadership wrangling and power plays (the gap between the lifestyles of the leadership set up in hotels while the ranks sloughed through the muds only highlighted those wrangles).

The 2018 PPC set its sights at a higher level at least on paper with the understanding that this was a long-term hard ass project with plenty of chances to succeed-and fail. The main thing though was to get some major coverage of the six weeks of actions planned for the May-June period. That is what Sam and Ralph tried to hammer home to VPA and other organizations like Code Pink who had bought into the idea, bought into the first stage of the campaign. Once people were committed to organizing around specific issues related to poverty and why then the planned events made sense, made sense to me as well standing on the sidelines. I wish things had gone as easily as the ease with which the plan was set up with that finale in Washington bring home “the bacon.”        



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