From The Archives-POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN: A NATIONAL CALL FOR MORAL REVIVAL Organizing Guide for State Capitol Press Conference and Demand Deliveries Action Purpose & Overview

POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN: A NATIONAL CALL FOR MORAL REVIVAL

Organizing Guide for State Capitol Press Conference and Demand Deliveries

                                                                       

Action Purpose & Overview

As part of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival state leaders will organize news conferences/rallies inside state and federal capital buildings across the nation within the first few weeks of state legislatures going into session to deliver our campaign demands.

This is an opportunity for states to express collective power by acting in coordination with one another. When we act in coordination we can bring more media attention to our work, we build off the energy of other state actions and we remind our base and each other that we aren’t alone.

These actions will not include nonviolent moral fusion direct action but will instead put our state legislators on notice of what we expect from our lawmakers. For those states that will engage in nonviolent direct action as part of their legislative strategy, these actions will lay a path for escalation as the session continues.

These actions will provide an opportunity to announce the upcoming work of your state campaign such as the statewide media tours in late March, organizing drives, poor people’s hearings, etc.

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Our Organizing Principles

                                                                                                                                   

While these actions will be different in each state, the spirit of each must align with the Fundamental Principles of the campaign. Consider each of these points at every step of your planning process.

●       In our efforts to shift the narrative, we know that we must shift the narrator. We create a platform for and uplift the leadership of those who are most directly impacted by the immoral policies that contribute to and maintain systemic racism, poverty and inequality, the war economy and militarism, and ecological devastation.

Questions to consider: Who is speaking? Are those most directly impacted by systemic injustice speaking in place of organizational leaders and non-profit leads. Who is organizing? In organizing for this action are emerging impacted leaders from your campaign engaged in the organizing process? Who is participating? Is your event accessible to people with disabilities? How will you meet the needs of your participants in terms of language barriers?

●       We are confronting the distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism by making visible the true moral issues of our day. One of the ways we do this is by involving and making visible leaders of many faiths who provide moral framing to contextualize our movement and issues.

Questions to consider: How are we providing a moral framing? Are faith leaders from your campaign engaged in the organizing process? Have they been encouraged to organize their congregation to attend? Have you asked clergy to wear their vestments appropriate for public witness (these are key to visualizing their involvement)? Do you have faith leaders speaking in your program to provide moral framing? Are speakers prepared to have a moral framing in their remarks?

●       We engage in fusion organizing. We intentionally build our campaign across lines of difference and historical division and make our fusion movement visible from every platform we create. We resist a single-issue mindset and at every opportunity reveal the connections between the issues we each face. We are not allies to one another but partners and we uplift each others struggles as our own.   

Questions to consider: Are we demonstrating fusion politics? Are the speakers a visual representation of coming together across lines of division including race, age, gender, gender identity, ability, sexual orientation, region and other lines of difference? Are the people standing behind your speakers and within the video/camera frame also visually demonstrating a coming together of people across lines of division? How are we using our program to show the connections across issues? How are all regions of your state campaign being included in your event framing and outreach efforts?

●       We understand the importance of a culturally grounded movement. When we gather as a movement, theomusicology can unite, galvanize, energize, inform, comfort, calm, direct, encourage and much more. Visual art helps effectively communicate our message and goals as a movement while creating a unified visual identity across all of our state campaigns.

Questions to consider: How will you bring the PPC spirit to your action? Will you have a theomusicologist lead campaign songs and chants during the news conference and demand delivery? Will you bring your PPC banners, flags and placards?

●       We understand the importance of building a mass movement and reaching as many people as possible and recognize the important role the media plays in maximizing our reach. A central goal of the campaign is to shift the narrative. To do this, we don’t let the media tell the story they want to tell, we teach the media about how they should understand and report on what they see.

Questions to consider: What is your media outreach/creation strategy? Have you identified and prepared media spokespeople who are committed to the campaign and can effectively communicate about the campaign and the event? How will you create your own media with this news conference? Examples: writing letters to the editor, creating videos, memes, and social media engagement.

●       Our most effective weapon in our fight to shift the narrative is the truth. We have made a serious commitment to revealing the truth both through personal testimony and through empirical research and analysis. At every opportunity, we tell the truth about what is happening in our communities, across our states, and across the country.

Questions to consider: How are you using the action as an opportunity for political education? Are you passing out your state fact sheets at the news conference to both participants and media? How are you incorporating these facts and others from the Souls of Poor Folks Audit in remarks and testimonies given during your news conference?

●       We are committed to nonviolence. While this takes many forms, we believe that all people have the right to feel safe.

Questions to consider: Does your news conference feel safe and welcoming? What are your plans for making sure your action is safe and people are able to get their questions answered (marshalls, etc)? What is your plan to make sure your action is accessible? How will people new to the Campaign feel welcome and invited into the work? Are you passing a clipboard with pledge cards and/or registration forms?

●       We are political and we are nonpartisan—no elected officials or candidates get the stage or serve on our organizing committees. This is not about left and right, Democrat or Republican but about right and wrong.

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How Is This Action Rooted In Our Goals?

Shift the narrative; Build power; & Impact elections and policies

Center our narrative

●       The narrative around our state legislature’s policy agendas, those most likely to have widespread negative impact on the lives of poor and marginalized people, are largely controlled by lawmakers. We will interrupt this narrative and bring media attention to 1) the truth about what is happening in our communities and the moral crisis we are in and 2) the ways that these policy agendas either contribute to or at the least maintain systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy, and a distorted moral narrative. These institutions of power are not living up to their constitutional mandate to “govern for the good of the whole” or the “general welfare.”

Change the moral and political landscape

●       Many of the organizations that are part of the PPC: NCMR will likely be involved in specific policy endorsements during your legislative session. It is unlikely that legislation introduced during this session will meet campaign criteria for policy endorsement (see page 7 of the Phase II Organizing Guide) because legislation is usually based on what lawmakers see as possible in the moral and political context they are operating in. This means our strategy for impacting policy is not endorsements. Instead, we are creating a moral and political landscape where these demands are the norm rather than the extreme. This begins by focusing the conversation around our demands.

Engage new leaders and consolidate emerging leaders

●       We will reach new audiences by engaging in a highly publicized action and provide an opportunity for new people to get involved in the campaign.

●       When we organize together, we have the opportunity to consolidate current and emerging campaign leader’s commitment, clarity and capacity. Any action or event can be used to strengthen our skills as organizers, speakers, canvassers, etc.; to deepen our understanding of the campaign demands and vision; and to strengthen our relationships to other leaders in our campaign.

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Materials and Resources

Mobilization

●       Review the list of organizations and list of faith bodies that have endorsed the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Don’t forget to invite these groups to take action with you.

●       Template language for Action Network event 

●       Template language for Facebook event

●       Template email blast language

●       Template social media toolkit

●       Flyer for those who request it

Communication

●       Materials to come

○       Template press advisory

○       Template open letter to deliver with the demands

○       Template Op-Ed

●       Click here to review the Communications Webinars to refresh your memory on strategies for media outreach, building your media link, and training media spokespeople.

The Resurrection And The Light-The 50th Anniversary Revival Of Doctor King’s Poor People’s Campaign-Join Us, Join The Struggle Against Poverty-Join The Resistance

The Resurrection And The Light-The 50^th Anniversary Revival Of Doctor King’s Poor People’s Campaign-Join Us, Join The Struggle Against Poverty-Join The Resistance  

By Leslie Dumont

Doctor Martin Luther King was personally a brave man. Brave in that understated way that young women like myself could admire and follow if it came down to that as it had down in hell-hole Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, all those places where the anguished cries for justice could be heard. Bravely withstood jails, beatings and blood.   

I was a young girl actually since I was only twelve when the whirlwind of 1968 hit my home in Cambridge, North Cambridge like a storm (although social and cultural movement like the folk and poetry music period of the early 1960s, the bulk of the black civil rights struggle as it headed north, the draft resistance and anti-Vietnam War protests which were a daily occurrence happening right down the street in Harvard Square). The Tet offensive in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese which meant that the war there was far from over and that I had a sneaking suspicion filtered down by my father that America was on the short end of the stick as far was winning went. Doctor King’s death which left his last great project The Poor People’s Campaign the revival of which I am introducing here. Ruthless, idealistic beautiful Robert Kennedy dead as well so that the hopes for a “newer world” he kept touting would be stalled, continue to be stalled. The disaster of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a bloodbath that I wept tears for a long time. All too much for a twelve year old girl to understand, to take in. Still hard fifty years later when 2018 places all those events before the still-divided, cold civil war divided, country again.             

The war, the Vietnam War, Sam Lowell keeps telling me we have to reference which war for the younger crowd to distinguish that war from the myriad others the American government has pursued or purchased proxies for since then, took the stuffing out of a lot of other social movements, other points on the national social agency. That stuffing being pulled including the War on Poverty that then President thought might be his legacy but which went to ground in the rice fields and highlands of Vietnam. Like I say I was too young to appreciate all of that, of the lost. But I still kept thinking and reading about it, about how to reduce the poverty around that was not doing anybody any good. My father, my late father, was deeply concerned about the poverty issue especially the white Appalachian Mountains poverty from whence he came. He had this book, this The Other America by Michael Harrington which dealt with just that neglected (and still neglected) rural poverty, in his library which I asked him about after I read it.  He told me some stories about his growing up dirt poor with nothing to hang onto but some bastardized dream of getting the hell out of there one way or another.

So I was very disappointed, very concerned when the first Poor People’s Campaign, the Resurrection City campaign down in Washington produced nothing, or not enough to banish poverty from this great over abundant country. And now in some truly ironic twist of silly fate there is a movement, a recent movement, afloat to go back to the ideas presented in Doctor King’s dream of eradicating poverty. The damnation is that in the 2018 as in 1968 the poor are still with us and still need champions working like seven dervishes to get the story back on the public agenda. Good luck to you, good luck to me too since unlike that twelve and too young to fathom the whole thing I am ready to roll now.

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A Few Notes On The Poor Peoples Campaign Of 1968 As Food For Thought As We Prepare From The Second And Hopefully Final Campaign in 2018

A Few Notes On The Poor Peoples Campaign Of 1968 As Food For Thought As We Prepare From The Second And Hopefully Final Campaign in 2018

By Seth Garth

Some readers may know that Si Lannon, who usually does film and art exhibitions reviews in this publication (and book reviews at the American Literary Digest some of which find their way into this publication by reciprocal agreement), back on June 23^rd of this year had an assignment in Washington, D.C. to write an article on the Cezanne Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. On his way to do that assignment, on that Saturday June 23^rd when he exited the Smithsonian Metro stop on National Mall to walk over to the 7^th Street entrance to the Gallery building Si noticed a large white tent and further down toward 7^th Street proper a large stage flanked by two huge screens and huge banners proclaiming that this was the site of the Poor People’s Campaign, hereafter PPC. When he stopped off at the tent he found out from one young activist who was busy painting slogans on posters for the day’s event that the day was the culmination of several weeks of local state capital actions throughout the country highlighting issues like homelessness, immigration and the war economy. All as they adversely affect the great unacknowledged poor masses in this country who have mainly been the victims of the growing gap between the rich and poor. The 23^rd was basically a wake-up call to the federal government and an organizing focus for the PPC cadre who will be working hard over the long haul to achieve some of the goals of the campaign. That morning and afternoon would be highlighted by a rally with the inevitable speakers and a march toward the Capitol several blocks down the Mall.     

Once Si knew what was happening and knowing that a fair number of readers and certainly a fair number of writers at this publication remember the original ill-fated Poor People’s Campaign from 1968 which was short-circuited by the murders Doctor Martin Luther King who originally organized the event and Robert Kennedy who was running for President that year and had endorsed the ideas of the campaign and had visited the encampment set up in that summer before his death he called up site manager Greg Green to see if he wanted Si to cover that event. Greg although about a half generation younger that the average person who would remember that event jumped on it with both hands. Told Si to not worry about the Cezanne exhibit and do a piece on the event, Which he did a good job on and had been posted on this site in late June.  

That would not be the end of the PPC coverage though once Si had done his report. Greg, curious about the original PPC, looked for writers here that might have some information and insights about what happened, or didn’t happen, in 1968 and maybe why. As it turned out the only person who had paid much attention to the event was I. I had actually visited the encampment in the summer of 1968 before I received that dreaded draft notice from “my friends and neighbors” which is the way they introduced themselves at the draft board in Adamsville. I made it clear to Greg that I had not been an activist, a participant but had been down for a different reason, a non-political reason, which is North Adamsville corner boy speak back then meant seeing some young woman. Be that as it may Greg assigned me the piece. I make no great claims about being some kind of PPC scholar but only offer some observation which may alert the current audience to what is happening.     

[This truly belongs as an aside but I could not resist making the point that in the amateur political organizing business some things never change. I refer to Si’s asking what was happening on June 23^rd to a young activist who was painting slogans on poster board. I can remember many a night, many an after midnight night, high on some drug of the month, working with a small group of other young activists painting slogans on poster board for some demonstration or other. That is the same part. What nobody, nobody in their right minds does today is take said posters or leaflets and using old-fashioned wallpaper paste put them up on telephone poles and on wall also after midnight to avoid the coppers, and probably high on the drug of the month then too] Seth Garth  

A Few Notes On The Poor Peoples Campaign Of 1968 As Food For Thought As We Prepare From The Second And Hopefully Final Campaign in 2018

[As many of you know this is the 50^th anniversary of the original Poor Peoples Campaign of 1968. Over the past several months to a year various individuals and organizations have organized around many of those original themes of bringing the poor into some kind of equality in this society. Over the next several weeks there will be weekly actions here locally and a mass rally in Washington around specific grievances. Smedley is knee-deep in the local planning so to give some thoughts about the original campaign is what our May GM discussion period is about. Since we have a big agenda I have written some notes so that we can go to the discussion part directly and save some time. These notes will also be in hard copy at the GM. Al Johnson]

As a long ago philosopher pointed out those who do not remember history are condemned to relive it. That point is what drives this discussion about what happened to the first Poor Peoples Campaign in 1968. It does not pretend to be all-inclusive nor more than one person’s take on those times and that event.

At the most general level the original PPC was a dramatic defeat for the struggles of the poor and oppressed of this country. To understand some of the reasons behind that defeat beyond the murder of the prime mover of the campaign Doctor King will help us to push forward. In a sense the PPC was poorly timed since 1968 as many of us older activists know was a hell-bent year with the Tet offensive finally showing Americans we could not “win” in Vietnam, the refusal of the sitting president, LBJ, to run again, the two assassinations of iconic progressive figures in King and Bobby Kennedy who were in their respective ways driving forces behind the campaign, the turmoil in the streets here and internationally with the May Days in France and the chaos and horror of the Democratic Convention in the summer of that year. So the PPC had to fight for breathe against those more dramatic events and got pushed to the side rather easily especially after King’s murder and some inner turmoil and in-fighting among the leadership.

The PPC was ill-timed and ill-starred in another way. Frankly the heroic black civil rights struggle down South which brought about massive increases in voting rights and some other positive benefits did not after 1965 put much of a dent in the oppression of black people and other minorities around housing, jobs, education, healthcare and the like. With the Vietnam War sucking the life out of Lyndon Johnson’s modern day version of “forty acres and a mule” the war on poverty at a governmental level fell apart. Liberals, governmental and private citizens, began the long retreat away from governmental attempts to alleviate poverty which continues to this day witness the demise of the social welfare programs started under the Clinton administration. Moreover a reaction set in around the question of race when the cities started burning up as a result of the denial of legitimate grievances by the black community and its allies in other minority communities.

The elephant in the room though and fifty years of myth creation around the hallowed name of Doctor King cannot cover the fact up that he as a leader of the black community had lost some authority by pre-Vietnam speech 1967, has been upended by more militant blacks from various vocal anti-integrationist black nationalists to the upfront romantic if doomed Black Panthers. Think about the evolution of the previously intergrated SNCC once black power became a widespread slogan, especially among the young non-churched types. King was the number one symbol of black integration when the moods in the black community was heading elsewhere. Those of us in the military in those days got a taste of that in off-hours when there was very little interaction between the races. King through his belated and now famous anti-Vietnam War speech and his support of the sanitation workers in Memphis was making something of a “comeback” and the PPC was to be at least the symbolic way to get his agenda back on the front pages.

This political, social and personal backdrop does not take away from what was attempted, and what was necessary given the other factors particularly the retreat by the liberals from advocacy of many social programs and the hostility of others to even dealing with the poverty problem any longer. A look at the PPC program tells us that much. It also highlights not only the social reality of the times but that like the heroic struggle for formal civils rights the poor and oppressed were going to have to fight for the better housing, healthcare, education and the like since few others were committed to their cause. The need for the poor and oppressed to lead and fight for what they need which never really happened in 1968 and is the wave of the future of the current campaigns really is the only long-term way forward in order to break the cycle of poverty and the pathologies that gut-level struggle for survival engenders. Something which grouping up in the projects I was personally painfully aware of as a kid.

A few nuts and bolts facts about the 1968 PPC will show that many of the same issues still need addressing, some of the same organizing tactics are in play as well from multiracial, multicultural meetings of poor people and their advocates which the ruling class in its constant strategy of “divide and conquer” hates to see to some programmatic demands. In March of 1968 many poverty-centered organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Southern Regional Council joined with Doctor King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in Atlantic to forge a common program to fight on. To list the three major demands today seems utopian (and way underestimating the money that would be needed today) but still necessary to fight around:

·        $30 billion annual appropriation for a real war on poverty

·        Congressional passage of full employment and guaranteed income legislation [a guaranteed annual wage]

·        Construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year until slums were eliminated

To highlight these demands the campaign would be divided into three phases, the first to create a permitted shanty town of several thousand people which came to be called Resurrection City on the National Mall, the second to begin protest demonstrations and mass non-violent civil disobedience actions and third to take actions to generate mass arrests like those which brought national attention to the plight of blacks in the South around voting rights. The latter two phases are the touchstone of the 2018 campaign as well.

To bring people to Washington several “caravans” were organized from all regions of the country to meet in June of 1968 with a big solidarity rally which brought some 50, 000 people to D.C. to join the estimated 3000 that were “residing” on the Mall.  

Bayard Rustin put forth a proposal for an “Economic Bill of Rights” for Solidarity Day that called for the federal government to most of which still are the wave of the future:

Recommit to the Full Employment Act of 1946 and legislate the immediate creation of at least one million socially useful career jobs in public service, adopt the pending housing and urban development act of 1968, repeal the 90th Congress’s punitive welfare restrictions in the 1967 Social Security Act, extend to all farm workers the right–guaranteed under the National Labor Relations Act–to organize agricultural labor unions, and restore budget cuts for bilingual education, Head Start, summer jobs, Economic Opportunity Act, Elementary and Secondary Education Acts

I have addressed some of the problems and social conditions which helped undermine that first campaign and others can add more from their recollections of the times including the question of post-King murder leadership and in-fighting. Hopefully the latter will not be an issue in the new movement.      

There are some differences in the current campaign from that of 1968 that I think are worth noting as we gear up the campaign. First, if we are to be successful this time, real poor people and members of oppressed communities will have to take leadership roles, make their mistakes and learn from them. Just like we did, do. Our role is one of support to see that such leadership emerges which I believe was a real short-coming of the “professional” organizer from Doctor King on down model in 1968. Second we are “demanding” similar programs to those of 1968 but not “begging” the government to implement as some criticized the 1968 campaign for doing. Lastly, and unfortunately, there are several more issues that the 1968 campaign did not have to address as forcefully like an end to mass black and Latino incarceration and the war on drugs which has decimated communities of color and sapped it of a young, mostly male, leadership component.       

Pop-Up Reflections On The Poor Peoples Rally And March In Washington, D.C. on June 23, 2018

Pop-Up Reflections On The Poor People's Rally And March In Washington, D.C. on June 23, 2018

By Si Lannon

[This initial report, commentary is expected to be the first of several reports this year as the Poor People's Campaign unwinds. Additional reports through December 2018 will be added to the end of this entry as needed. Greg Green]  

Some stories get written on the fly in our business, the publishing business and it does not matter if it is on-line or the hardest of hard copy. The damn thing falls into somebody’s lap and sometimes it is yours-by default. Here is genesis on my coverage of the Poor People's Campaign rally and march down in Washington, D.C. on June 23^rd. I had originally been sent down to Washington by Greg Green our current site manager to do a story about the Cezanne Portrait exhibit at the National Gallery of Art (with a side trip to the small Saint Francis of Assisi exhibit and another of the work on display of Saul Steinberg both of which will be dealt with if I ever get around to actually writing about again after the curtain falls.

Bart Webber has already recently told in this publication the other part of this story, the other part of how I was waylaid even before I was able to write word one about the Cezanne story. Told about how, as is my wont, since I was in town anyway that I would check out to see what was happening at the National Portrait Gallery which is open later than the National Gallery and I figured to do the Cezanne project the next day, a Saturday. The story that developed by Bart out of that experience concerned seeing a remembrance painting of Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic Time magazine cover of Bobby Kennedy in the spring of 1968 which flipped me out when I spied it on the first floor. Got me to thinking about the late Peter Paul Markin who was crazy for Bobby and spent the spring of that year working his ass off for him. My reflections about Markin (always Scribe in the old days) which that night I conveyed to Bart Webber and Sam Lowell, two old friends of his as well and who work at this publication, got turned into that article about the million “might have beens” if Bobby had not been murdered and Markin had not subsequently wound up in hellhole Vietnam which did him no good, no good at all and led to an unsettling early grave. You would not believe the speed Bart was able to put that one together once it got through the grapevine about my “discovery” and others clamored to get their points in about much missed Scribe. It was almost as if some portent, some omen, some invisible hand was at play since nobody here had written word one of original work about the 50^th anniversary the effect of Bobby’s murder and had relied on previous sketches to commemorate the event since everybody was busy with some other project.         

Here is where it all ties together, where sainted Bobby and wanna-be saint Scribe are reunited in spirit anyway. That Saturday I was heading to the National Gallery early to beat the crowds. I usually take the Metro since from the hotel where I was staying it was infinitely easier to do so than taking a car, so the natural stop on that line, the Blue line, is the Smithsonian on the National Mall. As I exited the station heading the few blocks to the museum from there I noticed a huge white tent across from the Hirschhorn Museum and further down toward 7^th Street a stage complete with a couple of large screens flanking a stage and people milling around. I stopped at the tent to inquire about the event although on any given day you will see tents, usually white, strewn on the Mall for some event or other. It turned out that this was the headquarters for the Poor People’s Campaign during the week of actions they had planned in D.C. and was to culminate later that morning and afternoon in a rally there and a march to the Capitol several blocks away.

Once I understood what was going on, understood that this might be something to check out further, I made the connection. Make another stab at figuring out the invisible hand at work this weekend. This year was also the 50^th anniversary of the ill-fated original Poor People’s Campaign led by Martin Luther King before he was assassinated in April of that year and which was carried on in his memory through the summer of 1968. The central physical focus of the original efforts was the establishment of an encampment dubbed Resurrection City which had been highlighted by a large demonstration on June 23^rd of that year. Robert Kennedy had before his own assassination put his endorsement of the campaign as part of his political strategy to spark issues around race, poverty and above all the raging, futile war being waged in Southeast Asia then and which was sucking up resources which could have been used to help alleviate the poverty of those times, something still with us all these years later. ( I use Southeast Asia here although at the time we mostly thought it was Vietnam little did we know until later and only by other sources like Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers expose that Laos, Cambodia and who knows where else were bombed to perdition as well).I believe that Bobby had also visited the site and I know that his funeral train passed through the city. I thought about the situation and called Greg Green to ask if he wanted me to also cover this event along with the Cezanne assignment. Greg said by all means yes. Actually what Greg said was that if I had wanted to keep my nice art assignments I had better damn well (his expression) cover the event. Greg being a half generation younger that most older writers who go back to the hard copy editions of this publication did not have the 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Poor Peoples Campaign on his radar so he was as they say “covering his ass” (my expression).

The following are some reflections taken away from that experience.         

Like in a lot of other things that happen without explanation I don’t believe in resurrection meaning in the context of the Poor People's Campaign, hereafter PPC, trying to jumpstart something like the war on poverty which is what this is all about based on something that happened 50 years ago and that was unsuccessful then seemed anachronistic. Seemed doom to failure as it had previously in  the muddy summer of 1968 once Doctor King’s hand was not there to guide the thing and use his huge authority not only in the black and among other minorities but among white liberals who to this day see him as the guy who could have led his people out of bondage-and assuaged  their guilt for falling down in the struggle after his demise. His authority unlike his successors, and from what I could see on stage this June day, could have pushed things forward. Even then there was no guarantee given the political climate that anything would happen. I confess after looking around, talking to some activists, a few who I recognized from other contexts, other political campaigns I have covered, hearing the endless speeches and trying to decipher what the road forward would look like since everybody emphasized, correctly emphasized that this would only be the start of a long uphill struggle, went into coverage of this event with something of a jaded eye. Whatever  I agree with in principle, whatever I    believe must be done about the vast social and economic inequalities in this country, and internationally.

Nothing said or heard that day has led me to believe that my original assessment was wrong, although this is one time I hope I am. The portents, that invisible hand I seem to have grown committed to using as a metaphor for these strange and worrisome times don’t head that way though. Here is a quick rundown of what the PPC had been up to the previous forty days as they called it, maybe reflecting some forty days in the wilderness although I could not get any rank and file activists to buy into that scenario, in what they have called their “call for a national moral revival.” Such a theme is always tricky and always capable of misintereptation, mainly since it is usually other-worldly Christian evangelicals and bare-bones religious folk who call, usually from the right political perspective or from outside politics, for moral revival. Usually eschewing the worldly poverty problems around them and waiting upon the Lord, and you know who that Lord is.

What the PPC, headed by Revered Barber from North Carolina and others who had been planning this project for several years, wanted to do was highlight the poverty situation and offer remedies. Organize the poor to organize themselves the way one youth activist put it. Saying as well, and I took this as an omen as well, that if it is not done from the bottom up as opposed to most efforts which are lead by middle class professional people on some salvation of their souls mission then once again the thing would be coopted and doomed to failure. Good point.   

In order to drum up support locally and nationally the PPC had the previous five weeks centered their actions, including acts of civil disobedience, on the state capitals each week presenting a different broad issue like homelessness or the war economy and the way those affect the poor, those down at the bottom of the barrel in society. After those five weeks of gathering from what I could tell, and what was noticeable in the crowd I saw at the Mall, a middle class professional cadre with a sprinkling of union activists to further the work, to get to the poor so they can organize themselves they would gather in Washington to see what they had wrought. From my observations of who was in the crowd that day, unlike what I remember and have seen photographs of the original encampment, with a few exceptions this was not the poor masses coming to act as avenging angels against their oppressors. Which made, makes me wonder about that portentous statement that young enthused activist made to me in all candor and which was seconded by a couple of other young people around him who nodded their heads in agreement.

If Sam Lowell or Seth Garth, maybe even Bart Webber although he is not given to straying away from straight reportage, were writing this they would say this was a situation where you “rounded up the usual suspects,” saw people who had been around these issues going back to the 1960s. Frank Jackman would have call it preaching to the choir” if you want another way to say it. These people were good in their time, hell, a bunch of us worked with them when the world was new and were still all sparkling eyes and dewy too, but we have a generational “passing the torch” problem between today’s youth and the generation after ours who came of age under the aegis of Ronald Reagan. The old ways of organizing, the very heavy reliance after all this time and all the times we have been showed nothing but ashes and brimstone of voting as the main organizational tool for change, does not bode well for this PPC program.      

And not so strangely given the moral imperative behind the movement the crowd was treated to such preaching in a literal sense both by the speakers who has some religious or quasi-religious take on the situation and by the “feel” of the event, the feeling that it was a revival meeting of some sort with people being exhorted to join up, to get out there in the mud and organize, to get “religion” as the late Markin used to say once he came back from Vietnam about the issues of war and peace.

The several thousand in attendance and/or who marched to the Capitol were thus treated to this eerie spectacle. But here is where things got a little awry. Got as confused as they did in the 1960s when strategy, basically voting for a regime or going down in the mud for fundamental social change were the two main poles of attraction. Put people, thoughtful people in different camps. The 23rd of June was an almost chemically pure example of that old dilemma-in one place-hell, in one speaker at times. On the one hand speakers, including prime leader Reverend Barber who knew how to work the crowd into a revival spirit no question, spoke of “revolution” which I assumed was meant in the traditional sense like the original American or French revolutions. In the next breath, and this was truest when the Reverend Jessie Jackson brought in for the occasion, a former King aide and later a Democratic Party presidential candidate himself, spent his every word talking about heading to the ballot box come November. Now revolution and voting are by no means mutually exclusive, but I got a very queasy feeling I had been here before, had been cajoled into doing the same old, same old. And you wonder why I am a little eye-jaded about the future prospects of this campaign.          

Dr. King’s Vision: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1967-68 Why a Poor People’s Campaign? Just a year before his assassination, at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in May 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selm… Later that year, in December 1967, Rev. Dr. King announced the plan to bring together poor people from across the country for a new march on Washington. This march was to demand better jobs, better homes, better education—better lives than the ones they were living. Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy explained that the intention of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 was to “dramatize the plight of America’s poor of all races and make very clear that they are sick and tired of waiting for a better life.” Rev. Dr. King proposed, “… If you are, let’s say, from rural Mississippi, and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs, and in showing it your children you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done.” King aligned with the struggle of the poor and black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in March and April 1968. He suggested their struggle for dignity was a dramatization of the issues taken up by the Poor People’s Campaign—a fight by capable, hard workers against dehumanization, discrimination and poverty wages in the richest country in the world. Dr. King saw that poverty was not just another issue and that poor people were not a special interest group. Throughout his many speeches in the last year of his life, he described the unjust economic conditions facing millions people worldwide. He held up the potential of the poor to come together to transform the whole of society. He knew that for the load of poverty to be lifted, the thinking and behavior of a critical mass of the American people would have to be changed. To accomplish this change of consciousness a “new and unsettling force” had to be formed. In other words, the poor would have to organize to take action together around our immediate and basic needs. In doing, we could become a powerful social and political force capable of changing the terms of how poverty is understood and dispelling the myths and stereotypes that uphold the mass complacency and leave the root causes of poverty intact. He described this force as a multi-racial “nonviolent army of the poor, a freedom church of the poor.” In his last Sunday sermon, he stated: There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution; that is a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution of weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear… The triple revolution that Rev. Dr. King highlighted in this sermon emphasized: 1. a technological revolution, 2. a revolution of weaponry, and 3. a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion taking place all over the world. He argued that social transformation was not inevitable, arising solely out of the historic conditions, but rather needed the commitment, consciousness, capacity and connectedness of the “new and unsettling force” to build a credible and powerful campaign. The first gathering of over fifty multiracial organizations that came together with SCLC to join the Poor People’s Campaign, took place in Atlanta, Georgia in March 1968. Key leaders and organizations at this session included: Tom Hayden of the Newark Community Union, Reis Tijerina of the Federal Alliance of New Mexico, John Lewis of the Southern Regional Council, Myles Horton of the Highlander Center, Appalachian volunteers from Kentucky, welfare rights activists, California farm workers, and organized tenants. Rev. Dr. King addressed the session saying that it was the first meeting of that kind he had ever participated in. Indeed, meetings where leaders of different sections of the poor and dispossessed come together on the basis of their common needs and demands remain rare and politically taboo. The Platform for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 As a first step in building the power needed to achieve the goal of a radical redistribution of political and economic power King, along with other leaders of the poor such as Johnnie Tillmon of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), helped work out the major elements of the platform for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. An important aspect of the Campaign was to petition the government to pass an Economic Bill of Rights as a step to lift the load of poverty. $30 billion annual appropriation for a real war on poverty Congressional passage of full employment and guaranteed income legislation [a guaranteed annual wage] Construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year until slums were eliminated The Campaign was organized into three phases. The first was to construct a shantytown, to become known as Resurrection City, on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. With permits from the National Park Service, Resurrection City was to house anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 Campaign participants. Additional participants would be housed in other group and family residences around the metropolitan area. The next phase was to begin public demonstrations, mass nonviolent civil disobedience, and mass arrests to protest the plight of poverty in this country. The third and final phase of the Campaign was to launch a nationwide boycott of major industries and shopping areas to prompt business leaders to pressure Congress into meeting the demands of the Campaign. Although Rev. Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, on April 29, 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign went forward. It began in Washington where key leaders of the campaign gathered for lobbying efforts and media events before dispersing around the country to formally launch the nine regional caravans bringing the thousands of participants to Washington: the “Eastern Caravan,” the “Appalachia Trail,” the “Southern Caravan,” the “Midwest Caravan,” the “Indian Trail,” the “San Francisco Caravan,” the “Western Caravan,” the “Mule Train,” and the “Freedom Train.”4 The efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign climaxed in the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom on June 19, 1968. Fifty thousand people joined the 3,000 participants living at Resurrection City to rally around the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign on Solidarity Day. This was the first and only massive mobilization to take place during the Poor People’s Campaign. Bayard Rustin put forth a proposal for an “Economic Bill of Rights” for Solidarity Day that called for the federal government to: Recommit to the Full Employment Act of 1946 and legislate the immediate creation of at least one million socially useful career jobs in public service Adopt the pending housing and urban development act of 1968 Repeal the 90th Congress’s punitive welfare restrictions in the 1967 Social Security Act Extend to all farm workers the right–guaranteed under the National Labor Relations Act–to organize agricultural labor unions Restore budget cuts for bilingual education, Head Start, summer jobs, Economic Opportunity Act, Elementary and Secondary Education Acts The Legacy of MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign Unfortunately, the unity and organization needed for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 to complete all three of the planned stages and form the “new and unsettling force” capable of disrupting “complacent national life” and achieving an economic bill of rights was not easy to come by. The assassinations of Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy, a key proponent of the Campaign and Presidential candidate, only served to cripple the Campaign and greatly limit its impact. King emphasized the need for poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans to unite. He asserted that the Poor People’s Campaign would only be successful if the poor could come together across all the obstacles and barriers set up to divide us and if they could overcome the attention and resources being diverted because of the US engagement in the Vietnam War. In August 1967, he preached: One unfortunate thing about [the slogan] Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan ‘Power for Poor People’ would be much more appro… And the night before his assassination, in his “Promised Land” speech, he reminded the people that being disunited only benefitted the rich and powerful: You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in sla… Shortly before the Poor People’s Campaign was launched, King described the kairos moment they were in. His words still ring true today: Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: “We… King and the other leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign asked fundamental questions about the contradictions of their day. Today, many of the groups interested in re-igniting the Poor People’s Campaign are asking similar questions about the problems of inequality, power and class: We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the … King exemplified the clarity, commitment, capability, and connectedness needed to build a movement to end poverty: I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life for those who have been left out…This is the way I’m going. This commitment is needed from all leaders interested in taking up King’s mantle. He demonstrated the difficulty and necessity of uniting the poor and dispossessed across race, religion, geography and other lines that divide. In our efforts to commemorate and build a Poor People’s Campaign for our times, we will undertake an analysis of the 1967-68 Campaign. We aim to stand on the shoulders of those who came before and put effort into learning lessons and getting into step together. Source: https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/poor-peoples-campaign-1968/ Upgrade to Premium Plan  Save unlimited bookmarks.  Save PDFs, DOCX files, images and Excel sheets as email attachments.  Get priority support and access to latest features. Upgrade To Premium EmailThis Send web pages & articles to your email inbox. 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