In honor of Juneteenth and a reminder that history is a vital tool for change and that some issues are still very much with us – that some attitudes never went away and that recent history has only made them more glowingly apparent.
So to remind you that The Civil Rights Movement was, and continues to be, a struggle, here is a documentary produced by Pacifica Radio in June of 1968.
Barely scratches the surface – but a beginning if you aren’t familiar.
Special thanks to Wikipedia for the background (kick into their fundraiser if you can).
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.
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. 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. 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. 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”.
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.'”
An economic bill of rights was never passed, and leaders spoke with regret about the occupation. SCLC director Bill Rutherford described the campaign as the movement’s “Little Bighorn.” Andrew Young, vice president of the SCLC, suggested that Resurrection City was spending $27,000 a week on food (equivalent to $237,000 in 2023) and had been about to run out of money. The mainstream media contrasted the Poor People’s Campaign unfavorably with (an idealized version of) the 1963 March on Washington, which they portrayed as organized and palatable.
The campaign did produce some changes, however subtle. They included more money for free and reduced lunches for school children and Head Start programs in Mississippi and Alabama. The USDA released surplus commodities to the nation’s one-thousand poorest counties, food stamps were expanded, and some federal welfare guidelines were streamlined. Marian Wright Edelman formed a network of agency bureaucrats concerned about poverty issues. Activists in the National Welfare Rights Organization also gained important connections in the capital. Meanwhile, other marchers, especially Chicano activists, spoke of eye-opening experiences that made them more sophisticated in their thinking about poverty and their relationships with each other, when they returned West.
The SCLC organized a protest caravan, driven by mule-power, to work its way down to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, in early August. Nixon continued to make rioting a campaign issue, explicitly seeking the votes of suburban whites, “the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators”, by promising increased policing, crackdowns on rioters, and an end to educational integration.
The Mule Train traveled on and arrived in Chicago for the turbulent Democratic Convention in Chicago, where the demonstrators got caught in the midst of violence in the streets surrounding the convention site.
In 1969, a Poor People’s Campaign delegation, including Abernathy, met with President Nixon and asked him to address hunger and malnutrition.
During the 1972 Democratic National Convention, Abernathy and the SCLC organized “Resurrection City II” in Miami. There, they camped alongside other groups, including Students for a Democratic Society and Jerry Rubin’s Yippees.
In 2017, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival was launched with the goal of bringing the original work of the Poor People’s Campaign forward.
Produced by Pacifica Radio in 1968, this 40 minute documentary encapsulates just a small portion of the events which took place during that tumultuous time, a time which is still with us, to a great degree. A time which we can never, nor will ever forget.
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