“The Poor People’s Campaign isn’t going to end when the big march is over and all the speeches are orated. It isn’t going to end when we have to move out of the wooden city. I firmly believe that what is taking place in Resurrection City will someday result in change of power that we are all working so hard for… Black, White, Mexican, Puerto Ricans, Indians, the entire spectrum of poverty is there talking and learning and it may not be radical enough for some, but to me it is one of the most radical events I’ve ever been a part of.”
— Doug Youngblood, Young Patriots founder and Resurrection City resident, 1968
In December 1967 Rev. Dr. King announced the plan to bring poor people from across the country for a new march on Washington, D.C., to disrupt the national consciousness and demand a response to the plight of the poor that would put the nation on a new course socially, economically and politically. Just three weeks after his death on April 4, 1968, with the leadership of the campaign still reeling from their loss, nine caravans from across the country traveled to Washington with delegations including Pacific Northwest Native Americans, Appalachian poor whites, Western farmworkers, and a mule and wagon procession from Marks, Mississippi. When they arrived in the capital they constructed a tent encampment pointedly named Resurrection City on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument housing nearly 3,000 residents for six weeks. But the campaign quickly dissolved. Its plans for a Poor People’s University to develop the leadership of the campaign’s participants were neglected. And it never reached the mass civil disobedience and nationwide boycotts that were part of the original plan to create a crisis that would force Congress to take action.
What is the legacy of the PPC? What did it accomplish? And in what ways did it fail? What factors limited it’s ability to achieve what it set out to do? And what lessons can we draw from both its limitations and successes? On Tuesday, August 16th, the Kairos Center’s Colleen Wessel-McCoy led an online seminar on these questions and more. You can listen to the audio recording below.
[aesop_audio title=”The Legacy of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign” src=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Legacy-of-the-68-PPC.mp3″ loop=”off” viewstart=”off” viewend=”off” hidden=”off”]