Volume Forty 1998
Essays in History
Published by the Corcoran Department of History at the
University of Virginia.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Class Resurrection: The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 and
Resurrection City
Robert T. Chase
George Mason University
There go my people-I must catch up with them, for I am their
leader.-Mohandas Gandhi
Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference's (SCLC) successor to the slain Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., began the Poor People's Campaign of 1968 with the proclamation that
"the poor are no longer divided. We are not going to let the white man put
us down anymore. It's not white power, and I'll give you some news, it's not
black power, either. It's poor power and we're going to use it."1 The Poor
People's Campaign (PPC) was a convergence of racial and economic concerns that
brought the poor, including those who were black, white, Indian, and Hispanic to
live in shantytowns and demonstrate daily in Washington, D.C. from May 14 until
June 24, 1968. The PPC was conceived by Dr. Martin Luther King, but,
unfortunately, was not led by him. Dr. King was murdered on April 4, 1968 while
campaigning with striking garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee. His death
helped to ensure that the Poor People's Campaign would be a failure. In Dr.
King's stead, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King's longtime friend and SCLC's vice
president, led and organized the PPC. While the press criticized Abernathy and
the SCLC executive staff for their poor management of the campaign, other
contributing factors to the campaign's demise remain unexamined.2 The failure
of the Poor People's Campaign extended beyond questions of leadership and tactics.
Ultimately, the PPC failed because the traditional constituency of the Civil
Rights movement -- the white, middle-class, liberals -- was repulsed by the
goals of the campaign itself. Bringing the poor together as a racial
amalgamation of similar interests and goals heightened the issue of class in
America and, consequently, Americans came to view the Civil Rights movement as
an instrument questioning the legitimacy of America's economic system and its
capitalistic "way of life."3
The failure of the Poor People's Campaign to win
substantial anti-poverty legislation does not, however, deny its historical
importance. On the contrary, its failure holds the key to its significance.
Journalists who covered the campaign failed to notice that the PPC's incorporation
of class issues and economic goals caused a change in the perception of the
Civil Rights movement among white, middle-class, liberals. Similarly, current
Civil Rights scholarship has largely ignored the Poor People's Campaign,
treating it only as an afterthought and an epilogue to a dwindling Civil Rights
movement. The PPC's first chronicler, Charles Fager, bolstered the popular
opinion among the press that the PPC failed because of Abernathy's inept
leadership. While the conventional wisdom is correct that "a basic
restructuring of the relationship between SCLC and its white liberal
constituency was probably inevitable upon Abernathy's elevation,"
shouldering Abernathy with the campaign's failure falls short of a full
understanding of the PPC and its effect on the Civil Rights movement. Although
Abernathy may have been, as campaign chronicler Charles Fager has argued,
"a blurred and less-refined echo of his Atlanta mentor," Martin
Luther King, the PPC failed because of its economic goals as much as its
management.4 Had King survived his assassin's bullet, he might have found that
the lofty goals of the PPC were incongruous with the continuation of white,
liberal, middle-class support.
Historian Geoffrey Hodgson found that the success of
the 1963 Civil Rights march in Washington, D.C. depended on the base of a
"liberal consensus" comprising both blue-collar labor democrats and a
collection of liberal intellectuals and press, policy makers, progressive
minded businessmen, church leaders, and students. Hodgson described the
philosophy of this "liberal consensus" as the belief that
"American capitalism was a revolutionary force for social change, that
economic growth was supremely good because it obviated the need for
redistribution and social conflict, that class had no place in American
politics."5 Hodgson argued that in 1963 the Civil Rights movement was
still in agreement with the ideals of the "liberal consensus:"
At the time of the March on Washington, in August 1963, the
Civil Rights movement was still seen as the culminating affirmation of the
liberal faith... There was nothing in the movement's ideas, at that stage, that
contradicted liberal orthodoxy, and its aims were championed by the whole
breadth of the liberal consensus: White House, labor, churches, intellectuals,
and the more modern-minded sectors of business. Its goal was to integrate black
people more closely into white society. In the fall of 1963, it was still
generally thought that this could be done without challenging white society, as
a consequence, in any way.6
By 1968, however, the PPC's march on Washington incorporated
economic goals of class-based equality that fractured and challenged the
ideology of the "liberal consensus." The result was that the
"liberal consensus" that supported King in 1963 rebuffed the PPC's
efforts in 1968.
By examining the Poor People's Campaign as an
attempted class rather than racial movement, this work intends to substantiate
Professor Manning Marable's contention that "effective power is never
exercised solely by a single race, but by a dominant social class. Thus Black
political movements are simultaneously movements that seek to restructure or
radically transform class relations."7 In order to evaluate the PPC as an
attempted class-based movement, this work focuses on the involvement of the
campaign's non-African American minorities.
The purpose of the following essay is threefold. The
first is to show that the inclusion of Native Americans, Mexican Americans,
Puerto Ricans, and poor white Appalachian people marked the change of the Civil
Rights movement from goals of racial equality to ideas of economic change and
confrontation. Of course, white liberals and other minorities had previously
participated in the Civil Rights movement, but never before had the concerns of
non-African American minorities been incorporated into the actual goals of the
movement itself. The inclusion of other minorities into the Poor People's
Campaign signaled the end of the Civil Rights movement and the beginning of a
prolonged fight for an expanded welfare system.
The second purpose of this paper is to demonstrate
that by 1968 African Americans were left with the choice between "black
power" to create a more separate and empowered black community or integration
through the inter-racial movement of poor people to achieve a new socioeconomic
policy in the United States. Stokely Carmichael, co-founder of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and proponent of "black
power," commented that the difference between SCLC and SNCC was between
"mobilizing versus organizing." As Hodgson has concluded "to
mobilize meant to rely, in the last analysis, on white help. To organize meant
to stand or fall by what black people could do for themselves."8
Therefore, the "mobilizing" philosophy of the SCLC depended on white,
liberal, middle-class support for the PPC. When that support failed to
materialize, the PPC failed as a movement. The result was that without King and
without white, liberal, middle-class support, the PPC inadvertently served as
notice to the black community that integration had not worked. Thus, with King
gone and the PPC a failure, the SCLC lost credibility as the forefront Civil
Rights organization causing the black community to lose its primary
organizational alternative to "black power."
The essay's third purpose is to demonstrate that the
campaign's economic goals of wealth redistribution fractured the Civil Rights
movement's traditional, liberal, white, middle-class constituency. Historian
Scott Sandage enthusiastically claimed that the Civil Rights movement succeeded
by using the image and national memory of Abraham Lincoln to create "an
inter-racial politics of memory, placing blacks at the center of the American
story by juxtaposing them with its noblest hero." In the process, the
Civil Rights movement was able to "successfully portray their adversary as
un-American."9 The Poor People's Campaign of 1968, however, contributed to
the failure of the Civil Rights movement precisely because it attempted to
embrace class solidarity while advocating economic goals that conflicted with
the value of American capitalism. Therefore, the PPC, not its adversaries, was
ultimately seen as "un-American."
Leftward Movements and the Discovery of Poverty
Since the Meredith Mississippi March in 1966,
the slogan "black power" had become a distinct philosophy in contrast
to King's earlier ideas of integration. But as early as 1965, the issues of the
Vietnam War and growing black frustration within the movement due to a
perceived stagnation of goals and progress confounded King and the SCLC staff.
On March 2, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson launched Operation Rolling
Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam. That same day, at a speech given at
Howard University, King for the first time openly questioned U.S. policy in
Vietnam calling for a negotiated settlement. King, however, was cautious and
did not fully rebuke U.S. efforts in Southeast Asia. The Civil Rights leader
did not want to provoke Johnson's ire on the war for fear that the Johnson
Administration might turn against the Civil Rights movement. Whitney Young,
director of the Urban League, heeded "Johnson needs a consensus. If we are
not with him on Vietnam, then he is not going to be with us on Civil
Rights."10 When SNCC publicly denounced the war in 1966, King neither
supported their decision nor did he join the growing chorus of Civil Rights
leaders condemning SNCC's proclamation. Young, for example, stated that the
Urban League would renounce Civil Rights organizations that "formally
adopted black power as a program, or which [tied] in domestic rights with the
Vietnam conflict." Similarly, Roy Wilkins, director of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), remarked that SNCC's
position against the war labeled them "only one of many civil rights
groups" and that their statement was "not the statement of other
groups of what is loosely called the Civil Rights movement."11
While King was slow to condemn the war in Vietnam, he
did make progressive movements towards a militant position that coupled the war
in Vietnam with social spending programs at home. By April 1966 King and the
SCLC board passed a resolution condemning the war. At the SCLC annual
convention in August the SCLC called for the immediate and unilateral
desclation of the war. Even as King was moving against the war in Vietnam, he
was simultaneously growing more concerned with the plight of the poor. During
an SCLC strategy session in October 1966, King proposed three initiatives for
the organization, one of which was the organization of America's impoverished
towards a "crusade to reform society in order to realize economic and
social justice." In November 1966, King told a Howard University audience
that African Americans needed to confront "basic issues between the
privileged and the underprivileged." King also supported Bayard Rustin and
A. Philip Randolph's 1966 "Freedom Budget" that asked for a
guaranteed annual wage.12 King's movements against the war culminated with his
April 4, 1967 speech, "Beyond Vietnam," at Riverside Church in New
York City. Carmichael, one of the primary proponents of black power, remembered
that King's "speech was very beautiful. I saw one of the reasons why I have
a great deal of love and respect for King was his love for the people and
consequently his honesty... He used words in that speech that I could never
use. I mean, if I were to use those words I would be dismissed as
irresponsible. But he said, 'The United States government is one of the
greatest purveyors of violence in the world today.'"13 By 1967 King had
concluded that ending America's war in Vietnam was a moral imperative.
Similarly, by 1967 King also began to link the U.S. war in Vietnam with a need
for a real "war on poverty" at home.
Origin, Tactics, and Goals of the PPC
On December 4, 1967, King announced the Poor People's
Campaign by declaring "America is at a crossroads of history, and it is
critically important for us, as a nation and a society, to chose a new path and
move upon it with resolution and courage. It is impossible to underestimate the
crisis we face in America. The stability of civilization, the potential of free
government, and the simple honor of men are at stake."14 King used the
same kind of apocalyptic language when he described the motivation behind the
Poor People's Campaign in his final article in Look.
We intend, before the summer comes, to initiate a 'last
chance' project to arouse the American conscience toward constructive
democratic change. The nation has been warned by the President's Commission (on
Civil Disorders) that our society faces catastrophic division in an approaching
doomsday if the country does not act. We have, through this non-violent action,
an opportunity to avoid a national disaster and to create a new spirit of
harmony.15
King's call for a poor people's campaign based on
integration and militant confrontation while remaining non-violent was a
conscious effort to distance the Civil Rights movement from the separatism of
the growing "black power" movement. Carmichael charged in 1966 that
"integration speaks not at all to the problem of blackness. Integration
today means the man who 'makes it,' leaves his black brothers behind in the
ghetto as fast as his new sports car will take him. It has no relevance to the
Harlem wino or to the cottonpicker making three dollars a day."16 King, on
the other hand, hoped that the PPC would reunite the Civil Rights' struggle for
integration and reignite the power of non-violence.
Immediately, however, members of the liberal press
began to articulate their discontent with the notion of a "poor people's
campaign." The day after King's announcement, a New York Times editorial
critically argued that,
Like the threat to 'close down' Federal induction centers,
Dr. Martin Luther King's plan to seek 'massive dislocation' of the national
capital violates the principles of responsible protest. Dr. King insists that
the massive civil disobedience campaign he plans in Washington next April will
be nonviolent. But his proclaimed goal of massive dislocation belies Dr. King's
profession of peaceful intent. If such a result were achieved, by whatever
means, it would probably involve some overt violence and it would certainly
violate the rights of thousands of Washingtonians and the interests of millions
of Americans. This is one more case in which the means are not justified by the
end.17
King's vision for his campaign required confrontational tactics
that many believed would end as his own personal "Waterloo." Jack
Nelson, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times News Service, reflected after
King's death that "The Campaign sorely misses Dr. King. Not that he
necessarily could have pulled it off. In fact, had he not been assassinated,
the campaign may well have been his Waterloo, as some civil rights leaders
predicted."18
King understood, however, that a multi-racial
poor people's movement aimed at a redistribution of America's wealth might
prove more difficult to build than the non-violent Civil Rights movement used
to end legal segregation in the South. While promoting the campaign's cause,
King admitted "It was easier to integrate lunch counters than to eradicate
slums. It didn't cost anything to integrate lunch counters. Now we are talking
about something that will cost billions and billions of dollars."19 To
accomplish his goal of economic redistribution for the poor, King argued that
"timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We've got to
confront the power structure massively."20
The PPC, as planned by King, equated ending the war
in Vietnam with creating a successful "war on poverty" at home. Jose
Yglesias in his 1968 interview asked both King and Andrew Young, a longtime
lieutenant to King, why the need for a "poor people's campaign?"
Young stated that "until now the main objectives of the civil rights
movement had been ones that most benefited middle-class Negroes. The people who
marched in the demonstrations and got beaten to desegregate restaurants and
hotels can't take advantage of those gains. They can't afford them. Now these
people are saying, 'What about us?'" 21 Young also equated the 1963 march
with the proposed Poor People's Campaign and determined that, "In a sense,
this is to be a war-a war without violence. It isn't going to be a
Sunday-school picnic like the '63 March on Washington. . . Something is going
to change or we'll all be in jail. This is do or die-not just for nonviolence
but for the nation-and we'll do whatever necessary to open the economic doors
of this nation for the poor."22 Ysglesias wrote that, "King explained
that although the cost to the nation of wiping out poverty had not been reduced
to a dollar figure, the war in Vietnam-'this unjust and immoral war,' as he
always characterizes it-cannot be waged if the campaign's demands are
met."23 Therefore, as King's political tendencies were heading leftward,
he equated the war in Vietnam with a real "war on poverty."24 While
many Americans opposed the Vietnam War without equating it to issues of class
and poverty, King believed that there was an intrinsic relationship between the
federal expenditure on an "immoral war" and the lack of funds spent
on Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty."
Although King grounded his reasons for the
campaign on moral issues, he did acknowledge that it would require older ideas
of class conflict. "In a sense, you could say we are engaged in a class
struggle, yes. It will be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls
for a redistribution of economic power," said King. "Yet this isn't a
purely materialistic or class concern. I feel that this movement in behalf of
the poor is the most moral thing-it is saying that every man is an heir to a
legacy of dignity and worth." Yet, when Yglesias recounted the inclusion
of other minorities, he declared to King, "You can't say you're in civil
rights any longer," and King responded with a smile, "But you can say
I am in human rights."25
The creation of a pan-racial coalition of poor people
that incorporated the goals of other minorities represented a strategic
departure for King. With the initiation of the PPC, the SCLC moved beyond civil
rights for African Americans, and more towards ideas of economic relief for all
impoverished Americans. "This is no longer a civil rights thing,"
commented Reverend James Bevel, a SCLC executive staff member. "This is
economic. We intend to force the power structure of this country to divert more
energy -- and by that I mean money -- into getting 40,000,000 Americans into
this nation's economic mainstream."26 Reflecting on the purposes and
designs of the campaign, Reverend Hosea Williams, the PPC's "political
action" director, remarked,
We will never get free by eliminating racism or bringing
about integration. If black people were able to eliminate every aspect of
racism and integrate every aspect of American life, we would not be free. Black
folks will never be free until we have our fair share of the economy. We live
not in a political society, nor in a social society, nor a religious society,
we live in an economic society. So we had to launch a movement to gain our fair
share of the economy.27
The completion of Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign
had three central phases. First, the SCLC would organize several thousand
people representing different racial backgrounds to live in a highly visible
shantytown, followed by daily demonstrations and a mass march similar to the
historic 1963 Civil Rights march on Washington, D.C. The second phase would
include mass arrests throughout the Capital. The third phase was envisioned as
a national economic boycott of America's most powerful corporations. Throughout
the three phases of the campaign, it was hoped that Robert Kennedy's bid for
the presidential democratic nomination would bolster the efforts of the Poor
People's Campaign. After all, it was Bobby Kennedy who, according to Marian
Wright Eldeman, told Martin Luther King to "bring the poor people to
Washington." As Eldeman, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and
personal friend of King, recalled her August 1967 meeting with King:
He [King] was real down that day when I walked in, sitting
in his office, and he was like everybody at that time -- Kennedy and me and all
of us concerned about the poor and what was happening to civil rights and the
country turning away from it, about what we were going to do next. And I told
him that Bobby Kennedy said he ought to bring the poor people to Washington.
And as simply as Bobby had said it, King instinctively felt that that was right
and treated me as if I was an emissary of grace here, or something that brought
him some sight. Out of that, the Poor People's Campaign was born.28
The tactics of the Poor People's Campaign were new
ones for the Civil Rights movement. Although the SCLC's Operation Breadbasket
relied upon local boycotting tactics, the PPC was the Civil Rights movement's
first planned national boycott against America's largest corporations and
businesses.29 Furthermore, the creation of a multi-racial coalition of poor
people that incorporated the goals of other minorities was a new effort for
SCLC. By focusing on poverty as opposed to de-segregation, King went beyond
traditional issues of adequate political representation and constitutionality
to issues of greater economic equality and opportunity.
Additionally, the SCLC purposefully designed broad
legislative goals so that the PPC would act as a highly symbolic gesture to
create a massive outpouring of sympathy from America's middle class. The hope
was that the Poor People's Campaign would simultaneously challenge the U.S. war
effort in Vietnam and U.S. spending priorities at home. Michael Harrington,
author of The Other America and confident to King, recalled King's dilemma in regards
to the goals of the PPC.
And it struck me that Dr. King was very pessimistic and
deeply disturbed at the way things were going. On the one hand, he was being
increasingly attacked from with the black movement. There was a surge of
nationalism. The Black Panthers had begun to come on the scene. There was SNCC,
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There had been a turn away from
nonviolence, so he was being attacked for being too much of a pacifist. Too
namby-pamby On the other hand, he was being attacked by Lyndon Johnson, and
even by the Hubert Humphrey liberals, for going too far to the left. For being
in the antiwar movement Within that context, we talked about the Poor People's
Campaign. In a sense, the Poor People's Campaign was certainly no repudiation
by Dr. King of his opposition to the war, but it was an attempt to then go back
and refocus on basics, and perhaps more importantly, to mobilize a mass
movement.30
Confronted by the rising popularity of "black
power" and "black nationalism," King created the PPC and wagered
that the Civil Rights tactics of non-violence and integration would not crash
on the shoals of economic confrontation. "King knows that he is
subjugating himself to his most severe test," wrote Milton Viorst in a
February 1968 Washingtonian article. "Assailed from both sides, he is
nonetheless proposing a grandiose program, that could succeed mightily or
collapse ignominiously. Some may chose to scoff, but Washington can scarcely
afford to dismiss the possibility that he will meet the test
decisively."31
Freedom Roads
The Poor People's Campaign was a national event
incorporating the poor from across the country. The campaign canvassed the
nation, traveling to Washington, D.C. in buses, cars, trains, and even an old
fashioned mule train. All told, the PPC maintained nine different caravans,
namely the "Eastern Caravan," the "Appalachia Trail," the
"Southern Caravan," the "Midwest Caravan," the "Indian
Trail," the "San Francisco Caravan," the "Western
Caravan," and finally the "Mule Train" and the "Freedom
Train."
The "Eastern Caravan," containing some 800
people, reached Washington, D.C. in mid-May after stopping in seven cities and
picking up some 200 Puerto Ricans in New York City. The "Appalachia
Trail" caravan had poor whites and African Americans from largely rural
regions. The Appalachian participants came primarily from Tennessee, Kentucky,
southwest Virginia, and West Virginia. The "Southern Caravan" worked
its way through the deep South, covering a total of 13 major cities and
included Mexican Americans and poor white southerners. The "Western
Caravan" included Mexican Americans from Los Angeles and Indians from New
Mexico and Oklahoma. The "Indian Trail" began in Seattle, Washington
and headed northeast stopping in Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota. The
collecting of poor people across the nation was done in the hope of
incorporating a true all-American representation. A geographical map of the
routes of all the caravans can be found on the following page in Figure I.
Figure I: Freedom Roads, Daily Worker
Blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Indians described
their reasons for embracing the campaign similarly. The phrases most often used
were "for better job and home," "for better education,"
"for civil rights and job," and "for freedom." One
applicant form, filled out by Mrs. Mahalia Keys, read simply, "For
Better!"32 The income of the applicants ranged from $1.25 an hour to
nothing. Very few applications maintained a wage exceeding the federal
minimum.33 Henrietta Franklin, an African American farm wife from Mississippi,
implored:
I'm here because when I was a child, I got taken out of
school and put to work on the farm helping my family. They didn't pay us in
money, but in food, in the crops so we could eat. Then I got married and had
kids, and my husband worked in the cotton fields in season and fixing cars and
trucks and stuff. But he got sick and don't work much no more and there ain't
hardly no cotton to get picked by hand anyway... So I came here with the
Campaign to tell people that we got to be treated like human beings-that we
have a right to live because we've earned the right but we've yet to be paid.34
Buck Maggard, a white Appalachian volunteer and organizer of
the PPC, revealed that he became involved in the campaign because "even
though sometimes we think we were white that we were free from all this
exploitation. But growing up I felt like I was exploited just as much as black
people was. My father was a coal miner and we didn't always have money. I
always felt like I was being discriminated against also, not because I was
black, but because I was poor. I guess I felt like I had a lot in common with
poor black people."35 Cleofes Vigil, a 51-year old Mexican-American from
Taos, New Mexico, wanted the newsmen to understand that "We can churn our
own butter if we have elbow room to do it. But the big companies and the
Federal Government are taking our land from us and fencing us in like a
concentration camp."36 Rafael Duran, a 67-year old Hispanic, explained a
generational legacy of protest that culminated with the Poor People's Campaign.
"Since I was a kid, my grandfather used to tell me how we were robbed of
land by the U.S. government," said Duran. "I was always looking for a
way to come to Washington to get it back. It was taken by fraud."37
Dempsey Price, an African American coal miner from Chicago, explained that
"You can't put the reasons why people are here down on paper. They're just
not reducible to paper and ink. My whole life is bound up in this
thing."38
While the press sometimes sympathized with the plight
of the poor and their reasons for coming to Washington, they often, however,
questioned the goals of the campaign. In a Washington Post editorial, the first
arrivals to Washington, D.C. were greeted by the city's largest newspaper as if
perhaps the "liberal" cause might be better served if the campaign
were to go somewhere else. "Would more Americans better understand the
plight of the rural and urban poor if, through the eyes of their press and
their government spokesman, they visited the poison spots of poverty, instead
of bringing representatives of these regions into the Capitol?," stated
the Washington Post. "Let us have a march, by all means. But why not turn
it around and have its route run from Washington to where the poverty is,
instead of from where the poverty is to Washington?"39 Similarly, in an
Atlanta Journal and Constitution editorial entitled "Is Poverty March
Worthwhile?," columnist Doreen Roy questioned the necessity of PPC's
existence.
A glance at the want ads, a talk with personnel managers at
large and small corporations, bear out an unpleasant truth: there IS work.
There is hope. There is a future for most of these hard-core poverty-stricken.
But it requires effort. And I can't help wondering how much good this 'march'
could have accomplished if its participants had marched to their nearest
employment agency instead of to our nation's capital. 40
In rejecting the Campaign, the press had
garnered support among American whites. A June 10, 1968 Washington Post article
reported that the Louis Harris national survey found that only 29%
of whites favored the march while 61% of them opposed it. With
opposite results, the Harris survey found that 80% of African
Americans favored the march while only 11% opposed it.41 No wonder,
then, that Newsweek felt at liberty to proclaim, "There remained no reason
to believe that Resurrection City would necessarily succeed even as a
spectacle, let alone as a pragmatic lobbying mission. . . this Poor People's
Campaign was fueled on faith, run on spontaneity verging sometimes on the
whimsical and pointed towards goals too impossibly grand to be won."42
Columnist Richard Wilson, writing in the Evening Sun on May 1 was even more
direct when he blasted not only their arrival, but the very idea of a poor
people's march. "The march was poorly conceived from the beginning. Its
objectives are not clearly spelled out," charged the Evening Sun.
"Its potential for harm is probably greater than for good."43 Thus,
for a nation so seemingly concerned with poverty issues on Capitol Hill, it
also appeared that the press became unhappy when the real manifestation of that
poverty showed up on the Capitol lawn.
Conditions of Resurrection City
As described by Dr. James Farmer, founder and former
head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Poor People's Campaign was
"a flop."44 It brought 2,600 people to Washington, D.C. to live for
almost six weeks, from May 14 to June 24, in shantytowns named
"Resurrection City." The camp's spirits were dampened as rain poured
down for twenty-eight of the forty-two days of its duration. Ben W. Gilbert of
the Washington Post described the miserable living conditions of Resurrection
City:
The grassy parkland turned to trampled mud, ankle-deep, with
some puddles of water hip-deep. The plywood homes were soaked. Washed clothes
would not dry. Dampness and surprisingly low temperatures for May and June
chilled the nights. Mud seeped in everywhere. Moving from place to place meant
sloshing around in water and mud. Trash, rotting food, discarded clothing,
packing boxes, cans, and liquor bottles slowly sank into the mud throughout the
encampment. Huge oil drums, crammed with refuse, burned day and night. Their
smoky stench carried all the way downtown and through the surrounding parkland
and Mall area.45
Photo I: Resurrection City, Aerial View; Oliver Atkins
Collection, George Mason University, Folder 91, Sheet 4, Frame 22
While the participants of the PPC lived in the
muddied shantytowns of Resurrection City (RC), Reverend Abernathy stayed at the
Pitts Hotel in Washington, an upscale African American establishment. The press
often criticized Abernathy for staying at the Pitts Hotel. Even today,
Abernathy's hypocrisy resonates among Civil Rights leaders. Dr. James Farmer
recalled that during his own visit to Resurrection City, the Reverend Abernathy
"pulled up in a big Cadillac, chauffeur driven, and he didn't get out. It
was muddy out. People were ankle deep in mud, and Abernathy didn't want to
dirty his shoes."46
Yet, "Resurrection City, USA," as its
residents liked to call it, was a source of pride for many of the campaign's
impoverished participants. Resurrection City was built by a professor of
architecture and maintained a city hall, a dispensary, a dining tent, a
"Poor People's University," a cultural ("Soul Center")
tent, a psychiatrist, and even its own zip code. The grounds of the city were
sprawled out along 15 acres of West Potomac Park, running across the Reflecting
Pool to the base of the Lincoln Memorial. The parkland permit was some six
pages long and prohibited the entrance of the U.S. Park Police. The SCLC
insured that Resurrection
Photo II: General Conditions of Resurrection City, Plumbing,
Oliver Atkins Collection, Folder 91, Sheet 2, Frame 9.
City maintained its own internal policing force, which soon
gained a notorious reputation for aggressiveness among the local and national
press.47 The total number of participants traveling to Washington, D.C.
originally numbered some 3,000 people. The length of time that the participants
remained in Resurrection City varied because the city's population was of a
transitory nature. Its voluntary participants earned no wages while at the city
and many came and went in accordance with their own personal needs. While some
left the campaign within its first two weeks, others remained for the city's
full six-week duration. The estimated number of people in the encampment
throughout the city's existence ranged between 2,600 and 3,000 people. Of
course, many more poor people arrived for the June 19 "Solidarity
Day," which brought a total of 50,000 to march on Washington. Throughout
its six-week duration, the participants of RC engaged in daily demonstrations
against and discussions with various government agencies and officials. The
campaign culminated with the June 19, 1968 "Solidarity Day" march to
the Lincoln Memorial. Shortly following the "Solidarity Day" march,
however, the number remaining in Resurrection City dwindled to less than 300.
Resurrection City, USA was finally closed on the
morning of June 24, 1968 by some 1,000 policemen following two evenings of
riots, near-riots, and the release of police dogs and over 1,000 tear gas
grenades. In the end, the police arrested 175 people including Reverend
Abernathy. There were also 81 arrests for curfew violations, 60 for disorderly
conduct or drunkenness, 10 for looting, and 3 for assaulting a policeman. The
campaign's goals for the poor were never achieved and the PPC was quickly
dubbed a dismal failure, what Bill Rutherford, executive director of SCLC,
called the "Little Bighorn" of the Civil Rights movement.48 Since its
demise, historians have paid the Poor People's Campaign and Resurrection City
scant attention and its story has been largely relegated to journalists.
Labor and the Poor People's Campaign
Dr. King hoped that the Poor People's Campaign
would become a focal point for the continuation of the Negro-Labor alliance. 49
Enlisting support from the major national labor organizations proved difficult,
however, because the PPC equated domestic poverty with the U.S. war effort in
Vietnam. King understood that seeking the assistance of national labor for an
expansion of welfare and for the end of the Vietnam War was an unlikely
crusade. Despite the inherent difficulties associated with labor and the goals
of the PPC, King knew that a campaign for the poor desperately needed support
from America's labor unions. Thus, King spoke in Chicago at the National Labor
Leadership Assembly for Peace on November 27, 1967. King criticized organized
labor for its support of the war in Vietnam when "tens of thousands of
Americans" opposed it. Historian Philip Foner wrote that Dr. King then
"declared that resolutions in favor of programs designed to combat poverty
were of little value as long as labor continued to give uncritical backing to
the Administration's war policies."50
Despite organized labor's reluctance to support
King's efforts against the war, the Civil Rights leader continued to lend his
support to labor. As he was preparing for the PPC, King received and accepted
the appeal from Memphis, Tennessee to assist in a strike of 1,200 garbage
workers who were mostly African Americans. Before embarking on his final
crusade which ended in his assassination, King told the Negro American Labor
Council delegates that the African American and labor alliance must continue to
fight together for the end of the "deteriorating economic and social
condition of the Negro community . . . heavily burdened with both unemployment
and underemployment, flagrant job discrimination, and the injustice of unequal
educational opportunity."51 King ended his message with the statement,
"From the Deep South we grasp your hand in fellowship."52
The proposed PPC, however, did not establish
the "fellowship" with national labor as King had hoped. National labor
support for the PPC was mixed. The largest union, the American Federation of
Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO), rejected the PPC
while Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers supported the campaign
wholeheartedly. In December 1967, shortly following the campaign's
announcement, George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, addressed the
organization's seventh convention. "We have all heard the phony argument
that the war in Vietnam uses up so much of our resources and so strains our
national budget that the great-unfinished work of our vital domestic programs
must be cut back or set aside until the war is over," declared Meany.
"So when you hear the summer soldiers calling for retreat in the war on
poverty and human deprivation in America or in the defense of freedom in
Vietnam, don't let them tell you that we cannot afford one or the other. We can
and must bear the cost of both."53 While Meany supported the continued
economic fight against poverty, he failed to rebuke the U.S. effort in Vietnam
and, thus, the AFL-CIO never reconciled itself with the efforts of the Poor
People's Campaign. The AFL-CIO continued throughout the campaign to deny its
support even in the face of advocacy from labor's largest newspaper, The Daily
Worker. "Organized labor has a tremendous stake in the Poor People's
Campaign, and the National March of the Poor initiated by the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference," opined an editorial from the staff of
The Daily Worker. " The self-interest of the AFL-CIO and independent
unions requires all-out support of these actions."54 In rejecting the
PPC's call for a guaranteed income, one anonymously quoted "high
official" of the AFL-CIO stated in the New York Times that "support
for this kind of plan just doesn't exist and couldn't exist in a work-oriented
culture."55 The contrasting view of America as a "work-oriented
culture" versus a "welfare-orientated culture" was an additional
reason why the AFL-CIO neither publicly endorsed nor financially supported the
Poor People's Campaign.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files on
the SCLC reveal that Bill Rutherford and Stanley Levinson, both long-time
lieutenants of King, had discussed labor's tepid support of the campaign.
Apparently, the Union in Memphis-the one that King had fought for just prior to
his assassination -- refused to donate a SCLC request of $10,000 towards the
PPC. In regards to the Union's reluctance to support the campaign, the FBI
files report that, "Levinson said he would put this task before all the
Unions and threaten them that they (SCLC) will make public the fact that while
other people have been giving, the group that Martin Luther King gave his life
for, did next to nothing. Levinson said they (the Unions) should be told that they
must come up with two hundred and fifty thousand collectively."56 The vast
national support of labor that Levinson and Stanley had hoped to coerce never
arrived. As The Wall Street Journal reported, "most national unions and
the AFL-CIO avoid taking a stand on the campaign, [while] some locals offer
varied help."57
Those unions that did offer support to the campaign
included mostly small local unions and two national labor organizations. The
PPC's goal to create 2.4 million jobs over four years won support from the
United Steelworkers of America. "In a very dramatic and, I hope,
successful way, they are petitioning their elected representatives to act
favorably upon this bill," union president I.W. Abel told a senate labor
subcommittee. "To that petitioning, I join the voice of the United
Steelworkers of America."58 Walter Reuther, president of the UAW, spoke
during the PPC's "Solidarity Day" march and was an outspoken advocate
for the campaign's goals for the poor. In May, during the earliest stages of
the campaign, Reuther charged that the federal government could close "tax
loopholes" and collect nearly $21 million for programs for the poor and
the cities. Reuther, addressing the opening session of the UAW's 23rd
constitutional convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, declared that America
must develop a fiscal policy that would assist the unemployed while also
raising the wages of the lower classes. "Answers must be found either in
an income policy that bears even-handedly upon all forms of income in order to
hold down costs or in equitable tax measures," Reuther suggested.
"There is enough to raise the incomes of all poor families above the
poverty level with billions left over to cure the sickness of our
cities."59 Similarly, on June 23 Reuther urged the Secretary of
Agriculture, Orville L. Freeman, to release $500,000,000 worth of food to the
nation's poor through food stamps and an expansion of the federal school lunch
program.
Local labor organization support included the efforts
of Teamsters' Vice President Harold Gibbons who headed a committee to seek PPC
funds from the Saint Louis-area unions. Additionally, the local union of the
Washington Retail Clerks donated $400 while the Chicago-area locals of the
Packinghouse Workers Union sent two busloads of members for the
"Solidarity Day" march. There was also some strong labor support from
New York City. The State, County and Municipal Employees Union announced that
they would attempt to send a 2,000-member delegation, including nurses to staff
medical aid stations. In addition, the New York branch of the American
Federation of Teachers urged members to teach in "freedom schools"
for the participants of Resurrection City.60
Despite the local support from some labor
unions, the lack of support from the AFL-CIO, America's largest labor union,
contributed to the PPC's failure. The campaign's goal of ending the Vietnam War
for economic redistribution to the poor tended to split and polarize labor
organizations. Labor leaders like the AFL-CIO's George Meany objected to the
campaign because they continued to cling to the post-War ideals of the
"liberal consensus" -- a belief in solving economic problems through
growth rather than redistribution and a belief in American dominance in world
affairs. Thus, the PPC splintered the national labor support because of both
its economic goals of redistribution and because of its position against the
war in Vietnam.
Internal Political Representation at Resurrection City
During the initial stages of Resurrection
City's development, James Bevel, a SCLC executive staff member and leader at
RC, provided the growing crowd his explanation of how politics ought to be run
in the multi-racial/multi-ethnic city. "We will not have the kind of sick
competitive elections like white folks, where you pit brothers against brothers
and buyin' votes and schemin' and callin' that democracy," said Bevel.
"Democracy's based on intelligence and self-respect and respect for other
people. What we will do, we will let intelligence lead us."61 There were
two levels of leadership in the PPC. The first was the SCLC executive staff
staying at the Pits Hotel. The SCLC executive staff was composed of the
Reverends Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, James Bevel, and Jesse
Jackson. These men collectively determined the campaign's strategic goals and
the logistics of the "Solidarity Day" march. Although the SCLC
executive staff made the majority of decisions concerning the campaign, two
elected bodies provided a kind of grass-roots political organization in
Resurrection City.
The first of these bodies was the Poor People's
Organizing Convention. In the elections to the Poor People's Organizing
Convention, the participants were to elect those who did not "own any real
estate, stocks, bonds or other securities."62 The five different ethnic
groups at RC were equally represented as African Americans, Mexican Americans,
Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and poor whites. The Convention then allowed
each ethnic group to elect a spokesman. The five elected ethnic spokesmen were
Hank Adams for American Indians, Corneilus Givens for African Americans, Reies
Tijerina for Mexican Americans, Dionicie Paden for Puerto Ricans, and Ted
Wulpert for poor whites.
The second governing body elected by democratic means
was the "Committee of 100." The committee representatives were
popularly elected from each of the racial groups. The Appalachian activist
Miles Horton observed "it was generally agreed that it was important for
whites to be represented on all committees and in all demonstrations, and
later, at press conferences" even though Appalachian whites made up a
small part of RC.63 The inclusion of these poor, white, Appalachians is
testament to the inclusiveness of the PPC at a time when proponents of
"black power," such as CORE, were excluding white participation.
The political representation process at RC was,
however, as transitory as the involvement of its participants. Mike Clark, a
white Appalachian volunteer who attended the campaign, criticized Resurrection
City's political process as "chaotic" because
people were always moving in and out, of the campaign and
the city, so the political process in RC was always very fluid, it was complete
and total chaos. So you would have elected leaders and surrogates, people who
would stand in for them. And depending on who was around, who was sick and who
felt like going, you would have a constantly changing circle of people who
would go to those meetings when they were held, and they weren't held very
regularly.64
On the other hand, Clark also believed that the internal
grass-roots leadership allowed for more class-based involvement. Even as he
criticized the chaotic nature of the campaign, Clark still believed that the
PPC's political demonstrations were drawn along class lines. "All the
people engaged in leadership decisions, formally or informally, had the
implicit acknowledgement all the time that this was a class problem. And that
race and class were mixed in together," Clark said. "But if you're
going to talk about a solution, it had to be a solution based on an analysis of
class and not simply race."65 Buck Maggard, also an Appalachian
participant of the campaign, stated that the political process was both
democratic and inclusive in regards to race. "It was an incredibly
grass-roots effort in politics. Leaders were developed by general agreement. A
consensus," Maggard enthusiastically recalled. "The Committee planned
daily demonstrations on a real democratic basis. We had included everybody's
needs from blacks, to Indians, whites, and Mexicans."66 The
decision-making in the campaign's day-to-day demonstrations often insured that
the concerns of other ethnic peoples were aptly represented.
Mike Clark judiciously summarized both his
disappointment and his excitement about the results of the PPC with the
statement that
More often than not, the SCLC seemed to have little direct
effect on the radical education that took place. And that was probably a good
thing, for if we are to learn anything from Resurrection City it will come from
the residents and not from the SCLC staff who were often removed from the
action inside their own city. . . . The poor people's ghetto evolved a way of
life and a way of thinking which was independent of both official Washington
and SCLC. It is this experience of living together that will sow the seeds of
change in the students of Resurrection City.67
Thus, while there was disappointment among the various
minority activists concerning the PPC's failure to win significant anti-poverty
legislation, the participants were still part of a process that formed the
beginnings of a "bottom-up" coalition. Despite the campaign's
ultimate failure to produce anti-poverty legislation, it is important to note
that the PPC attempted to create a democratic, grass-roots system of political
representation as an alternative to the traditional politics of Washington,
D.C.
Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans
On March, 7, 1968, King sent Reies Tijerina,
leader of the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres (Alliance of Free City States),
a telegram inviting his participation in the PPC. "The time to clearly
present the case of poor people nationally draws near. . . May I request that
you meet with me in a closed session at the Paschals Motor Inn, Hunter Street,
Atlanta, Georgia, Thursday, March 14." 68 Tijerina's Alianza group was
less interested in wealth redistribution, however, than in land redistribution
and the collective bargaining rights for southwestern agricultural workers.
Alianza's claims originated in the 1848 Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo where they
argued that the United States had appropriated certain tracts of land in New
Mexico that by treaty belonged to the Mexican-Americans. In 1967, Tijerina lead
a raid on the Tierra Amarilla County Courthouse, New Mexico to arrest officials
that Alianza held responsible for withholding disputed land. 69 The ensuing
result was an armed conflict between Alianza and the local police, giving Tijerina
and Alianza national attention. Immediately, the press scrutinized the choice
of Tijerina to represent Mexican-Americans in the PPC. The Santa Fe New Mexican
editorial, "Tijerina: The Wrong Choice," pronounced the viewpoint
that Tijerina's involvement "seems almost certain to lessen the prospects
that the march will be a nonviolent one."70 In fairness to King, Caesar
Chavez, a Chicano leader more inclined towards non-violent tactics, was invited
to attend the campaign but could not attend due to his hunger strike as leader
of the United Farm Worker labor movement in California. The selection of
Tijerina, however, showed the SCLC's support for a movement that would
incorporate other ethnic interests besides those of African Americans.
Photo III: A-Frame shacks at Resurrection City, A Hispanic
Dwelling, Oliver Atkins Collection, George Mason University, Folder 91, Sheet
4, Frame 22
Besides Tijerina, the Mexican-American contingent was
represented by Bert Corona for California, Chris Tijerina (Reies Tijerina's
son) for New Mexico, and Rodalfo "Corky" Gonzalez for Colorado. There
were originally 1,000 Mexican-Americans who traveled from the states of
California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona to attend the PPC.71 The Puerto
Rican leaders included Grace Moore Newman and Haleong Valentine and the
American Indians were represented through various tribal chiefs and
representatives, including Till Walker and Mel Tom. There were approximately
one to two hundred Puerto Ricans in Resurrection City and a similar number of
American Indians. During the May 19, 1968 "Solidarity March," as many
as three to five thousand Puerto Ricans arrived in Washington, D.C. from the
northeastern cities of New York and Philadelphia.72 Like the African Americans
and the Appalachians, the number of Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and
American Indian participants varied throughout the course of the six-week
campaign.
The Mexican-Americans and Native Americans brought to
the campaign a different set of demands than the majority of the African
American and Puerto Rican participants. Some of the more prominent
Mexican-American demands centered on issues of culture and education. Rodolfo
"Corky" Gonzales, head of the Colorado Mexican American contingent
and leader of the Crusade for Justice, was a central figure demanding cultural
change in America's education system. As part of the Poor People's Campaign,
various demonstrations were held at several government institutions so that
they might in the words of Ralph Abernathy, "turn things upside down, and
rightside up." During a demonstration at the Office of Education, Gonzalez
issued a series of demands that asked for the withholding of "federal
funds to those school systems employing teachers, curriculum and textbooks which
distort and/or omit the history, contributions and language of the
Mexican-Americans."73 Other demands included compensation for
psychological destruction to the identity of Mexican-Americans, a completely
bi-lingual education system, and protection of cultural rights as guaranteed by
the treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. Richard Romero, of the Crusade for Justice,
explained in bitter detail the reason for the Mexican-American demands in
regards to America's education system.
We do not believe that massive amounts of money will be the
solution to the problems we now encounter -- that our people encounter in the
Southwest. We feel that there has to be a renovation of the education system,
to teach Mexican-American history and Afro-American history so that our children
can have this pride about knowing who they are. Right now, the way that
educational system is set up, not only do they deprive my children of knowing
who they are, they also deprive their children of knowing who my children are.
For example, to identify with being a Mexican-American, right now in the
Southwest, is to identify with failure. The symbol of success in the
educational system is the dollar, which is what you're taught, an Anglo figure
-- the guy with blonde hair and blue eyes -- and we're not Anglos and we're
poor, the majority of us, so therefore, our children suffer. When they go home,
they even start rejecting their own parents because they're poor. Its just this
big hang-up that they've made us out of history a failure.74
The specific Mexican American demands calling for cultural
recognition were a local and ethnic concern. Their espousal by the SCLC,
however, was part of a wider movement to make minority culture part and parcel
of a larger, and new "American" ideology.
Gonzalez also presented a more traditional list
of demands akin to the national goals of the Poor People's Campaign as
established by the SCLC. These demands centered on additional federal
expenditure for housing, education, economic opportunities, job development,
and a general redistribution of wealth through a guaranteed annual income.75
Again, demands in the campaign were purposefully listed as problems to be
solved without providing the exact legislative solution. The press often
questioned the need for the Mexican-American demands. For instance, the
Washington Post quizzically remarked that "Anglo New Mexicans can not
understand the discontent-in a state where a Spanish man can easily get a car
loan with a $3,500-a-year salary, where housing integration is a reality, where
a U.S. Senator is Spanish, a third of the State Police Spanish, half the state
government Spanish."76
The Mexican-Americans, the Indians, and some of
the Appalachians did not actually live in Resurrection City but stayed instead
at the Hawthorne School, a private experimental secondary school in southwest
D.C. Charles Fager argued that Tijerina used the Mexican-American's physical
separation at the Hawthorne School to gain "his share of the campaign
leadership and the press."77 The Hawthorne School soon came to be symbolic
of an internal split between Abernathy and Tijerina. Newspapers and political
pundits saw the physical separation of these minorities as symbolic of
inter-racial split throughout the campaign. Ernest Austin, the SCLC's organizer
for Appalachia, commented on the situation of the Hawthorne School and
acknowledged that some Appalachians were reluctant to live in the squalor of
Resurrection City.
It wasn't that they were afraid of the mud or something
because in Appalachia they live in that situation. It wasn't that they were
afraid of the blacks, it's just what they saw of Resurrection City was -- let's
face it, nothing but a city ghetto. In which you brought all the ghetto
problems in. And none of them had been used to those problems. Now while they
were poor and starving, you know a mountain cabin is a quarter mile or a mile
away from another mountain cabin -- so for the Appalachian here is a mass of
humanity packed in. And just that many people around them they'd never been in
this kind of situation before.78
In the case of Tijerina, or as Gonzalez once referred to
him, "T.V.-rina," the campaign may have sharpened racial issues
rather than closed them.
The issue of the Hawthorne School, however, is not so
easily relegated as a space of racial contention. Instead, Michael Kline, a
white Appalachian Volunteer (AV) who attended the campaign, was asked about his
experiences at Resurrection City and immediately summoned up a very different
picture of the Hawthorne School:
It was an incredible experience. It was at the Hawthorne
School... 150 people from the region were there, a substantial number of black
people were there, mostly from West Virginia, and we just slept on mattresses
at the school, and mixed it up with people from the American Indian movement,
Reies Tijerina was there, migrant workers from the South West, brown berets and
the black panthers were there. Everybody just got along remarkably. Took care
of each other. Got involved in prolonged dialogue to change the basic nature of
our society. Building coalitions with other groups. It was dynamite.79
Similarly, Michael Clark stated emphatically that "I
consider the Hawthorne School as important as what took place in Resurrection
City, mostly because it was a successful multi-ethnic community, although the
press did not know of it and gave little coverage to the school."80
Although the separation of living quarters between
African Americans and Mexican-Americans at the Hawthorne School is an example
of racial conflict rather than class solidarity, it must be remembered that in
the public arena the Mexican-Americans and the African Americans went to great
lengths to show mutual support. On May 29, 1968, Abernathy and Tijerina jointly
led a group of Native Americans to protest against the Supreme Court decision
affirming limitations on Indian fishing rights in certain rivers of Washington
State. The demonstration turned into a disaster as the participants began
banging on the Supreme Court's doors demanding entrance and then smashing some
of its windows. While the Native American demonstration failed to gain any of
its demands, the groups of Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and Native
Americans continued to work with each other in the encampment of RC. Mike
Clark, an Appalachian volunteer and PPC participant, recalled that, "Yes,
there were inter-racial problems in Resurrection City. However, many of the
problems stemmed from the egos of Abernathy and Tijerina. The relationship we
built with the Mexican-Americans, with Tijerina, continued beyond the campaign.
It had a lasting effect and we continued to work with Mexican-Americans and
others whom we had coordinated so closely with at Resurrection City."81
Despite the split between Tijerina and
Abernathy, the campaign continued its public pronouncements of racial
solidarity. For instance, Gonzalez addressed the issue of incorporating the
Mexican-American demands into the Civil Rights movement with the statement that
"The Mexican-Americans come here to be part of the Poor People's Campaign.
The issues they bring are not only poverty but such special problems as the
rights of farm workers to organize along the border and the 'green card'
system, along with freeing them of bondage to welfare."82 Reverend James
Bevel, defending the PPC's multi-racial coalition, countered that "There
are a lot of people who would like the question to remain one of race, because
they would like to keep us away from the economic issues."83 While the
campaign's class-based effort was marred by the break between Tijerina and
Abernathy, it still retained its united effort towards bringing a change in
America's socioeconomic policies.
White Appalachia
The white Appalachia participants who came to
the Poor People's Campaign publicized their own specific ethnicity while also
exemplifying how they had become marginalized by the dominant society.84 The
attendance of Appalachians at the Poor People's Campaign, perhaps more than any
other race, also highlighted the issue of class. The connection between poverty
and race brought poor white Appalachian people into the Civil Rights movement
as a previously unrecognized minority. Thus, the inclusion of poor white
southern peoples into the Poor People's Campaign is an historical exception to
sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward's assessment that
"if ever there were sectors of the working class that should have been
'the closest of allies,' as one critic complained, it was the black and white
poor. But the institutional development of the United States had determined
otherwise, as witness the history of failed efforts to produce multiracial
class-based movements."85
While popular contention maintains that the late
1960s was a moment of white working-class backlash against the Civil Rights
movement, as evidenced by George Wallace's strong showing in the 1968
presidential election, the PPC created an alternative movement for black-white
coalition. Political scientist Jody Carlson has written that the Wallace
campaign gained popularity in 1968 because it appealed to lower class,
Southern, whites who felt "powerless" to gain their share of
America's wealth. Carlson found that those who supported Wallace did so from
"a model of scarcity," believing that "there is only so much to
go around, and governmental response to civil rights demands means that one's
'share' has to be jealously guarded, as blacks are perceived as getting more
than what rightfully belongs to them."86 The Appalachians who participated
in the PPC, however, believed that America had abundant resources that could be
more adequately shared with the all of the poor, both blacks and whites.
Defining America as a place of "scarcity" or one of
"abundance" is central to the difference between the Wallace
supporters and those Appalachians who supported the PPC.
There were perhaps as many as four or five hundred
Appalachians, of which two to three hundred were white, who attended the Poor
People's Campaign.87 The Appalachian participants came primarily from
Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia and were assembled by the Appalachian
Volunteers, a federally funded Appalachian organization, and the Highlander
Center, a school and labor activist group in New Market, Tennessee. Some of the
participants were educated volunteers, labor activists, and Civil Rights
veterans-like Miles Horton, director of the Highlander Center-while others were
unemployed participants who had not been previously engaged in the Civil Rights
movement.88 Charles "Buck" Maggard, a white Appalachian organizer for
the PPC, stated that "I didn't ask the income of these people who wanted
to volunteer, I knew
Photo IV: White Applachian Family (note the shack's
pronouncement of "Soul Power!" the chosen slogan of the PPC over the
more well-known idea of "Black Power" ) Oliver Atkins Collection,
George Mason University, Folder 92, Sheet 1, Frame 18.
A white Appalachian family (10 members) standing outside a
tent which bears a banner saying "Sol! Power".
them. They were poor all right. It was difficult for them to
come, they had families to leave and weren't gettin' paid while they were
there. But they came because they believed in it."89
The Appalachian demands, unlike those of the Native
Americans or the Mexican Americans, centered on economic issues. Tom Houck, the
SCLC organizer for all of the campaign's non-African American minorities,
concluded that "for the Indians, it was basically fishing rights, land
rights, more freedom for educational rights in their reservations and tribal
councils. The Mexican Americans . . . were very interested in the land question
in the treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo (1848). . . The poor whites were interested
basically in the same things as blacks: the food question, the question of
starvation; the question of hunger."90
Appalachians who came to Resurrection City hoped that
the campaign would publicize as well as politicize the plight of America's poor
as part of a structural problem of oppression. One Appalachian group from
Kentucky met with Senator John Sherman and provided this list of broad and
radical demands:
1. Adequate jobs for the unemployed and the underemployed.
2. Welfare payments brought up to realistically defined
minimum subsistence levels with removal of qualifications that tend to be
punitive and to break up families.
3. Basic minimum income guarantees for all Americans.
4. The firm and final establishment of school desegregation
and quality of education for all Americans.
5. A massive program of building and renovation to provide
decent housing for the poor and those Americans who live on minimum, fixed
income.
6. Adequate medical and dental care for all Americans.
7. The elimination from the law enforcement and judicial
systems of whatever forms of discrimination against minority groups and poor
people now exist.91
Like most aspects of the Campaign, the Appalachian
demands were broadly defined and called for the creation of new socioeconomic
policies without enumerating specific legislative proposals. In tactics and in
general purpose the Appalachian people shared a grass-roots campaign with poor
African Americans. For instance, the Council of Southern Mountains, an activist
group for Appalachia, applauded the fact that the campaign created an economic
alliance between Appalachians and poor African Americans. The Council endorsed
the Appalachian participation in the PPC with the opinion that the economic
goals of the campaign had greater implications than the many previous efforts
of the Civil Rights movement.
For the people of Appalachia, the Poor People's Campaign
must not be seen as just another civil-rights demonstration, a march which can
be observed from a distance, criticized now and dismissed as irrelevant at some
future date. The Poor People's Campaign is far more significant: it attempts to
channel the rage and the frustration of the poor into a legitimate and
effective program of education and political action for this nation in a
non-violent way.92
The issue, however, for the poor white Appalachians
in the PPC was whether they would seek greater economic relief through a reform
of federal programs or whether they would demand an economic revolution against
the capitalist system itself. Ernest Austin, the SCLC staff member in charge of
organizing the Appalachian groups, summarized the situation as the following:
I call it political or philosophical problems here. What
constitutes the movement? There is the groups that will come in on the double
talk who will talk about restructuring the economic system of the United States
because the system itself is corrupt. These people come on like radicals. And
then there's the group of black folks might come out of Mississippi who don't
see this system as bad per se -- they see themselves locked out of it. In other
words, they can't participate in it -- and, you know, enjoy the abundance. And
here at the same time, you've got this mother with eight children. She's not
interested in tearing down this productive structure, she's interested in
getting more of her share of it. . . . And then you've got a group of middle
class whites -- who by this time are talking around trying to tell the black
folk, "Well we've been there, we've seen it and we've tasted it, and we're
telling you what you want to get into is no good." And so you have these
two forces working . . . this causes a lot of confusion.93
Like many participants of the campaign, Appalachians
were divided over the PPC's economic goals. On the one hand, Appalachians
believed that America was an overwhelmingly wealthy nation that could share its
abundance with the poor by eliminating expenditures on the Vietnam War and
through expanded federal welfare programs. On the other hand, there were those
who thought that America's entire economic system required reevaluation. These
Appalachians probably agreed with Reverend Jesse Jackson's declaration during
the campaign that "Sometime before this night is over we are going to talk
not just about jobs, but we are going to talk about capitalism itself....
People have been afraid of using the word (capitalism) because the alternative
is supposed to be communism. Whether or not that is the alternative, capitalism
is a bad system."94 The Appalachians who argued for economic reform,
however, still believed in the prospects that a "reformed" capitalism
could achieve the American utopian dream, what Warren I. Susman has called the
"culture of abundance." The PPC's battle over economic goals is an
example of Susman's theory that "the culture of abundancy and its believed
promises help explain better than any other factor why Marxian socialism did
not take deep root in the United States. Many who might have chosen the
socialist way went instead with the hope of a culture of abundance."95
Diane DiPrima's poem, "Revolutionary Letters, #19," written for the Poor
People's Campaign, expressed the campaign's contradiction between the desire to
share in America's "culture of abundance" or to revolt against it.
If what you want is jobs
for everyone, you are still the enemy,
you have not thought thru, clearly what that means.
If what you want is housing, Industry
(G.E. on the Navaho reservation)
a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator,
TV, more plumbing, scientific
Freeways, you are still
The enemy, you have chosen
To sacrifice the planet for a few years
of some science fiction utopia, if what
you want
Still is, or can be, schools
Where all our kids are pushed into one
shape, are Taught
It's better to be "American" than black
Or Indian, or Jap, or Puerto Rican, where Dick
And Jane become and are the dream, do you
Look like Dick's father, don't you think your kid
Secretly wishes you did. . . .If you still want a
piece
A small piece of suburbia, green lawn
Laid down by the square foot
Color TV, whose radiant energy
Kills brain cells, whose subliminal ads
Brainwash your children, have taken over
Your dreams. . .THEN YOU ARE STILL
THE ENEMY, you are selling
Yourself short, remember
You can have what you ask for, ask for
everything96
The PPC's internal argument between revolting against
the "culture of abundance" or buying into it through economic reform
does not detract from the fact that poor, white, Appalachian participation
contrasted with the popular notion of "white backlash." Through their
participation in the PPC, Appalachians demonstrated that they were not susceptible
to George's Wallace's "politics of the powerless." These Appalachians
believed that America's resources could be shared either through economic
"reform" or economic "revolution." Thus, the PPC's
Appalachians rejected Wallace's notion of economic scarcity and the resulting
"white backlash" against the Civil Rights movement. Although their
numbers were small, the class-based efforts of the Appalachians at the PPC
acted as a symbolic gesture to galvanize other Americans towards the campaign's
goals.
Cultural Consciousness and The Soul Center
The establishment of cross-cultural understanding and
affinity between the various minorities at Resurrection City was considered a
crucial aspect of the campaign. The establishment of a multi-cultural program
at RC manifested itself in the "Many Races Soul Center" or cultural
tent. The "Soul Center" tent stood in the middle of Resurrection City
as a cultural product of inter-racial coordination between the SCLC, the
Highlander Center, and the Smithsonian Institute. Reverend Frederick D.
Kirkpatrick and Jimmy Collier worked together with Ralph Rinzler of the
Smithsonian and Miles Horton and Guy Carawan of Highlander to establish a space
of cross-cultural exchange. According to Kirkpatrick the center was created
because the "poor people in America need to be freed from cultural
oppression, from the sense of being out of step with the American life
style."97
Some of the principal Appalachian musicians and
folklorists who performed during the campaign were Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger,
and Guy Carawan.98 Anne Romasc from New York City, who had previously taught
groups of black and southern high-school students at Highlander, was now
continuing her efforts in the Soul Tent "using the media of art, music,
literature, and dancing to develop inter-racial understanding."99 Sessions
were often held on Appalachian work songs, black spirituals and similar work
songs, Gospel, blues, country, traditional Mexican American songs, and Indian
chants as well as folk stories. For example, on the evening of May 29th various
ethnic groups got together in the "Soul Center" tent where there was
a symphony of "harmonicas, trumpets, guitars, drums of different makes and
kinds-including a barrel and a tin can, and a whiskey bottle that became a
musical instrument akin to a triangle. A group of Indians sang songs of their
solidarity with all the Poor People."100 Bernice Reagon, a leading African
American folk singer, "soon had Tent City singing and shouting, rocking
and clapping to the beat of old spirituals, the original freedom songs whose
lyrics she referred to not as 'negro dialect' but as 'Afro-American
language.'"101 Reagon recalled that while performing at the "Soul
Center" she experienced her earliest moments of inter-racial cultural exchange:
I remember Kirkpatrick coming afterwards, and saying we are
going to sing "This Land is Your Land" by Woodie Guthrie, and we can
sing this because Chief Crow Dog says it's all right. And for me it was a very
interesting exercise not in simply putting people together but in one of my
earliest watchings of a cultural program where I saw musicians relating and
shifting their material because they were acknowledging the relationship
between who they were and who somebody else was.102
In addition to musical entertainment and cultural
exchange programs, both the "Soul Center" tent and the "Poor
People's University" established multi-racial education courses. The
educational workshops conducted during the campaign focused on problems of
inter-racial division, specific problems of various ethnic or racial groups,
demoralizing and "violent" effects of poverty, and ways to ultimately
overcome these problems through integration, non-violence, and class-based
solidarity. The University's seminars were held at the Highlander's "Soul
Center" and through Washington, D.C.'s academic consortium of Catholic
University, Howard University, American University, George Washington
University, and Georgetown University. Stoney Cooks, the SCLC staff member who
created, organized, and implemented the "Poor People's University,"
summarized its educational activities with the enthusiastic comment that
"we staged about twenty-five successful lecture series, you know, in the
city. We had about 13 lecture series at George Washington campus, and we had
two at Howard University's campus; ranging from people like Michael Harrington
(author of The Other America), I.F. Stone, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Denning, you
know, just a wide range of people."103 Thus, the multi-cultural programs
of the "Soul Center" tent and the multi-racial educational programs
of the "Poor People's University" acted as a class-based,
multicultural, educational opportunity for the social activists of the Poor
People's Campaign.
The March's Legislative Objectives: Reform or Revolution?
The Poor People's Campaign presented a multitude of
demands from local interests and specific ethnic concerns to arguments for all
encompassing welfare policies. According to press accounts, these broad demands
caused confusion over the campaign's ends. The SCLC's Statements of Demands for
Rights of the Poor, dated April 29-30 and May 1, 1968 stipulated the campaign's
demands in broad terms.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, architects of
the Poor People's Campaign, have outlined 5 requirements of the bill of
economic & social rights that will set poverty on the road to extinction:
1.A meaningful job at a living wage for every employable
citizen.
2. A secure and adequate income for all who cannot find jobs
or for whom employment is inappropriate.
3. Access to land as a means to income and livelihood.
4. Access to capital as a means of full participation in the
economic life of America.
5. Recognition by law of the right of people affected by
government programs to play a truly significant role in determining how they
are designed and carried out.104
The demands were addressed to the Departments of
Agriculture, Justice, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Health, Education
& Welfare, State, and Interior and the Office of Economic Opportunity, and
the Senate Sub-Committee on Employment. On the surface, the diffuse demands of
the Campaign may seem incongruous with previous Civil Rights tactics. This, of
course, was by design. During an interview with Andrew Young, executive vice
president of SCLC, the journalist Jose Yglesias wrote that
The reasons for not presenting detailed legislation are
tactical. They believe that if the campaign is tied to specific bills they may,
in Andy Young's words, be building failure. Their job is to mount a massive,
militant demonstration of poor people's needs-the wiping out of slums, the
creation of jobs, through government spending on, say, the rebuilding of
cities, immediate guaranteed incomes, the extension of medical services and
quality education for everyone; in effect, to spend the annual $70-billion
allotted 'for war' to insure that the poor break out of the cycle of poverty
and discrimination they believe the system now imposes on them. Finding legislative
solutions is the job of the Administration and Congress.105
While Abernathy and the SCLC executive staff were attempting
to organize a class-based campaign for economic redistribution, they still
recognized that their planned "Solidarity Day" march required the
backing of the traditional Civil Rights white, liberal, middle-class
constituency. When asked by the press about the role of the white,
middle-class, liberals, Abernathy responded "We have not at all changed
our strategy. We know that we must have the backing and the support of the
white majority in our country because we make up a small minority --
approximately 11 percent -- of the population of this country. As black people,
as poor people, at best we would only make up one-fifth of the population. So
we have to rely on a strong reservoir of goodwill in the white
community."106
To ensure the support of the affluent whites,
Abernathy appointed Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the 1963 Civil Rights
march, to organize and prepare the poor for the "Solidarity Day"
march. The press applauded the appointment of Rustin because they believed, in
the words of the Washington Post, that he represented the "old-line,
respectable, highly organized, labor, church and academic liberalism."107
Although Abernathy had originally rejected Rustin for the organizing role, he
realized by late May that he needed Rustin's organizational ability as well as
his connection to liberal, middle-class, whites and labor. Rustin was appointed
to the position on May 25 and he wasted no time in delaying "Solidarity
Day" from the Memorial Day weekend to June 19th. More importantly,
however, he issued the pragmatic "Call to Americans of Goodwill,"
which contained an "Economic Bill of Rights" that stipulated the
specific legislative goals of the campaign. These goals were:
1. Recommit the Federal Government to the Full Employment
Act of 1946 and legislate the immediate creation of at least one million
socially useful career jobs in public service;
2. Adopt the pending housing and urban development act of
1968;
3. Repeal the 90th Congress's punitive welfare restrictions
in the 1967 Social Security Act. . .;
4. Extend to all farm workers the right -- guaranteed under
the National Labor Relations Act &mdash to organize agricultural labor
unions;
5. Restore budget cuts for bilingual education, Head Start,
summer jobs, Economic Opportunity Act, Elementary and Secondary Education
Acts.108
Furthermore, Rustin pragmatically stated in his
text that, "We recognize that this economic bill of rights cannot be
adopted overnight. And we are not blind to the conservative mood of the present
Congress."109 The press immediately applauded Rustin's specific
legislative goals of reform. The Washington Post stated "Mr. Rustin's
enumeration of specific goals gives the campaign a focus, the lack of which has
made its purposes quixotic and unrealizable. . . These demands, as Mr. Rustin
recognizes, are not realizable overnight. The essential thing is that a good
faith constructive start be made toward realization of them."110
Despite their appeal to the press, Rustin's
remarks went against Abernathy's declaration that "When it comes to
specific legislation, this is not our job. If the leaders of this country have
enough sense to put a man on the moon, they have enough sense to put an end to
poverty in this country."111 Thus, the day following Rustin's public
release of the "Economic Bill of Rights," Hosea Williams, an
executive member of the SCLC staff and political director of PPC's "direct
action" demonstrations, called the pronouncement "a bunch of
foolishness" and "unauthorized." By June 7, Rustin resigned from
the march stating that "I know from long experience that large numbers of
people cannot be enlisted in such a mobilization unless they clearly understand
its aims, objectives and tactics."112
The press widely reported that members of the
SCLC executive staff were infuriated by Rustin's refusal to equate the war in
Vietnam with the plight of the poor. Additionally, the SCLC, as reported by the
press, criticized Rustin for his specific and "limited" goals and the
allowance to Congress that those goals might not be immediately obtainable.
Anti-war members, student groups, and more militant members of the PPC saw
Rustin as "a sellout to the white liberal Establishment."113 The New
York Times reported that one "informed official" aptly stated that
Rustin's specific and limited legislative goals forced the Poor People's
Campaign "to choose between mere reform with the system, as represented by
Rustin, and real revolutionary change, as demanded by his people. It was really
no choice because he can't lay down the law to them. The campaign is run by a
real democracy."114 Rustin's goals symbolized the "reform" philosophy
of the Civil Rights movement. The Poor People's Campaign, however, was an
amalgamation of militant radicalism and traditional integrationist tactics. The
product that came from these strains was a class-based ideal that demanded a
multi-racial coalition for revolutionary change in America's socioeconomic
policies.
Figure 2: Chicago Defender Cartoon
In response to Rustin's untimely departure from
the campaign, the liberal press angrily assaulted the PPC and its future. The
Washington Post issued an editorial on June 10 entitled "Get it
Together!" in which it assailed the removal of Rustin and his specific
legislative goals:
When Hosea Williams, the campaign chief of direct action,
commented the other day on the fine proposals of Bayard Rustin-proposals that
might have taken the Campaign out of the doldrums-Mr. Williams called them
'completely out of order.' Now Mr. Rustin has resigned as coordinator of the
June 19 "Solidarity Day" march and while this will deal the Campaign
a serious blow, he can hardly be blamed. For the man who was out of order was
Mr. Williams, with his intemperate remarks.115
The New York Times also issued a chilling editorial that
presciently commented that "the SCLC militants' mistrust of 'Rustinism'
forced their leader to drop his most important link to middle-class liberalism.
It was a fateful decision."116 Furthermore, the Chicago Defender printed
an intriguing cartoon that equated the PPC with the American war in Vietnam.
The cartoon depicted a confused and bedazzled "Uncle Sam" flanked by
Abernathy's seemingly never ending "Poor People's Demands" and North
Vietnam's equally long "Hanoi Demands." The cartoon demonstrated the
feeling among some of America's middle class that the PPC and North Vietnam
were equal enemies of America; that the two forces were assaulting the nation's
values both aboard and at home. After only one week of the city's existence,
the New York Times questioned the relevancy of the Campaign for white, middle
class Americans:
The more troublesome question is simply, 'Why?' Perhaps it
is only the reluctance or inability of the white middle class to comprehend a
life so radically different from its own, or to credit the anger and
frustration pent up in the poor, particularly the black poor; but even conceding
that, it is hard to see a rational explanation for Resurrection City. . .
Resurrection City does not seem necessary or even symbolic. . . That, at least,
is the way it appears to the middle class mind.117
Solidarity Day
Abernathy appointed Sterling Tucker, director
of the Washington Urban League, as Rustin's replacement. Following Tucker's
appointment, new legislative goals were developed in the face of increasing
congressional and national criticism of the Poor People's Campaign. On June 13,
Tucker hurriedly issued a list of 49 demands of which 22 were considered so
essential that the SCLC would end Resurrection City if the key demands were
met. The 22 key demands were made up of 19 administrative and three legislative
items. The administrative demands focused on Federal food programs, job
programs, education, health services, and welfare benefits to the poor. The
three legislative demands included the passage of a bill to create 2.4 million
jobs over a four-year period, provided $5.5 billion towards new housing, and
repeal the new welfare amendments that would freeze Federal welfare
contributions at the January 1, 1968 level. While Tucker's new legislative
goals were more ambitious than Rustin's "Bill of Economic Rights,"
they were signs of desperation among the leaders of the Poor People's Campaign.
Dr. King's planned goal of class-based
confrontation to force economic change was all but abandoned by the arrival of
"Solidarity Day." It was widely understood that in order for the
march to be a success, it had to incorporate the white, liberal, middle class
remnants of the 1963 march. The goal of changing the capitalist system of
America was incompatible with "American" values. Therefore, by
mid-June the PPC demanded reform, not revolution.
Once the SCLC had reduced its goals from
"revolution" to "reform," they finally earned the respect
of the liberal press. In the editorial "The Goals for The Poor," the
Washington Post wrote that the new demands "they (SCLC) seek are not pie
in the sky but food in the belly, and an end to discrimination."118
Similarly, the New York Times happily declared that "For a crusade that
began and then nearly floundered on great moral imperatives -- the injustice of
a government that spends more money planning commuter highways for well-fed
surbanites than on the distribution of surplus hominy grits for hungry black
children -- last week's decisions smacked remarkably of practical
politics."119 In a cheerful exultation over the diminished demands, the
Washington Post remarked triumphantly that "The demands of the poor, as
now formulated, are neither fanciful nor exorbitant. They reflect, almost
without exception, goals already enunciated by the President and seriously
contemplated by the Congress. Really, what the poor seek is redemption of
promises and an enlargement of opportunity. There is nothing at all
unreasonable or un-American about that."120
On June 19, 1968 the Poor People's Campaign
averted a total disaster for the "Solidarity Day" march as an estimated
50,000 people marched on the Capitol. The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, one of
several prominent speakers on "Solidarity Day" stood beneath the
Lincoln Memorial and emphatically stipulated the march's philosophy as he
declared that,
Whereas we stand in the shadows of Lincoln the Emancipator
who freed us into capitalism without capital. Whereas we stand in a land of
surplus food with 10 million starving citizens, and whereas the soil bank has
become Holy Land. . . the land on which some men swim in wealth while others
drown in tears from broken promises, destroyed dreams and blasted hopes. . .
For the life we live and the life we love we vow to fight for a new sensitive
and sensible economic order in that all men need a job or an income if they are
to have human dignity; all men deserve a job or an income for it is not alone
by men's work but by God's grace that America is so fertile and rich; And
America can afford a job or an income for all men if she has the will to put
healing programs over killing programs.121
The efforts of "Solidarity Day" equated the U.S.
war in Vietnam with issues of race and poverty that culminated in what became
the second and final major Civil Rights march on Washington, D.C.
The participants of the march, however, found that
"Solidarity Day" was profoundly different than the 1963 Civil Rights
march. The New York Times compared the 1963 and 1968 marches and concluded
that, "In tone, the 1963 march was kind of a
Photo V: The Reverend Jesse Jackson at Resurrection City,
Oliver Atkins Collection, George Mason University, Folder 91, Sheet 2, Frame 4.
mass love-in, church social, county fair and civil rights
demonstration. . . Today's crowd was more intense. It conveyed a greater sense
of cool anger and militancy."122 Time Magazine sadly reported that
The 1963 demonstration was suffused with the hope that the
last vestiges of legal segregation would soon disappear. Most indeed did, but
that did not prove enough; laws aside, the reality of discrimination and
poverty remained. The 1968 rally was motivated by disillusionment and despair.
In five years, a mood of aspiration had changed, among many, to one of
apocalypse.123
Similarly, Luther Jackson, an official of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wryly
remarked that "you can almost tell by the clothes. Five years ago the
thing was almost solidly middle-class, and even the poor dressed in their
Sunday best. Yet the country has failed to change, and there is disenchantment
which affects them in so many ways."124
Besides the one-day spectacle of the Solidarity Day
march, the additional plans for the PPC never came to fruition. The PPC's
planned second phase of mass arrests never occurred and the third phase, the
national economic boycott, was abandoned. Dr. King's idea of economic
confrontation to end the Vietnam War and reallocate America's expenditures
towards a "real war on poverty" were considered too radical a concept
to enlist the support of America's white, middle-class, liberals.
Black Capitalism and the Poor People's Campaign
While the poor were mired in mud at
Resurrection City attempting to make their private plight a public one, Richard
M. Nixon, a Republican presidential candidate, was preparing his own answer to
the Poor People's Campaign. In a radio address in April of 1968, Nixon stated
that "Integration must come-but in order for it to come on a sound and
equal basis, the black community has to be built from within even as the old
barriers between black and white are dismantled from without."125 His
radio address rejected SCLC's call for welfare programs and government
intervention for the poor. Instead, he developed a political pitch that asked
African Americans to help themselves by establishing their own businesses. As
The Wall Street Journal correctly summarized, Nixon placed "primary
emphasis on helping poor black people help themselves where they now are,
living together in the urban and rural slums of America. Integration of the
black population, except for the relatively small middle class, will be left
for another time."126 Nixon's call was for a new alliance with the portion
of the black population that "disavows any debt to the Democratic Party.
Because of this, the [forthcoming] Nixon years could see the development of a
most unusual alliance-between a Republican Administration that is not trusted
by most blacks and a black militant leadership that is not trusted by most
whites."127
On May 16, 1968, Nixon refined his ideas on
this "unusual alliance" when he delivered the speech "A New
Alignment for American Unity." In the speech, Nixon discussed a "new
majority" that included the motley combination of traditional Republicans,
the Moynihan-Goodwin liberals, the progressive South, and black militants.
Nixon believed that this "new majority is not a grouping of power blocs,
but an alliance of ideas. . . many of these men and women belong to the same
blocs that formed the old coalitions. But now, thinking independently, they
have all reached a new conclusion about the direction of our nation."128
Nixon's call for a "new majority" was an allure to the adherents of
"black power" while it also was a public rebuke of the Poor People's
Campaign. Nixon explained his notions of "black capitalism" during
his April 14 radio address:
Black extremists are guaranteed headlines when they shout
"burn" or "get a gun." But much of the black militant talk
these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise
than to those of the welfarist '30s-terms of "pride,"
"ownership," "private enterprise," "capital,"
"self-assurance," "self-respect,"-the same qualities, the
same characteristics, the same ideals, the same methods, that for two centuries
have been at the heart of American success, and that America has been exporting
to the world. What most of the militants are asking is not separation, but to
be included in-not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs-to have a
share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the
central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be orientated
toward more black ownership, for from this can flow the rest -black pride,
black jobs, black opportunity and yes, black power, in the best, the most
constructive sense of that often misapplied term.129
Seeing the stark choice between "black power" and
the goals of the Poor People's Campaign, Bayard Rustin aggressively took on the
ideas of "black capitalism." While addressing members of the AFL-CIO
in his attempt to gain labor's support for the PPC, Rustin commented in the
Federationist, the AFL-CIO's primary publication, that in regards to
"black power:"
I detect powerful elements of conservatism. Leaving aside
those extremists who call for violent 'revolution,' the Black Power movement
embraces a diversity of groups and ideologies. It contains a strong impulse
toward withdrawal from social struggle and action, a retreat back into the
ghetto, avoidance of contact with the white world... This brand of black power
has much in common with the conservative white America's view of the Negro. It
stresses self-help ('why don't those Negroes pull themselves up by their
bootstraps like my ancestors did?'). It identifies the Negro's main problems in
psychological terms, calls upon him to develop greater self-respect and dignity
by studying Negro history and culture and by building independent institutions.
. . Above all, in my opinion, these deficiencies result from systematic
exclusion of the Negro from the economic mainstream. This exclusion cannot be
reversed-but only perpetuated-by gilding the ghettos. A 'separate but equal'
economy for black Americans is impossible.130
Nixon's call for "black capitalism" did not
address black power's demand for political control as well as economic power,
but it did garner support among some of the black militant leadership. By the
summer of 1968, Mr. Roy Innis had assumed the national director's duties of the
Congress of Racial of Equality (CORE). Innis had pledged that CORE would create
"black ownership of capital instruments" to create "a nation
within a nation."131 In regards to Nixon's political appeal for
"black capitalism," Mr. Innis responded that "the key question
is whether Mr. Nixon continues to float pie-in-the-sky dreamy ideas, like
integration, that are unrealistic, or whether he moves straightforward toward a
redistribution of power that places more control of black communities in the
hands of blacks. This latter course will be the most important thing he can do
to defuse the ghetto."132 As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the
similarities between Nixon and Innis extended to actual legislative policies.
During the course of the Poor People's Campaign, Mr. Innis and "a
bipartisan group of Congressman including conservatives and liberals"
introduced into Congress the "Community Self-Determination Act." The
essence of the bill was the creation of a Community Development Corporation
(CDC) by the residents of poor neighborhoods. The CDC would own and manage
subsidiary businesses in the community, receiving its credit from a new
national system of community development banks, owned by the CDCs and patterned
after the National Land Bank Associations that help provide farm credit. The
act also contained incentives to encourage private companies to enter into
business in the mostly black ghetto communities.
While the "Community Self-Determination
Act" was never passed in Congress, it served as an example of political
coupling between white conservatives and black radicals. Although the Poor
People's Campaign offered government assistance in the form of new
socioeconomic policies, "black capitalism" seemingly offered time
honored American practices of self-help entrepreneurship. The proposed union between
the ideals of "black power" and "black capitalism" was
largely an unsuccessful political lure for the Nixon campaign, it did, however,
represent an opportunity for increased fractionalization within the Civil
Rights movement. When the PPC failed to gain the support that the SCLC expected
from white, middle-class, liberals it indicated to the African American
community that King's "dream" of integration had failed. Nixon seized
on this idea and further opened the gap between black and white by offering
African Americans the separate, but equal, economic notions of "black
capitalism." Ultimately, the failure of whites to fully support the PPC
weakened SCLC's position and allowed for greater polarization and confusion
among Civil Rights leaders. The SCLC, adrift without King and further weakened
by the failure of the PPC, ultimately lost its legitimacy as the forefront
Civil Rights organization. Thus, the failure of the PPC contributed to the
overall demise of the Civil Rights movement.
Conclusion
On June 24, 1968, Michael Clark jotted down his last
thoughts on the Poor People's Campaign as the police closed Resurrection City
forever:
Resurrection City was a small place and a very human one. No
one seems to know for sure how many people lived there the past month and a
half-It has also had problems all out of proportion with its size. Its citizens
were poor people. They had few illusions about their past, or their future.
Most were unaccustomed to governing themselves. They had been pushed around for
years, and sometimes tempers exploded, sometimes they reacted with violence.
They came from California, Chicago, Mississippi, Florida, New York, New Mexico,
Kentucky-from all over the nation-and most came with a common feeling of
frustration. But for many, these muddy sheets and plywood shanties were home.
It was here that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I
have a Dream" speech five years ago.... But there was a marked difference
between the march last week and the one five years ago. The first march in 1963
and also the Selma-Montgomery March in 1965 contained a strong current of hope
and trust.... The marchers believed that the American Dream was only a step
away from realization -- that once the evils of racial prejudice were exposed
this country would respond to eliminate them.... All that is gone now. The
evils were exposed and little was done. The march last week was born, not out
of hope, but out of frustration and desperation. These were different demands
-- for decent jobs, good schools, and a meaningful way of life. The marchers
this time had a different purpose. They were ready to say they had been
short-changed. They had not received their share of the American Dream.133
The PPC offered two visions for America's future. The
first was centered on economic reform and it was best represented by Bayard
Rustin and the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. The assassination of
Robert Kennedy in the midst of the campaign went a long way towards weakening
the reformist position within SCLC. As Andrew Young emotionally recalled, the
death of King followed by Kennedy's assassination had taken its toll.
So we didn't have time to grieve [for King], we didn't have
time to even miss Martin Luther King. We had to go on with his work. And so we
pushed ourselves even though we were probably all emotionally and internally on
the verge of exploding. And we pushed ourselves right on through the early days
of the Poor People's Campaign. But then on the sixth of June, right after
Martin's death on the fourth of April, Robert Kennedy's assassination just
brought everything to a halt, and I think we began to grieve for Martin in the
context of Bobby Kennedy's assassination because Bobby Kennedy had been with us
in Atlanta at Martin's funeral. And many of us began to see in him a hope for
the future. We kind of transferred a little of our loyalty, a little of our
trust, and a little of our hope to him, and now he was gone too.
In the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination and in the face
of growing black militancy, the Poor People's Campaign ultimately chose a
revolutionary vision for America that demanded the complete overhaul of the
America's capitalist system. Despite the revolutionary attempt at a class-based
movement for the poor, the SCLC leadership was forced to acknowledge that the
PPC failed to create an outpouring of sympathy from white liberals in the hopes
of politicizing the middle class against the government's spending priorities.
Bill Rutherford, executive director of SCLC, summarized the feelings of
frustration and abandonment felt by many Civil Rights leaders in the aftermath
of the Poor People's Campaign:
We had anticipated a reaction on the part of the American
public under the impact of publicity that we had hoped to generate, that would
have helped achieve the goal in focusing attention on the plight of the poor in
America. And within two or three weeks after the demonstrations at the
Department of Justice, at the FBI Building, at the Department of Agriculture,
and so on, it became more and more clear that this was not happening, it was
not about to happen. In fact, I would say that the culmination of the Poor
People's Campaign, which left thrawted and frustrated the hundreds and thousands
of people who come from all parts of the country, who had no homes to go to,
who were deeply buried in poverty and who remained buried in poverty despite
the Poor People's Campaign, and were left completely stranded -- they were the
survivors of what could be described as the Little Bighorn of the civil rights
movement.134
After the six-week debacle for the PPC, it was clear
that white, middle-class, liberal Americans would only engage in the Civil
Rights movement when it clung to "American" ideals. In other words,
the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s succeded because it fought racial
inequality as part of a regional and political -- not national and economic --
problem. The Poor People's Campaign, however, questioned America's capitalist
system and was thus seen as economically akin to revolution. Therefore, the PPC
garnered little support from the white, middle-class, liberals who could
concede concrete legislative reforms for the poor but not outright change of
the economic system for all Americans. Therefore, the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the apathy of the middle class, the
terrible weather conditions, the failure to produce anti-poverty legislation,
and the inherent difficulty of managing a city of the impoverished caused the
Poor People's Campaign to end ignominiously. When the revolutionary call for a
class-based confrontation failed to garner support among the traditional Civil
Rights' constituency, the Poor People's Campaign was doomed to failure and along
with it the last vestige of Dr. Martin Luther King's "dream."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] New York Times, May 2, 1968, p. 30.
[2] Both the press and the SCLC executive staff criticized
Dr. Abernathy. The FBI files show that even before the PPC, his leadership was
often criticized by Andrew Young, executive vice president of SCLC, Correta
King, Bill Rutherford (SCLC's executive director), and SCLC senior staffer
Stanley Levinson. FBI SCLC Files 2152-2156, May 1968.
[3] Steven F. Lawson's historiographical article on Civil
Rights historical scholarship mentions the Poor People's Campaign in passing
but provides no real insight into its impact and, furthermore, provides no
additional source material on the subject. For a historiographical account of
the Civil Rights movement please see, Steven F. Lawson, "Freedom Then,
Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights movement," American
Historical Review, 96 (April 1991), 456-471. There are two narrative accounts
of the Poor People's Campaign and Resurrection City. The first account, Charles
Fager's Uncertain Resurrection: The Poor People's Washington Campaign is the
most detailed treatment of Resurrection City available. Fager concludes that
the Poor People's Campaign failed because of leadership problems and overall
tactics. Although his prediction has not come true that, "No doubt the
moldy cadaver will eventually be exhumed and exhaustively dissected by a corps
of Ph.D. candidates, and its inner secrets will be exposed." (Fager, p. 8)
The second narrative account of the Poor People's Campaign can be found in
Gerald McKnight's The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the
Poor People's Campaign. McKnight concludes that "lawless elements of the
American surveillance state, especially the FBI, played a major role in the
campaign's bafflement and undoing." Gerald McKnight, The Last Crusade:
Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People's Campaign (Boulder,
Colorado: WestView Press, 1998). For additional narrative accounts of the Poor
People's Campaign please see, Ben W. Gilbert and the Staff of The Washington
Post, Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots, p.
195-207; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1987),
p. 357-384; Charles Hunter, "On the Case in Resurrection City",
Trans-Action magazine article reprinted in August Meir, The Transformation of
Activism (Aldine Publishing Company, 1970), p. 5-29; and, Jose Yglesias,
"Dr. King's March on Washington," New York Times Magazine article
reprinted in August Meir, John Bracey Jr., and Elliot Rudwick, eds. Black
Protest in the Sixties, (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, Inc., 1991), p.
277.
[4] Charles Fager, Uncertain Resurrection: The Poor People's
Washington Campaign (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Erdmans Publishing
Company, 1969), p. 28-29.
[5] Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II
to Nixon What Happened and Why (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 89. For a
full discussion of Hodgson's views on the philosophy of the "liberal
consensus" see, Hodgson, "The Ideology of the Liberal
Consensus," America in our Time, p. 67-98.
[6] Ibid, p. 179.
[7] Manning Marable, Black American Politics: From The
Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (London: Verso, 1985), p. vii.
[8] Stokely Carmichael quoted in Hodgson, America in Our
Time, p. 192.
[9] Scott Sandage, "A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln
Memorial, the Civil Rights movement, and the Politics of Memory,
1939-1963," The Journal of American History, June 1993, pp. 135-167.
[10] Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The
Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1978), pp. 23-25; Young quoted in James Forman,
The Making of a Black Revolutionary (New York: Macmillian, 1972), p. 309.
[11] Young and Wilkins, quoted in, Henry Hampton and Steve
Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights movement
from the 1950s Through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 339.
[12] David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King
Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William
Morrow, 1986), pp. 539-540.
[13] Stokely Carmichael, oral history interview, Hampton and
Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom, p. 347.
[14] Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
"Statement by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President," December 4,
1967, The King Archives, Box 178, File 33; New York Times, December 5, 1967, p.
1 and 32.
[15] The President's Commission on Civil Disorder issued the
report with the historic assessment that America was developing two nations,
"one white, the other black." Dr. Martin Luther King, Look, April,
1968.
[16] Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), "What We
Want," 1966 as reprinted in Civil Rights and the Black American: A
Documentary History, edited by Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zanagrando
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), p. 602.
[17] New York Times, editorial "The Responsibility of
Dissent," December 6, 1967, p. 46.
[18] Jack Nelson, Los Angeles Times News Service, as printed
in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, June 10, 1968, 2-A.
[19] The Washingtonian, February, 1968, p. 53.
[20] Ibid.
[21] New York Times Magazine, March 31, 1967.
[22] Newsweek, May 6, 1968, p. 30.
[23] While King often referred to the "$70-billion it
(the U.S.) spends annually for war," the actual $70 billion represented
the total defense outlay for 1967, with approximately $20.5 billion spent on
the war in Vietnam. Department of Defense Authorization Bill, 1968; Jose
Yglesias, New York Times Magazine, March 31, 1967.
[24] Richard Glenn Lenta details King's leftward movement in
the last two years of his life. See, Richard Glen Lentz, Resurrecting the
Prophet: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the News Magazines, (Phd dissertation,
University of Iowa, 1983).
[25] Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted by Jose Yglesias, New
York Times Magazine, March 31, 1967.
[26] Knoxville Journal, "Marchers Run Into
Problems," May 4, 1968, p. 1.
[27] Reverend Hosea Williams, interview with the author,
April 16, 1998.
[28] Marian Wright Edelman, oral history interview, Hamilton
and Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom, pp. 451-452.
[29] In early 1965, King had also made preparations for a
nation-wide boycott of Mississippi products but relented and did away with the
plan at the last minute. Fager, p. 18.
[30] Michael Harrington, oral history interview, Hampton and
Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom, p. 458.
[31] Milton Viorst, The Washingtonian, February, 1968, p.
53.
[32] The King Center, Atlanta, Georgia maintains thousands
of applicant forms for the PPC. The applicants' race was not given on the form
but the last names of many of the applicants might have given some indication
of their race. Unfortunately, not every applicant completely filled out the
forms, thus information on where the participants came from and who they were
was not always available. King Center, Box 180 and 181. Mrs. Mahalia Keys
application was in Box 180, file 21.
[33] Washington Post, "What Brings Poor People to the
Capital?," May 24, 1968, A14.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Charles "Buck" Maggard, interview with the
author, December 9, 1997.
[36] The Washington Post, "West's Poor: A Proud
People," May 28, 1968, B1.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid, May 24, 1968, A14.
[39] Ibid, April 23, 1968.
[40] Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Doreen Roy, "Is
Poverty March Worthwhile?," May 25, 1968.
[41] Washington Post, June 10, 1968, A7.
[42] Newsweek, "What can you do for us?," June 3,
1968, p. 22.
[43] The Evening Star, Richard Wilson, May 1, 1968.
[44] James Farmer, while on speaking engagements, stopped by
Resurrection City. His assessment of failure does not stand alone. Most
journalists of the time agreed, as does the Poor People's Campaign principal
monograph by Charles Fager. In his conclusion, Fager lamented that, "The
Campaign had no momentum; it had failed both as a moral crusade and as
entertainment." Fager, p. 124; Dr. James Farmer interview with the author,
November 1, 1997.
[45] Ben W. Gilbert, Ten Blocks from the White House:
Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger
Publishers, 1969), p. 198.
[46] Dr. James Farmer, interview with the author, November
1, 1997.
[47] These self-proclaimed and self-organized policing
groups were widely viewed by the press as instruments that, "sometimes
disturbed as well as kept order." Gilbert, p. 199. Writing in the Evening
Star, Mary McGory wrote the headline "Oppressed are Oppressing" and
went on to say of these self-policing activities that "The young marshals,
some of whom probably have shouted themselves horse over police brutality, were
pushing people around in the style to which they have become accustomed. Their
orders were numerous and arbitrary. They shouted 'make way,' joined hands,
shoved organizers, sympathizers and curious indiscriminately, intervened
swiftly in any dialogue between poor and press." As quoted in Fager, p.
37.
[48] William Rutherford, oral history interview, Hampton and
Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom, p. 480.
[49] For an overview of the Negro-Labor alliance please see,
Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Work: 1619-1973 (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1974), pp. 332-335.
[50] Ibid, p. 377.
[51] Ibid.
[52] The Worker, June 26, 1968.
[53] George Meany, Federationist, "Labor: The Main
Force for Progress," January 1968, p. 3.
[54] The Worker, "AFL-CIO and The March," April
28, 1968, p. 3.
[55] New York Times, May 28, 1968, p. 23.
[56] FBI SCLC File 2160, May 6, 1968.
[57] The Wall Street Journal, May 14, 1968, p. 1.
[58] Wheeling West Virginia Intelligencer, May 16, 1968, p.
33.
[59] The Nashville Tennessean, May 5, 1968, p. 14-A.
[60] The Wall Street Journal, May 14, 1968, p. 1.
[61] James Bevel, quoted in Fager, p. 41.
[62] Highlander Library, Records Group (RG) 3, Series II,
Box 2, File Folder (FF) 22.
[63] The Highlander Collection, State Historical Society,
Madison, Wisconsin. "Poor People's Cultural Work Shop," Box 109,
Folder 10.
[64] Mike Clark, interview with the author, November 26,
1997.
[65] Ibid.
[66] Buck Maggard, interview with the author, December 10,
1997.
[67] The Highlander Collection, The State Historical
Society, Madison, Wisconsin, Mike Clark to Charles Fager, December 13, 1968,
Box 105, Folder 12.
[68] The King Center Archives, Acc. No1., Subgroup E, Series
VIII, Ss 1, Box 177.6.
[69] For detailed narratives of the Tijerina's activities in
New Mexico, please see Patricia Bell Blawis, Tijerina and the Land Grants:
Mexican-Americans in Struggle for Their Heritage, (New York: International
Publishers, 1971); Richard Gardner, Grito!, Reies Tijerina and the New Mexico
Land Grant War of 1967 (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1970); and,
Peter Nabokov, Tijerina and the Land Grant War (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1969).
[70] The Santa Fe New Mexican, April 26, 1968.
[71] The Mexican-American representatives and their numbers
were given in a SCLC memorandum to Dr. William A. Rutherford from Thomas E.
Houck, Jr. dated April 20, 1968. King Center Archives, SCLC papers, Box 177.20.
[72] Thomas E. Houck, oral history interview, Ralph Bunche
Oral History Collection, Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University,
Washington, D.C.
[73] The King Center Archives, SCLC Papers, Box 179.10.
[74] Richard Romero, oral history interview, Ralph Bunche
Oral History Collection, Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University,
Washington, D.C.
[75] Crusade for Justice, Denver, Colorado "Demands of
the Indio-Hispano to the Federal Government," King Center Archives, Box
179.9.
[76] The Washington Post, June 4, 1968, A8.
[77] Fager, p. 55.
[78 Ernest Austin, oral history interview, Ralph Bunche Oral
History Collection, Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University,
Washington, D.C.
[79] Michael Kline, University of Kentucky, Appalachian oral
history collection, Appalachia 310, Tape #2, 910H185.
[80 Michael Clark to Chuck Fager, December 13, 1968,
Highlander Collection, State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
[81 Mike Clark, interview with the author, November 26,
1997.
[82] The Worker, "The Poor on March Learning the Root
Cause of Ills," June 9, 1968, page 15.
[83] Ibid.
[84] It should be recalled, however, that not all poor
Appalachians are poor white Appalachians. Mr. Cestor Pastor, a participant of
the Poor People's Campaign, an Appalachian by geography and culture, and an
African American by birth made that abundantly clear to the Highlander Center
when he wrote from Kentucky that "I was born in a negro poor family in a 1
room log cabin miles from the nearest wagon road. On a 40 acre tract that
wouldn't sprout peas. My only diet until I was a groon man was mushroom gravy.
Wild greens...A few months ago I joined the Poor People's Campaign. Now I guess
you don't wonder why.... I wonder why our own public servants don't speak out
for us. They claim they are our friends they want to keep us, are they afraid
to speak out. Are they afraid of the money men in Lecture County. I am sure
they are not afraid of the helpless disabled poor." Mr. Cestor Johnson of
Kentucky to The Highlander Center, Highlander Library, Box 2 FF 22.
[85] This study, however, does not claim that the Appalachian
involvement in the Poor People's Campaign was some kind of widespread phenomena
among the rural poor of the South. Instead, it merely suggests that the
introduction of Appalachian people into this Campaign signifies an opportunity
for class-based struggles among blacks and whites. The fact that the Poor
People's Campaign failed to alleviate poverty and end the war in Vietnam is
less important than the successful cooperation between poor Southern whites and
poor African Americans. Fox and Piven, p. xii.
[86] Jody Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of
Powerlessness: The Wallace Campaigns for the Presidency, 1964-1976 (New
Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1981), p. 6.
[87] The King Center Archives, The SCLC papers, Box 177.6;
Ernest Austin, oral history interview, Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection,
Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
[88] The Highlander Center is in New Market, Tennessee and
has been in existence since Miles Fall Horton founded it in 1927 as an
Appalachian center for labor organization. During the 1950s and early 1960s it
was directly involved in the Civil Rights movement in the South. Highlander,
however, became removed from the Civil Rights movement following 1963 and was
not strongly active in the movement until the opportunity of the Poor People's
Campaign in 1968. John Glen's study of the Highlander originated from his Ph.D.
dissertation and had originally covered the Center's activities up to 1962. A
1996 edition of the book, however, provides a sweeping final chapter covering
the Highlander's activities from 1962 to 1996. The Poor People's Campaign is
mentioned but not studied in the 1996 edition. For a full discussion of
Highlander, please see John Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1996); and, John Glen, "Like a Flower
Slowly Blooming: Highlander and the Nurturing of an Appalachian Movement,"
in Stephen L. Fisher, ed. Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance
and Change, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 31-56. The King
Center Archives, Box 182.7 and The Highlander Center Archives, Knoxville,
Tennessee, RGI I , Series III, Box 2, FF 22.
[89] Charles "Buck" Maggard, interview with the
author, December 10, 1997.
[90] Tom Houck, oral history interview, Ralph Bunche Oral
History collection, Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University,
Washington, D.C.
[91] John Sherman Collection, University of Kentucky
Archives.
[92] Mountain Life and Work: The Magazine of the Appalachian
South, "CSM Endorses Poor People's Campaign," May 1968, p. 3.
[93] Ernest Austin, oral history interview, Ralph Bunche
Oral History Collection, Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University,
Washington, D.C.
[94] The Worker, "The Poor on March Learning the Root
Cause of Ills",June 9, 1968, page 15.
[95] Warren I. Susman, Culture As History: The
Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984), p. xxix.
[96] Diane DiPrima, "Revolutionary Letters: Number
Nineteen (for the Poor People's Campaign)," Liberation, April 1968, p. 32.
[97] The King Center, Box 180:4.
[98] Guy Carawan, interview with the author, October 29,
1997; Michael Seeger, interview with the author, December 15, 1997
[99]
[100] The King Center archives, Box 180:4.
[101] Ibid.
[102] Bernice Reagon, interview with the author, March 17,
1998.
[103] Stoney Cooks, oral history interview with Kathy
Shannon, Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Springarn Research
Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
[104] SCLC Papers, "Statements of Demands for Rights of
the Poor," April 29-30, May 1, 1968, The King Center Archives, Box 177,
File Folder 35.
[105] Jose Yglesias, New York Times Magazine, March 31,
1967.
[106] New York Times, "Abernathy Urges Whites to Prod
Congress to Act," May 26, 1968, p. 70.
[107] The Washington Post, "The Poor: A Realist Is
Called in to Save a Dream," June 2, 1968, 4E.
[108] New York Times, Bayard Rustin, "Call to Americans
of Goodwill," June 5, 1968, p. 49.
[109] Ibid.
[110] The Washington Post, "Goals for the Poor,"
June 5, 1968, A20.
[111] New York Times, "Rustin To Assist Protest of
Poor," May 25, 1968.
[112] Ibid, June 8,1968, page 18.
[113] Ibid, June 7, 1968, page 16.
[114] Ibid, June 8, 1968, p. 18.
[115] The Washington Post, "Get it Together," June
10, 1968, A20.
[116] New York Times, "The Poor: Campaign in
Trouble," June 9, 1968, p. 65.
[117] New York Times, "In the Nation: Down by the
Reflecting Pool," May 21, 1968,
[118] Washington Post, "The Goals for the Poor,"
June 13, 1968, A20.
[119] New York Times, "Hope for the Troubled
Campaign," June 16, 1968, 8E.
[120] Washington Post, "Solidarity Day," June 16,
1968, B6.
[121] Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, "SCLC's National
Solidarity Day: June 19, 1968," The King Center Archives, Acc. No. 1,
Subgroup E, Series VIII, Ss 1,2, Box 180:2.
[122] New York Times, "Anger Replaces the Hopes of '63,"
June 20, 1968, p. 31.
[123] Time Magazine, "Solidarity and Disarray,"
June 28, 1968, p. 17.
[124] New York Times, "Anger Replaces the Hopes of
'63," June 20, 1968, p. 31.
[125] The Wall Street Journal, "Nixon's Approach to
Helping Blacks", by Monroe M. Karmin, December 9, 1968, p. 20.
[126] The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1968, p. 20.
[127] Ibid.
[128] Richard M. Nixon, "A New Alignment for American
Unity," May 16, 1968, found in William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside
View of the Pre-Watergate White House (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc.,
1975), p. 49-50; Stephen E. Amrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician,
1962-1972, Volume II, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 154-155.
[129] The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1968, p. 20.
[130] Bayard Rustin, "The Labor-Negro Coalition: A New
Beginning," Federationist, January 1968, p. 3.
[131] For a full discussion on Mr. Roy Innis' ascension in
CORE please see, August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil
Rights movement 1942-1968, p. 423-425.
[132] The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1968, p. 20.
[133] Hand-written journal of Michael Clark, Highlander
Library, RG 1, Series II, Box 2, FF22.
[134] William Rutherford, oral history interview, Hampton
and Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom, p. 480.
Selected Works Consulted
Primary Archival Sources
The Poor People's Campaign File and personal papers of
Michael Clark. The Highlander Center Archives. Knoxville, Tennessee.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Papers. The
King Center Archives, The King Library, Atlanta, Georgia.
The Miles Horton and Highlander Center collections. The
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection. Moorland-Springarn
Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
The John Sherman Collection. The University of Kentucky
Archives.
Files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S.
Department of Justice. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Papers, POCAM, Washington HQ File.
Oral Interviews
Carawan, Guy and Candie. Interview with the author, October
29, 1997.
Clark, Michael. Interview with the author, November 26,
1997.
Farmer, James. Interview with the author, November 1, 1997.
Maggard, Charles "Buck." Interview with the
author, December 10, 1997.
Reagon, Bernice. Interview with the author, March 17, 1998.
Seeger, Michael. Interview with the author, December 15,
1997.
Williams, Hosea. Interview with the author, April 16, 1998.
Books & Articles
Abernathy, Ralph D. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. New
York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Carlson, Jody. George C. Wallace and the Politics of
Powerlessness: The Wallace Campaigns for the Presidency, 1964-1976. New
Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1981.
Cloward, Richard A., and Frances Fox Piven. Poor People's
Movements: Why They Succeed,How they Fail. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Fager, Charles. Uncertain Resurrection: The Poor People's
Washington Campaign. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Erdmans Publishing
Company, 1969.
Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The
Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens:
The University of Georgia Press.
Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow,
1986.
Gaventa, John. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and
Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Gilbert, Ben. Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of
the Washington Riots of 1968. New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1969.
Glen, John. Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932-1962.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988.
Hampton, Henry and Steven Fayer (eds). Voices of Freedom: An
Oral History of the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s. New
York: Bantam Books, 1990.