Kings Last March Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to shut down Washington in the spring of 1968. He was organizing what he hoped would be the longest-running protest in the history of the nations capital. King called it the Poor Peoples Campaign. He intended to dramatize the suffering of the nations poor by bringing them to the capital. Poor people would live together on the National Mall - the long strip of land between the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial - and engage in widespread civil disobedience. King wanted to force the federal government to deal with poverty. In 1967, King spoke frequently about a new phase of the civil rights movement. It would focus on economic justice for poor people. While the civil rights movement had won the desegregation of public accommodations and broad new voting rights for black citizens, King said these victories had done little to vanquish one central problem: poverty. For King and many others, theres a very depressing realization in 1965 that what they thought would represent victory turns out not really to represent anywhere near the degree of fundamental change that they previously had imagined it would, says David Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. So long as all people remained poor, they would never really be free, King declared. He felt it was his job to steer the movement in a new direction.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 12:50:55 +0000
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