{"id":514,"date":"2025-03-09T18:29:54","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T01:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/?p=514"},"modified":"2025-03-09T18:34:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-10T01:34:34","slug":"poor-peoples-march-on-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/?p=514","title":{"rendered":"Poor People’s March on Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The\u00a0Poor People’s Campaign<\/strong>, or\u00a0Poor People’s March on Washington<\/strong>, was a 1968 effort to gain\u00a0economic justice\u00a0for\u00a0poor people in the United States. It was organized by\u00a0Martin Luther King Jr.\u00a0and the\u00a0Southern Christian Leadership Conference\u00a0(SCLC), and carried out under the leadership of\u00a0Ralph Abernathy\u00a0in the wake of\u00a0King’s assassination\u00a0in April 1968.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The campaign demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person\u00a0protest camp\u00a0on the\u00a0Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Poor People’s Campaign was motivated by a desire for\u00a0economic justice: the idea that all people should have what they need to live. King and the SCLC shifted their focus to these issues after observing that gains in civil rights had not improved the material conditions of life for many\u00a0African Americans. The Poor People’s Campaign was a multiracial effort\u2014including African Americans,\u00a0European Americans,\u00a0Asian Americans,\u00a0Hispanic Americans, and\u00a0Native Americans\u2014aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to political historians such as Barbara Cruikshank, “the poor” did not particularly conceive of themselves as a unified group until\u00a0President\u00a0Lyndon Johnson’s\u00a0War on Poverty\u00a0(declared in 1964) identified them as such. Figures from the 1960 census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Commerce Department, and the Federal Reserve estimated anywhere from 40 to 60 million Americans\u2014or 22 to 33 percent\u2014lived below the\u00a0poverty line. At the same time, the nature of poverty itself was changing as America’s population increasingly lived in cities, not farms (and could not grow its own food).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1968, the War on Poverty seemed like a failure, neglected by a\u00a0Johnson administration\u00a0(and Congress) that wanted to focus on the\u00a0Vietnam War\u00a0and increasingly saw anti-poverty programs as primarily helping African Americans. The Poor People’s Campaign sought to address poverty through income and housing. The campaign would help the poor by dramatizing their needs, uniting all races under the commonality of hardship and presenting a plan to start to a solution. Under the “economic bill of rights,” the Poor People’s Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with a $30\u00a0billion anti-poverty package that included, among other demands, a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure and more low-income housing. The Poor People’s Campaign was part of the second phase of the civil rights movement. King said, “We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

King wanted to bring poor people to Washington, D.C., forcing politicians to see them and think about their needs: “We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, ‘We are here; we are poor; we don’t have any money; you have made us this way … and we’ve come to stay until you do something about it.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Poor People’s Campaign, or\u00a0Poor People’s March on Washington, was a 1968 effort to gain\u00a0economic justice\u00a0for\u00a0poor people in the United States. It was organized by\u00a0Martin Luther King Jr.\u00a0and the\u00a0Southern Christian Leadership Conference\u00a0(SCLC), and carried out under the leadership of\u00a0Ralph Abernathy\u00a0in the wake of\u00a0King’s assassination\u00a0in April 1968. The campaign demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":517,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":516,"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1968yr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}