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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968

Author: Robert Hamilton

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0820358290

This book introduces new audiences to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final initiative, the multiracial Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) of 1968. Robert Hamilton depicts the experience of poor people who traveled to Washington in May 1968 to dramatize the issue of poverty by building a temporary city, Resurrection City. His narrative allows us to hear their voices and understand the strategies, objectives, and organization of the campaign. In addition, he highlights the campaign's educational aspect, showing that significant social movements are a means by which societies learn about themselves and framing the PPC as an initiative whose example can teach and inspire current and future generations. The study thus situates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and teachings in relation to current events and further solidifies Dr. King’s cultural and sociopolitical relevance. In the decades since 1968, we have seen increasing global inequality leading to greater social polarization, including in the United States. Hamilton offers the insight that the radical politics of Dr. King—as represented in the civil rights and human rights agendas of the PPC—can help us understand and address the challenges of this polarization. Hamilton highlights Dr. King’s commitment to ending poverty and explains why Dr. King’s ideas on this and related issues should be brought to the attention of a wider public who often view him almost exclusively as a civil rights, but not a human rights, leader.

Old News: Resurrection City

Author: Jill Freedman

Publisher: Penguin Group

Published: 1970

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13:

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"The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a Poor Peoples Campaign in Washington was still in the planning stages when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968. King had envisioned a mass rally of economically disadvantaged people which would shut down Washington, DC until legislators promised solutions to poverty and unemployment. He had all the poor in mind, not just black folks. He also spoke out about against the war in Vietnam. In May, the March on Washington began. I knew I had to shoot it. I had to see what was happening, to record it and be part of it....Of course, it was old stuff from the start. Another nonviolent demonstration. Another March on Washington. Another army camping, calling on a deaf government. Even poverty is ancient history...We built Resurrection City out of plywood shacks on the Washington Mall, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Talk about poor. Some of those people raised their whole standard of living just by moving in. Food every day, electric lights, enough beds for everyone. This mudhole was a paradise...At 2:30 in the morning of the last day, the authorities gassed us in our beds." photographer's website viewed 9/23/2020

Resurrection City, 1968

Author: Jill Freedman

Publisher: Damiani Limited

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9788862085830

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In May of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Poor People's Campaign to demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. The Campaign was organized by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of Dr. King's assassination. After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp called Resurrection City on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968. Published in 1970, Old News: Resurrection City was photographer Jill Freedman's first book. The book documents the encampment in all its complexity Freedman lived in the encampment for its entire six weeks, photographing the residents, their daily lives, their protests, and their eventual eviction. The new 50th anniversary edition of the book, titled Resurrection City, 1968 will reprint most of the 185 pictures from the original publication, presenting them in a more vivid printing and design. Freedman's hard-hitting original text will be included as well. Two introductory essays will be included, by John Edwin Mason, historian of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, and by Aaron Bryant, Curator of Photography, Visual Culture, and Contemporary Political History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Redemption

Author: Joseph Rosenbloom

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0807083380

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An “immersive, humanizing, and demystifying” look at the final hours of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life as he seeks to revive the non-violent civil rights movement and push to end poverty in America (Charles Blow, New York Times). “King comes to life in death—a courage ever so inspiring.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning At 10:33 a.m. on April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., landed in Memphis on a flight from Atlanta. A march that he had led in Memphis six days earlier to support striking garbage workers had turned into a riot, and King was returning to prove that he could lead a violence-free protest. King’s reputation as a credible, non-violent leader of the civil rights movement was in jeopardy just as he was launching the Poor Peoples Campaign. He was calling for massive civil disobedience in the nation’s capital to pressure lawmakers to enact sweeping anti-poverty legislation. But King didn’t live long enough to lead the protest. He was fatally shot at 6:01 p.m. on April 4 in Memphis. Redemption is an intimate look at the last thirty-one hours and twenty-eight minutes of King’s life. King was exhausted from a brutal speaking schedule. He was being denounced in the press and by political leaders as an agent of violence. He was facing dissent even within the civil rights movement and among his own staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In Memphis, a federal court injunction was barring him from marching. As threats against King mounted, he feared an imminent, violent death. The risks were enormous, the pressure intense. On the stormy night of April 3, King gathered the strength to speak at a rally on behalf of sanitation workers. The “Mountaintop Speech,” an eloquent and passionate appeal for workers’ rights and economic justice, exhibited his oratorical mastery at its finest. Redemption draws on dozens of interviews by the author with people who were immersed in the Memphis events, features recently released documents from Atlanta archives, and includes compelling photos. The fresh material reveals untold facets of the story including a never-before-reported lapse by the Memphis Police Department to provide security for King. It unveils financial and logistical dilemmas, and recounts the emotional and marital pressures that were bedeviling King. Also revealed is what his assassin, James Earl Ray, was doing in Memphis during the same time and how a series of extraordinary breaks enabled Ray to construct a sniper’s nest and shoot King.

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign

Author: Michael K. Honey

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2011-02-07

Total Pages: 665

ISBN-13: 0393078329

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The definitive history of the epic struggle for economic justice that became Martin Luther King Jr.'s last crusade. Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic "plantation mentality" embodied in its good-old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb. Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education, and low wages locked most black workers into poverty. Then two sanitation workers were chewed up like garbage in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a public employee strike that brought to a boil long-simmering issues of racial injustice. With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael Honey brings to life the magnetic characters who clashed on the Memphis battlefield: stalwart black workers; fiery black ministers; volatile, young, black-power advocates; idealistic organizers and tough-talking unionists; the first black members of the Memphis city council; the white upper crust who sought to prevent change or conflagration; and, finally, the magisterial Martin Luther King Jr., undertaking a Poor People's Campaign at the crossroads of his life, vilified as a subversive, hounded by the FBI, and seeing in the working poor of Memphis his hopes for a better America.

Marks, Martin and the Mule Train

Author: Hilliard Lawrence Lackey

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2014-02-24

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1493114972

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Marks, Martin and the Mule Train is a third person chronicle of Marks, Mississippi as the origin of the Mule Train component of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign. The book begins with the backdrop of living conditions in Marks, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, mired in abject poverty during the transition period when farm implements displaced field hands. More than half of area residents had left the cotton fields to work in factories up north. But those that stayed home were devoid of jobs and many were hungry. It was this pervasive sense of hopelessness and widespread hunger that struck Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his two visits to Marks in 1966. His first visit was made to preach the funeral of a marcher who had suffered a heart attack while engaged in the James Meredith March Against Fear from Memphis, TN to Jackson, MS. Allegedly, Dr. King asked some black junior youth what they were going to be when they grew up. Their responses drew tears from the Civil Rights leader when summarily they acknowledged no future because of their skin color. The second visit also aroused tears empathy when Dr. King and Dr. Ralph David Abernathy watched a teacher feed her students four apples and a box of crackers for lunch. Southern public schools declined to accept federal aid for free and reduced meals to sidestep integration. These observations in Marks convinced Dr. King to follow the suggestion of Marian Wright Edelman to lead a Poor Peoples Campaign for jobs and justice. Dr. Abernathy writes in his book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, that Dr. King wanted the Poor Peoples Campaign to begin at the end of the world, in Marks, Mississippi. And so it did. Even though Dr. King was assassinated on April 14, 1968, his inspired Mule Train left Marks on May 14, 1968. The 1, 000 mile journey took a month to complete but 28 wagons pulled by 56 mules paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue on Juneteenth (June 19)1968 as the centerpiece of the Poor Peoples Campaign. The Mule Train fulfilled one of Dr. Kings dreams.

King and the Other America

Author: Sylvie Laurent

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-01-08

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0520288572

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Shortly before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a radical redistribution of economic and political power to transform the whole of society. In 1967, he envisioned and designed the Poor People’s Campaign, an interracial effort that was carried out after his death. This campaign brought together impoverished Americans of all races to demand better wages, better jobs, better homes, and better education. King and the Other America explores this overlooked and obscured episode of the late civil rights movement, deepening our understanding of King’s commitment to social justice and also of the long-term trajectory of the civil rights movement. Digging into earlier radical arguments about economic inequality across America, which King drew on throughout his entire political and religious life, Sylvie Laurent argues that the Poor People’s Campaign was the logical culmination of King’s influences and ideas, which have had lasting impact on young activists and the public. Fifty years later, growing inequality and grinding poverty in the United States have spurred new efforts to rejuvenate the campaign. This book draws the connections between King's perceptive thoughts on substantive justice and the ongoing quest for equality for all.