Poor People’s Campaign

Poor People’s Campaign, political campaign that culminated in a demonstration held in Washington, D.C., in 1968, in which participants demanded that the government formulate a plan to help redress the employment and housing problems of the poor throughout the United States.

In November 1967 civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) met and decided to launch a Poor People’s Campaign to highlight and find solutions to many of the problems facing the country’s poor. The campaign would lead up to a Poor People’s March on the country’s capital.

King and the SCLC were excited about the prospect of this campaign following the victories of the civil rights legislation of previous years, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The SCLC’s aim for the Poor People’s Campaign was to address broadly economic inequalities with nonviolent direct action. The SCLC’s vision was that the campaign would be the most sustainable, massive, and widespread effort of civil disobedience undertaken by any social movement in U.S. history.

The plan for the march was that protestors—consisting of poor African Americans, whites, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans from different urban and rural areas—would come together in Washington, D.C., and demonstrate daily from May 14 to June 24, 1968. It was hoped that this would persuade Congress and the federal executive branch to take serious and adequate actions on jobs and incomes. The campaign would culminate in a massive march on Washington, where demonstrators would demand a $12 billion Economic Bill of Rights guaranteeing employment to those able to work, income to those unable to work, and an end to discrimination in housing.

The Poor People’s Campaign was still in the planning stages when King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. Nevertheless, the Poor People’s March took place on June 19, 1968, led by Ralph Abernathy, a longtime friend of King who had been promoted to president of the SCLC from his post of vice president.

The Poor People’s March was on a much smaller scale than King and others had originally imagined, with an estimated 50,000 demonstrators participating. The marchers walked from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where they listened to speeches by Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy; King’s widow, Coretta Scott King; and Abernathy.

Just five days after the march, authorities closed Resurrection City, the temporary camp that demonstrators had erected on a 16-acre site near the Lincoln Monument to use during the course of the campaign. More than 100 residents were arrested when they refused to leave the site. Other residents, including Abernathy, were arrested during a demonstration at the U.S. Capitol building. National guardsmen were mobilized to stop disturbances.

The Poor People’s Campaign fell short of its goal to win significant antipoverty legislation. It did, however, mark a change of the civil rights movement from advocating a platform of only racial equality to one that incorporated interracial class issues and economic goals.