Most people know that when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, he was in Memphis to help striking sanitation workers. What is largely forgotten is that he was involved in a larger campaign to address poverty in the United States.<\/p>\n
Addressing poverty. Sound familiar? Similar to the current Occupy movement, it was a call for a more fair distribution of wealth in the United States. The movement was alternately known as the \u201cPoor People\u2019s Campaign\u201d and \u201cResurrection City.\u201d<\/p>\n
The political climate and talking points were quite different forty-three years ago. President Johnson introduced a War on Poverty in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This was less than seven weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Johnson was able to mobilize support for a progressive agenda in the spirit of the Kennedy administration, although many of the specifics of Johnson\u2019s plan including the war on poverty had not yet been proposed by Kennedy.<\/p>\n
There were a number of programs established in the War on Poverty that improved economic conditions for poor people and often empowered them to manage projects. But in August, 1965 when Johnson chose to significantly escalate the war in Vietnam, he redirected considerable financial resources from domestic needs to a problematic war 10,000 miles away. The hope that had been generated among low-income individuals and families was dashed. America faced the frustration of rising expectations \u2013 promises that had been made and now were not being kept. This was expressed by despair as well as anger as evidenced by the urban riots that spread across the nation in the mid to late 1960s.<\/p>\n
Our current frustration does not emanate from rising expectations. Instead we now are in a sea of declining expectations. For all but the very wealthy, hope has been extinguished and replaced with fear about an uncertain and seemingly bleak future.<\/p>\n
How is the current Occupy movement similar to and different from with the Poor People\u2019s Campaign in 1968? The key common thread is a feeling of injustice that there are some in<\/a> America who are profiting as others struggle to reach a livable income. Each movement is petitioning its government and public opinion to remedy the unfairness in our society.<\/p>\n Theoretically the Occupy movement has a much larger constituency, the 99% of the American population that are not in the top 1%. The 1968 Poor People\u2019s March was an effort to take that portion of the population below the poverty level (perhaps 20%) to a level which might be regarded as \u201cjust getting by.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the criticisms of the Occupy movement is that there is no single leader; not even a group of leaders. The Poor People\u2019s Campaign in 1968 was an effort by Dr. King and colleagues to organize poor people from throughout the country to meet in our most desperate pockets of poverty such as Quitman County, Mississippi and marching to Washington, DC to petition their government. Along the way they would pick up others who were also struggling for food and shelter.<\/p>\n The Poor People\u2019s Campaign suffered a blow far beyond any hardship that the Occupy movement has endured to date. Dr. King was assassinated just as the marches to Washington, DC were beginning. On the evening of his death, over 100 cities across the nation burst into flames. The rioting continued for nearly a week. America was fragmented. Dr. King was actually assassinated just four days after the National Advisory Commission in Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission ) reported to President Johnson that urban riots in the mid-1960s. The seminal line of the report was \u201cOur nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white \u2013 separate and unequal.\u201d<\/p>\n Hauntingly, Dr. King called the Report \u201ca physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.\u201d The report illustrated that while that the Poor People\u2019s March was not just about economic disparity; it was also about racial segregation. There may be undercurrents of racial tension in the current Occupy movement, but they play a very secondary role to economic considerations.<\/p>\n