Poor People’s Campaign

Overview

The Poor People’s Campaign was Martin Luther King Jr.’s late-1967 national campaign to make poverty and economic justice central civil-rights questions.

Current Profile

The campaign aimed to bring African Americans, Native Americans, poor white people, Puerto Ricans, Pacific Islanders, and other marginalized groups to Washington. Its planned shanty town, Resurrection City, was meant to make poverty physically and politically visible while demanding national action beyond formal desegregation.

King’s death did not cancel the campaign, but the episode portrays the eventual encampment as badly organized, rain-soaked, violent, and unsuccessful. The project therefore preserves both the ambition of a multiracial economic coalition and the operational difficulty of realizing it after its central leader was murdered.

Key Characteristics

• National campaign linking civil rights to poverty and material inequality.
• Designed as a multiracial coalition rather than a single-community mobilization.
• Planned to use Resurrection City as a sustained Washington protest.
• Extended King’s program beyond legal equality toward economic power.
• Continued after King’s death but did not produce the intended moral breakthrough.

Evidence

Coalition and purpose

• 509. America in ‘68: The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Part 2) describes King’s late-1967 launch, the groups he hoped to unite, and the Washington shanty-town plan.

Implementation after assassination

• 509. America in ‘68: The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Part 2) says the campaign proceeded after King’s funeral but presents Resurrection City as disorganized and unable to achieve his hoped-for breakthrough.

Qualifications

The current evidence is one retrospective episode and supplies neither a full organizational history nor the perspectives of all participating communities. “Disastrous” is the hosts’ evaluative summary of implementation, not a finding that the campaign’s economic demands or coalition design lacked historical importance.

What Changed

• Created the campaign as the national expression of King’s late economic-justice program.

Relationships

• Martin Luther King Jr. - founder and central public leader.
• Late Civil-Rights Economic Justice - broader strategic shift the campaign embodied.
• Memphis Sanitation Strike - local labor struggle that gave the same economic-dignity agenda a concrete campaign.
• Nonviolent Movement Credibility Crisis - strategic vulnerability exposed during the Memphis mobilization.