Poor People's Campaign

As a young, barely-politicized person, I ran across a notice inviting people to come to Washington, D.C., with a group studying non-violence. Leaving from Ann Arbor, the plan was to stay in churches and college dorms for a week, participating in marches and meetings in Resurrection City, built along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I signed up with the group of eight or so people.

The campaign had been Martin Luther King’s idea, but he was killed in April, 1968, and the campaign started in May. It was left to Ralph Abernathy to head up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I recall how tired Abernathy appeared to me, sitting across from him in a poorly attended meeting. By contrast, Jesse Jackson was everywhere! He was only 27 and had been leading an SCLC operation in Chicago. His upstart, attention-getting ploys caused a rift with Abernathy later. But Jackson’s attempt to downplay race in the struggle against poverty and the grass-roots organizations he created were certainly affected by his experiences at the Poor People’s Campaign.

In addition to poor black people, Dr. King had reached out to Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poor white Appalachians, all of whom came to Resurrection city. Multi-cultural experiences and classes for all were held in the “Soul Center” tent in the middle of the city. I’ve since learned that the Highlander Folk Center and the Smithsonian Institution assisted.

Every night, under the Lincoln Memorial, with acres of people around the reflecting pool singing along and dancing, groups played pop music. It seemed to mostly be a Motown Sound. Marshall Tate, who became a friend that week, drew me instead to the tent nearby where the old blues and bluegrass people were playing and Pete Seeger moderated the evenings. Seeger had been blacklisted from being on television in the early years of the 1960’s when I was watching, so I’d never seen him though we were all singing his songs. I don’t remember exactly who we saw, but probably John Lee Hooker, Flatt and Scruggs, lots of banjo pickers.

An odd thing about the present, is that you don’t know the significance of what you are doing until later. It is only now, forty-five years later, that some of the pieces click into place. For instance, marching in a long, winding column throughout the capitol alongside a nondescript middle-aged white man, I heard the whispers, “That’s Dave Dellinger.” I knew he was a peace activist, but it is only now that I am aware of his power and significance. He was 53 at the time and had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. All through the 1950’s and 60’s he participated in freedom marches in the South and hunger strikes in jail, eventually coming to apply the principles of nonviolence to the anti-Vietnam war movement. He was indicted later in 1968, along with the rest of the Chicago Eight.

June 18, 1968, Washington, D.C.

Marshall and I stayed on in Washington when the others left, marching, exploring and going to the Smithsonian. I recall the warm rains which left mud everywhere and getting arrested (actually taken to a police station!) because I was jaywalking, barefoot and looked like a hippie. Delicious bread was baked in coffee cans day after day by an older couple in blue denim. On June 6, hitchhiking back to Ann Arbor, we got into a car and heard that Robert Kennedy was dead. Marshall says that when speaking to groups as part of his work for the Pacific County Democrats, he always mentions this. “It was a life-defining moment for me,” he says.

The Poor People’s Campaign is generally seen as a failure because it did not produce anti-poverty legislation, it didn’t get much press coverage and the campaign died out in the middle of June. Residents were divided about whether they wanted to share in America’s “culture of abundance” or revolt against it. One of the mule trains, however, did travel to both the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. And the campaign’s legacy lives on in the indelible experiences of those who were there.

None of my characters attends the Poor People’s Campaign. Marty is in California in 1968, Line is pregnant and working, and Paul is in Minnesota. But my own involvement informs the writing and everything that happens in With One Hand Waving Free.