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The Poor People's Campaign was a march on Washington D.C. to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States that began on this day in 1968, just one month after the assassination of one of its key organizers, MLK Jr.

The protest was also organized by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King's assassination.

After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.

Among those demands was a proposal for an "economic bill of rights" that included a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure, and more low-income housing for poor Americans of all races.

"I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…

When we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…

That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…"

-MLK Jr., in a 1967 planning meeting

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604 comments

  • Goddamn I got a colleague to watch the Louis Theoreux film and he said, effectively "wow, I had no idea it was so bad, 50,000 dead. I feel like I'm changing my opnion. It just reminds me of what Russians are doing to Crimeans and what Chinese are doing to Tibet" and that pissed me off so goddamn much. It fucking hurts to hear that someone can be so goddamn racist, ignorant, empire-loving. I fucking hate him right now. I went off about how he knows absolutely nothing about any of this and should be ashamed, about how 50,000 is such an underestimate and comparisons to anything except the holocaust, genocide of indigenous people in the America's, or any other colonialist genocide are offensively demeaning. I have no idea where to begin and can't stand living with people like this. He said "isn't learning good?" and I can't imagine any way he could learn except being shamed and ashamed. Jesus christ I'm fuming. Liberals deserve the boomerang that will inevitably return, however long that takes.

604 comments