Since the destruction of Resurrection City and the forcible removal of the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) from Washington, DC, sent back home from state violence against poor people. We were conscious and not fooled by the lies of LBJ and his racist Dixiecrat Democratic Party and Republican Party alliance.
We returned to our neighborhoods as organizers for alternative political parties like the Peace and Freedom Party, the Freedom and Peace Party, progressive parties, and Eugene McCarthy, peace candidate for President to end the War in Vietnam.
Dick Gregory (FPP) and Eldridge Cleaver (PFP) were candidates for President, and for the first time, we have a woman running for President, Charlene Mitchell. The Youth International Party had a pig as a candidate for President.
About a month later, the PPC went to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention for the nomination of Hubert Humphrey for President, marching with the demands for a Poor People’s Agenda, and was met with brutal violence by the police of Democratic machine mayor Richard Daley.
We also went to Miami for the Republican Party Convention in Miami.with the Mule Train. Bruta violence was laid upon the marchers and the PPC, with two dead, as Richard Nixon was the Republican candidate.
We were not party hacks or foot soldiers of any party machine, missionaries, poverty pimps, or warmongers. We were beautiful poor people with the Economic Bill of Rights, as we mark 55 years that the bill was proclaimed.
The original Poor People’s Campaign supported independent and anti-war political campaigns. Dick Gregory, the Freedom and Peace Party candidate for US president in 1968 and a tireless ally of PPC and the Fishing Rights Movement of the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, was warmly welcomed at Resurrection City. Also, anti-war Democratic nominee Eugene McCarthy was given respect there. This is the truth about the ideological orientation of the Campaign and Resurrection City and this is the legacy we must remember, retell, and revitalize.
On this Sunday, Mothers’ Day, May the 12th, 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign was opened
with the National Welfare Rights Organization, which taught Martin Luther King Jr. to learn and understand the daily struggles of poor mothers to feed their children food on the table rather than starve. Because all his life he lived in a middle-class comfort zone.
Across the land, the rivers, mountains, and 26 states with buses arriving from all over the country to Washington, DC, the seat of government with their demands.
With 5000 warrior women and allies, they have gathered to march down the streets of the burned, devastated city after the people rebelled on April the 4thof 1968, after the brutal murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the sanitation workers who were on strike for the recognition of the union.
They had gathered with the largest banner of the National Welfare Rights Organization, with “Mothers Power,” “Women’s Power,” “Welfare Rights Now,” “We Want What is Ours,” “More Money,” “Poor People’s Power,” “Bring the Troops Home Now,” “End the War,” “Organizing for Poor People’s Power” and “The Right to a Decent Job – New York City PPC.”
It was the 5000 women who played a leading role rather than the male-dominated leadership of SCLC and PPC. It’s often forgotten of the unsung heroes, of Blacks, Indigenous, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and poor whites, and allies who held their banners on the Long March until it ended, and then they marched right into the rally at the Cardozo High School Stadium. With leaders from the NWRO, George Wiley, Johnnie Tillmon, and Chief Big Snake and many others. And their demands to restore aid to families with dependent children, and demanded an end to the 1967 Social Security Amendment, which froze public assistance throughout the United States, cutting the funds for Head Start, and a poverty in America that had more than 60 million people living in misery. They were hungry, there was a lack of education, forced to live in subhuman conditions, lack of jobs, institutional racism, and lack of health care.
The speakers were Johnnie Tillmon and Coretta Scott King. They spoke that starving the children is violence. Punishing the mother and the child is violence. Discriminating against a working man is violence. Denying schools for children is violence. Denying housing is violence. Denying medical needs is violence. Denying Native Americans the right to self-determination is violence. Denying bilingual education is violence.
We were a campaign of consciousness to end the war. As a woman in the rally burned a draft card and was immediately arrested. While LBJ and the Dixiecrats and his Republican allies in Congress were subsidizing corporate farming, oil companies, airlines, and housing for suburbia. And increasing the military budget of $8 million per day, $80 billion per year for the War in Vietnam while cutting the funds for poverty. It was a culture of violence on poor people in America. We were calling for an Economic Bill of Rights, which was a moment of joy. Since the beginning of the march of our demands, the seeing eyes and ears of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover, the Washington Metropolitan Police, the Capitol Police, and the 116th Military Intelligence Group, of every moment of the march and rally, we were peaceful and we were guided with love rather than the climate of fear that surrounded us.
Poor People’s Campaign March on Washington, D.C., May-June 1968. Photo courtesy of the Poor People’s Campaign (CC BY 4.0)
As the season of Puerto Rican parades and festivals, remember the Día de los Puertorriqueños gathering at Resurrection City, the first of its in kind in Washington, DC, on this day, June 15, 1968, organized by Gilberto Gerena Valentín.
Greetings from Poor People’s Embassy on International Workers Day! To another year of struggle of workers all around the world for the right to dignity, the right to justice, and the right to live.
“Now look a-here, Congress
This is a brand new day
No more full-time work
No more part-time pay.”
From ”Everybody’s Got a Right to Live”
Music & lyrIcs (c) 1968 Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick
From the album Everybody’s Got a Right to Live by Jimmy Collier & Rev. Frederick Douglass Fitzpatrick (Smithsonian Folkways, 1968)
This day marks the founding of the original Poor People’s Campaign in 1967. We must always remember their courage and sacrifice. Soldiers of the civil and human rights movements and movements of Indigenous, Puerto Ricans, Appalachians, and Chicanas/os were at the core of the struggle in this new ”Washington Campaign.”*
* Martin Luther King, Jr., “Press Conference on Washington Campaign” (Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, 4 December 1967).
Greetings of peace & love from Poor People’s Embassy – Embajada de la Gente Pobre to the Wright family on the loss of a revolutionary internationalist freedom fighter, Rev Dr Bruce Wright (1961-2021) of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, Poor People’s Army, Refuge Ministries, and Revolutionary Road Radio, carrying on the tradition of the original PPC. This organizer, poet, musician, and practitioner of liberation theology no compromise is deeply missed.
Poor People’s Embassy - Embajada de la Gente Pobre 