Poor People’s Embassy – Embajada de la Gente Pobre

IPMSDL extends its condolences to the family, comrades and friends of Hank Adams (Assiniboine–Sioux, 1943–2020).
Hank is known known for his lifelong work to secure Native treaty rights, especially Northwest Coast tribes’ treaty rights to fish their accustomed rivers and grounds.
Let us join in mourning the death of Hank but we also celebrate his life committed to advancing Indigenous Peoples rights!

Quezon City, Philippines

https://www.ipmsdl.org/
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“Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux, 1933–2005) called Adams “the most important Indian” of that time and predicted that historians would recognize his contributions to the struggle for Indigenous rights.

During the 1980s, Adams worked with the Miskito Indians in their campaign for self-determination in Nicaragua. Until his death, he advocated for Native young people’s education about treaty history and rights and their participation in public affairs, and for Native communities’ interests and voices in the debate about climate change.”https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2020/12/24/most-important-indian-hank-adams-19432020/

“The second evil that I want to deal with is the evil of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus it spreads its nagging prehensile tentacles into cities and hamlets and villages all over our nation. Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life. And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population … . Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will … .”

Martin Luther King Jr, “Three Evils Speech,” 10 May 1967

To a leading light of the original Poor People’s Campaign and the American Indian Movement.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2020/12/24/most-important-indian-hank-adams-19432020/

The Day I Always Remember on This Day

© Carlos Raúl Dufflar 12/4/2020

Even after six generations of past life, struggling for a new future in the community for housing fit for a human being, food for the people, job training, income, jobs, justice, against police brutality. 

The Harlem Rent Strike of 1963, the Great Student Boycott of 1964, it was the age of consciousness. The SNCC and the Freedom Schools that taught us people’s history and science.

I was one of the few high school students to join and become an organizer, to organize the students for their rights and real people’s history from the negative narrative against the abuse of poor people and against the war in Vietnam. 

So when the word was given by a friend that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would speak at the Riverside Church. Many times I have passed the Riverside Church but until April the 4th, 1967, when I walked in and sat down and waited for him to speak. “A Time to Break Our Silence Beyond Vietnam.” It was a moment of joy that opened my heart. 

A few months passed by and we were marching for peace and bring the troops home now. But the poor were dying in greater numbers in the battlefield. 

When the people rose like a mighty storm in Newark and Detroit and across the country. 

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called SCLC staff conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on December the 4th, 1967, he called for a Poor People’s Campaign to unite all poor people of Indigenous, Puerto Rixans, Blacks, and Appalachian poor whites, and to create a new city to rise of poor people – Resurrection City. 

For our demands against exploitation, institutional racism, and the War in Vietnam,, and for jobs, a guaranteed income for all, education, food, and Indigenous fishing rights.

As we all called ourselves sisters and brothers.

And this is history that can never be erased.

This is in loving & living memory of all who sacrificed to build the original Poor People’s Campaign (original PPC), in existence from December 4, 1967, to Summer 1969.

The organizing culminated in a six-week community called Resurrection City in Washington, DC, from Mother’s Day (May 12) to the early morning of June 24, 1968.

The original Poor People’s Embassy was an organizing center for the Campaign in New York City at West 142nd Street & Fifth Avenue. Out of here, Cornelius “Cornbread” Givens, Gilberto Gerena Valentín, Jimmy Collier, and Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick among many others carried on the work to organize the original PPC.

Since the time of the courageous acts of those who were part of Committee of 100, the Caravans to Resurrection City, and the City itself, they have many stories that have yet to be told.

We re-establish the Embassy to preserve and tell these stories, free of distortion and revisionism.

.Note: Día de los Puertorriqueños was actually held the following week, on June 15.

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