Freedom Facts and Firsts. Jessie Carney Smith
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), under the leadership of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shifted its strategies in 1967 and embarked on a campaign for poor people. It expanded its operational base in the South to a national focus. Economic inequities became the movement’s target. The Poor People’s Campaign was in response to the rioting that occurred in more than 180 cities during the summer of 1968. Based upon a survey conducted by the NAACP in Mississippi, it was noted that African Americans suffered from hunger, malnutrition, and starvation. In Chicago, the SCLC found an urban crisis of poverty embedded in racist economic structures. Even the Kerner Commission Report, released on February 29, 1968, called for jobs, housing, and economic development programs.
Because institutionalized racism did not capitulate to the strategies of resistance used against racial apartheid in the South, King and the SCLC began planning a new attack to focus the nation’s attention on poverty in America. On June 19, 1968, more than 50,000 people assembled at the nation’s capital to voice their support for the Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice. King announced the Poor People’s Campaign at an SCLC staff retreat in November 1967. Suggested to King by Marion Wright (now Marion Wright Edelman), director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, that the Poor People’s Campaign be staged in Washington, it was seen by King as the next chapter in the struggle for equality. Through non-violent direct action, King and the SCLC wanted to zoom the nation’s lens on economic injustice and poverty.
The Poor People’s Campaign was to be a movement for a wide range of people, including Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Appalachian whites.
During an early planning meeting in March 1968, King informed the gathering that this was an opportunity for poor people of all colors and backgrounds to gain their entitlement to a decent life. Contrasting his earlier campaigns for African American equality, the Poor People’s Campaign was to be a movement for a wide range of people, including Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Appalachian whites. Many leaders of these communities pledged themselves to the Poor People’s Campaign. King believed that economic deprivation caused the outbreak of urban riots throughout America and that capitalism was to blame for poverty. Some in the SCLC considered King’s campaign too ambitious and his demands too nebulous. Others, such as civil rights activists Bayard Rustin and Roy Wilkins, questioned the advisability of a poor people’s march on Washington that might lead to violence. Government officials and organizations, ranging from the FBI to President Lyndon B. Johnson, instigated an out-and-out fight to disrupt the organizers.
In the midst of organizing, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support the city’s striking sanitation workers. When the March 28, 1968, march, led by King, turned violent, 16-year-old Larry Payne, the only fatality of the day’s mayhem, was killed by policeman L. D. Jones. Sixty others were injured. It seemed as though his nay-sayers were right. Determined to lead a peaceful demonstration, King returned to Memphis on April 2 and was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Because of King’s assassination, support for the Poor People’s Campaign gained momentum. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the new president of the SCLC, kept the movement going. On Mother’s Day, May 12, 1968, thousands of women, led by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, formed the first wave of demonstrators. The next day, the first residents of Resurrection City, a temporary settlement, populated the National Mall in tents made from canvas and plywood. Each day the residents of Resurrection City marched to various agencies of the federal government and presented their economic bill of rights. Midway through the campaign, Senator Robert Kennedy, whose wife attended the Mother’s Day opening of Resurrection City, was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Five days after the Solidarity Day mass demonstration on June 19, 1968, the U.S. Department of the Interior closed down Resurrection City after its permit to use the park expired. While the Poor People’s March on Washington was only minimally successful, it did briefly focus the nation’s attention on the plight of the poor.
Linda T. Wynn
Portsmouth, Virginia, Sit-ins (1960)
Civil rights actions in Portsmouth, Virginia, during 1960 were not well organized at the beginning, being unplanned and spontaneous student efforts in sympathy with the Greensboro sit-ins. This led to the first violent confrontation between black demonstrators and white supporters of segregation, but later protests were more disciplined and successful in desegregating public facilities in the city. On February 12, 1960, several African American female high school students marked Abraham Lincoln’s birthday by staging a sit-in at Rose’s Variety Store in downtown Portsmouth. With no formal leadership, organization, or planning, they sat at the store’s lunch counter and were refused service until the store closed at 5:30 P.M.
They continued the protest for the next few days, as other black students joined their efforts. Even without training, they applied the basic principle of non-violent protest by not responding to insults from white hecklers. Local media coverage began, documenting the violent outbreak on February 16, when young white hoodlums attacked the demonstrators, and some blacks retaliated after a flying object hit a black girl. On February 17, a crowd of over 3,000 blacks and whites gathered as the group attempted to continue the sit-in, and the blacks were attacked by police dogs. Gordon Carey, a white field secretary from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), arrived in Portsmouth on February 18 to train and organize the students into the Student Movement for Racial Equality, which achieved success in local civil rights efforts.
Fletcher F. Moon
Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom (1957)
As the third anniversary of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education approached, little progress toward desegregation of public schools was evident. Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleagues in the recently formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) attempted to get President Dwight Eisenhower to make a public statement in support of the court decision and to confront segregationists for their resistance to federal law. When Eisenhower refused to act, King and associates Thomas Kilgore Jr. and Bayard Rustin began to organize efforts for a prayer pilgrimage to the nation’s capital on May 17. Veteran civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph saw parallels to his idea in 1941 for a March on Washington, and a planning meeting involving King, Randolph, NAACP president Roy Wilkins, Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, and other leaders took place on April 5, 1957, at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington.
They continued the protest for the next few days, as other black students joined their efforts.
Despites differences of opinion regarding strategies and objectives, Randolph, King, and Wilkins signed and issued a joint statement, the “Call to a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” indicating that eight Southern states had made no good faith effort to move forward on school desegregation “with all deliberate speed” or with any speed at all. The statement also cited historic precedents, such as the Dred Scott decision exactly 100 years earlier and the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln, to dramatize the long wait of African Americans for freedom. Threats and violence directed toward black citizens and the NAACP were also cited, along with the intention to conduct a peaceful and orderly demonstration. Powel and Mitchell, among others, insisted that the event not become an open protest, which would embarrass the Eisenhower administration and hinder future government cooperation in civil rights and other political issues. On May 17, the anticipated number of participants and supporters was less than hoped for, but the estimated total of 25,000 to 30,000 who did attend presaged the much larger March on Washington that would take place in 1963. Legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson provided music, and a notable