Very rare: Martin Luther King Jr. writes to raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Poor People’s Campaign. Likely written in March, and dated April 1968, the letter was printed just days before his assassination on the fourth. This is likely the last fundraising appeal to go out in his name.
Anticipating a tumultuous summer ahead, King begins in combative fashion: “Our national government is playing Russian roulette with riots; it gambles with another summer of disaster.” By this time, US involvement in Vietnam was well underway and King notes that the nation’s “ample resources” were being “squandered substantially on war.” He feared that legislation to abolish slums and end unemployment were in danger of being “filed away to gather dust if the people do not generate relentless pressure on Congress.”
“King’s last and most daring dream was a Poor People’s Campaign to win full employment, affordable housing for all, a decent income for those unable to work, and equal educational opportunities for the poor. He foresaw a massive public works program to rebuild the dilapidated and substandard housing of the inner city by those who lived there, providing jobs, training, and housing in a coordinated effort. In organizing this campaign, the [SCLC] had designed a carefully detailed strategy for a prolonged effort that would train poor people in 10 different areas of the nation in the techniques of ‘militant nonviolence.’ The intention was to create a nonviolent uprising, a multiracial coalition of poor people and their allies who would march to Washington D.C., set up mass encampments, and then launch protests every day for economic justice” (Messman).
Indeed, King writes here: “A pilgrimage of the poor will gather in Washington from the slums and the rural starvation regions of the nation. We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until America responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we will embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. We will in this way fashion a confrontation unique in drama but firm in discipline to wrest from the government fundamental measures to end the long agony of the hard core poor.”
There are no copies of this on OCLC, but even with someone as important as King, ephemeral material such as this may elude institutional cataloguers.
Messman, T., “The Poor People’s Campaign: Non-Violent Insurrection for Economic Justice” in Race, Poverty & the Environment, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp.30-32.
