As the new Poor People’s Campaign is gathering momentum and organizing across the country, locally and regionally, people are grounding themselves in understanding what, on April 4, 1967, MLK Jr. called the three evils of racism, poverty and militarism in his extraordinary and groundbreaking speech at Riverside Church in NYC, Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break the Silence in which he took a courageous moral stand against the war in Vietnam,
Dr. King began to explore a new kind of revolution, a vision of people at the grassroots/community level creating new values, relationships, and structures as the foundation for a new society and combining the struggle against systemic racism with a struggle against poverty and militarism.
“We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.” …. “The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the rights to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income … It is morally right to insist that every person have a decent house, and adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.”
In 1968 the Poor People’s Campaign set up a multiracial, multi-ethnic Resurrection City on the Washington Mall and demanded an economic bill of rights.
Today the new Poor People’s Campaign is bringing together Americans who have a lot more in common than we are often led to believe about each other. Building coalitions and solidarity is not easy. As we remember the tragedy of his assassination fifty years ago, we can also look deeply at the legacy of Dr. King’s remarkable role in the Freedom Movement, the power of non-violent direct action, and his ability to see the interlocking web of all forms of discrimination, violence, oppression, and war. To these we add the fundamental need for a healthy planet and an end to environmental degradation. We can look at the good news of the massive amount of effective organizing happening all over the country now to end the many forms of interpersonal, cultural and state-sponsored violence, and the reverse the daily dismantling of the basic public protections of people’s civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights. Something powerful is happening here.