Poor People's Campaign engages in 40 days of demonstrations
William Barber II and Liz Theoharis are leading the re-launched national movement, started in 1968.
(The Christian Science Monitor) For all its aspirations toward justice for all, the encampment known as Resurrection City became more a symbol of lost hope than empowerment.
The sprawling camp on the National Mall, the emblem of the Poor People's Campaign of 1968, lost its chief architect, Martin Luther King Jr., when he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4. After a police crackdown on the remaining campers in June of that year, the camp and its populist struggle against economic inequality faded into the whir of Woodstock and war.
Bernard Lafayette, of Tampa, Florida, was a national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign. He mourned his friend, Dr. King. And he watched the movement falter, and fade. But he didn’t give up the dream.
