Poor People’s Campaign
The March Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Never Got to See
They set up a shanty town and elected a mayor. Fifty years after it occurred, the goals and story of the Poor People’s Campaign still resonate.
Photo Illustration by Alex Brook Lynn/ The Daily Beast
In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took a radical turn. After the freedoms won by the civil rights movement, King decided that his next fight was against economic inequality.
“Now we are in a new phase,” he told NBC journalist Frank McGee on May 7, 1967, “and that is a phase where we are seeking genuine equality, where we are dealing with hard economic and social issues.”
“It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee an annual income. It’s much easier to integrate a bus than it is to get a program that will force the government to put billions of dollars into ending slums.”
Watch the video above to find out about King Jr.’s last march, a march he planned but did not get to see.