IN MAY 1968, JUST A month after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, around 3,000 protesters converged in Washington, D.C., to stage a campaign that the civil rights leader had been planning. Known as the Poor People’s Campaign, or PPC, it represented new directions in both King’s thought and strategy. The PPC was conceived in the belief that racial equality is inextricable from economic equality, that civil rights are insufficient without the security to enjoy them. And in practice, as he put it in a 1967 speech, King hoped that
the protests would embody a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other … ”
On May 13, the day after Coretta Scott King led protesters into the capital, thousands of the demonstrators set up tents and shacks on the National Mall, making it plain that they were not simply marching in and then out of town.
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