My family was living on Hazard Drive in Albany, Georgia when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968—my late mother’s 42nd birthday. I was two months shy of 14 and felt doubly sad—that King’s life had been snuffed out and my mother would cry for him on her birthday.
Five weeks later, on May 12th, approximately 50,000 protestors gathered on The National Mall and heard Rev. Ralph Abernathy say these words ~
“We come with an appeal to open the doors of America to the almost 50 million Americans who have not been given a fair share of America’s wealth and opportunity, and we will stay until we get it.”
This peaceful gathering of poor people from the four corners of the country—all races and walks of life—was called The Poor People’s Campaign and demanded that Lyndon Johnson and Congress provide jobs, healthcare and decent homes for the 13% of Americans living below the poverty line. They weren’t alone in this act of civil disobedience in 1968, there was continual student unrest across the globe—in New York City, Paris, Mexico, Poland, Egypt, West Germany, and Czechoslovakia.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP71gUdg8qQ]
A week after the march, tents and shacks went up on the Mall and became known as Resurrection City— a temporary city of 7,000 who were still traumatized by King’s assassination, yet carrying on with his hope for America. Photographer Jill Freedman quit her job and lived in Resurrection City. She and her pictures have survived to tell the story. In the the video above Chuck Farris artfully tells a version of that story.
The massive poor people’s march would be Dr. King’s final project, reflecting his shift in focus away from civil rights, as purely a race issue, toward human rights, a matter of class. His wife, Coretta Scott King, with the help of many black ministers—Abernathy and Rev. Jessie Jackson among them—carried through with the plan.
After seven weeks of unrelenting rain—the sky itself was despondent—the protestors went home. No doubt Jessie’s words echoed in their minds and hearts: “I am. Somebody…I may not have a job, but I am somebody.”
If it happened today—over 43 years later—Resurrection City could just as easily be called Occupy The Mall.
good sense of history. bring it forward to now. “Occupy the Mall” is the right idea. Stay there / here. The issues in the OWS have far reaching racial implications. Put your history there stay current. We have to over come now and you have the gift. Use it well.
Thanks, Tom. Indeed we ALL have the gift. The thing is to USE it.
Wow. I’m learning about a piece of history I know little about and the relevance to OWS puts so much in perspective. Keep it comin’!
That was precisely my first thought while reading this Anita, that today’s Occupy movement is similar to Dr. King’s vision and aspiration here. Well done, and a VERY powerful presentation of Jill Freeman and her photos. Have you found a way to share this with some of the Occupy folks? I think they would find strength in reading about this time in history.
Very pertinent post! I remember Resurrection City and your unique perspective is well-expressed. The photo essay is incredible! Wow. Artists have a way of helping me see things in a new way. Thank you!
The OWSers are actually planning to “Occupy DC” on January 17, 2012 over the MLK weekend. You’ll be hearing more about their plans soon, if you haven’t already.
I’ve been down there a great deal, smelled the teargas and the pot (and even had it passed to me), danced with them, photographed and filmed them, interviewed them and spent a lot of time in discussion. So I guess this will be a blog response rather than just a comment. Apologies for my lack of brevity.
Sorry, (to the rest of us), they really don’t want to hear about the Poor People’s March or any other historical lesson you or I may have for them (another e.g: the “Hoovervilles” tent cities inhabited by veterans in protest of their mistreatment upon return from WWI). It’s hard to explain, but their sense of history is slightly different from ours. Their education and experience has been different; their worldview is different. In their minds, we need to embrace THEIR movement, they don’t see themselves as joining ours, or rather, our parents’ or grandparents’ movement… They don’t see that it’s JUST THEIR TURN to join a movement that has been going on at least since the beginning of American history. Nowhere is this truer than in Oakland, home of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis and home to radical organizations long engaged in “the struggle.” But these individuals have visited and come away in turn feeling like “the young white kids” just won’t listen; they “don’t have any respect.”
They want to run this thing, they want to be listened to. It’s their turn.
The most radical thing have done is to actually join in community–as equals–with the pre-existing homeless people of the parks and spaces they are occupying. Some wisely refer to the drunks, winos, addicts, hobos, bums and “down on their luck” men and women as “Indigenous Residents” of such-and-such park. There are already people living in those parks, but we don’t see them or we choose to ignore them because they are unsavory. OWS blends them into the community. In my opinion, that has been the most amazing juxtaposition and game-changer of the OWS movement.
Don’t believe what you’ve heard. Mainstream media are really unreliable on this issue. They aren’t even allowed off the sidewalk to enter the camps. Suspicion against journalists is palpable. You have to come to an Occupy site, action or demonstration and dive right in. And interact with the occupiers, if you want to “get it,” listen to their stories and then, try like hell to bite your tongue. I have written a number of articles, very few of which I have bothered to publish because my perspective keeps shifting the more I see and hear.
There is a certain quality I’ll call hopelessness or jadedness that diverges from the essential optimism and feeling of empowerment felt by the huge baby boom generation. These kids today are so indebted from college loans, or they served overseas and returned to nothing. They don’t trust anyone (although they wish they could), they feel fooled by their excitement over Obama. And they’ve been taught by some common source (Howard Zinn?) that all authority figures, religious, academic or political leaders and the media are liars, plain and simple.
For these young people, everything out there is f’ed up . The older “Occupy” participants are folks who have either been hurt by the system or they may be experienced, perhaps professional, demonstrators and radicals.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-mays-mcdonald/occupy-oakland-reflects-a_b_1006213.html
Thanks, Pam, for taking us inside. I need to get myself down there, too.