What did MLK say about the Poor People's Campaign?

The Poor People's Campaign was perhaps the most urgent work of my final months, and I spoke about it at length in several places. At its heart, the campaign was a confrontation with America's broken promises. As I said in Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists” That gap between the Declaration's promise and the daily reality of forty million poor Americans was precisely what we intended to make visible. The method was deliberate and disciplined. In Showdown for Nonviolence, I described it as a Selma-like movement on economic issues — sustained, not a single day's march, but a campaign that could persist for months, just as we had done in Alabama. We would bring roughly three thousand of the poorest citizens from ten cities and five rural areas, train them in nonviolent discipline, and move on Washington determined to stay until Congress acted on jobs and income. Why Washington? Because, as I wrote in The Trumpet of Conscience, “only the federal Congress and administration can decide to use the billions of dollars we need for a real war on poverty” The stakes could not have been higher. I believed that if the campaign succeeded, nonviolence would be vindicated as the instrument of social change. If it failed, something darker awaited us all.