110 HCON 161 IH: Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Dr.
U.S. House of Representatives
2007-05-24
text/xml
EN
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Whereas Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. raised the possibility
of a poor people’s alliance as early as 1964;
Whereas Dr. King advocated such an alliance in his book
entitled Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community published in January,
1967, and often spoke of the need to confront the class and racial basis of
economic discrimination;
Whereas America was at war and very polarized during the
summer of 1967 and racked by social and economic injustice and civil
strife;
Whereas Dr. King sought to overcome widespread national
despair during 1967 and called for transmuting the deep rage of the
ghetto into a constructive and creative force
;
Whereas in the middle of August, 1967, Dr. King first
revealed his new organizing vision to his aides in the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) for a nonviolent campaign of mass civil
disobedience in the national capital itself to dramatize the need for jobs and
economic advancement for the poor;
Whereas Dr. King planned to bring thousands of unemployed
Americans to Washington, DC, to camp out in front of government buildings for
an extended period like the Bonus Marchers of 1932 in order to cripple
the operations of an oppressive society
until it listened at last to
the cries of its poor;
Whereas in mid-November, 1967, at an SCLC retreat, Dr.
King informed his closest advisors that we are going to take this
movement and we are going to reach out to the poor people in all directions in
this country. We’re going into the Southwest after the Indians, into the West
after the Chicanos, into Appalachia after the poor whites, and into the
ghettoes after Negroes and Puerto Ricans. And we’re going to bring them
together and enlarge this campaign into something bigger than just a
civil-rights movement for Negroes
;
Whereas he traveled nationwide throughout the fall of 1967
to raise funds for the poor people’s campaign, which he called his last
and greatest dream
;
Whereas Dr. King held a national news conference at
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on December 4th, 1967 to unveil this new
campaign, remind the press that the government does not move to correct
the problems involving race until it is confronted directly and
dramatically
, detail the SCLC’s plan to recruit 3,000 poor people from
five rural areas and ten major cities, train them for three months in the
techniques of nonviolence, and then bring them to Washington, DC to disrupt
government operations until America responded to the needs of her poor;
Whereas J. Edgar Hoover and other top-ranking FBI
officials actively sought to sabotage the poor people’s campaign, using 44
field officers to stir up public indignation against it and for the first time
specifically targeted Dr. King in the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities against
black nationalist hate groups
;
Whereas the announcement of the poor people’s campaign
markedly increased assassination threats against Dr. King and precipitated the
issuance of what has now been documented as specific contracts upon his
life;
Whereas SCLC leaders officially approved the poor people’s
campaign in January, 1968;
Whereas in January, 1968, Bernard Lafayette was named to
direct the poor people’s campaign and forty veteran SCLC field workers were
dispatched to selected rural areas in the South and to Baltimore, Philadelphia,
Newark, New York, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and other riot-plagued cities to
start recruiting volunteers to establish a poor people’s tent
city in Washington, DC;
Whereas several thousand poor people in the first phase of
the campaign were supposed to march into Washington, DC as a poor people’s army
in late April, 1968, and encamp in a plainly visible shantytown;
Whereas the poor people’s campaign was designed to
mobilize the nation to mount a full-scale, nonviolent assault on poverty
through at least three months of unrelenting pressure on Congress for action
during the summer of 1968 and spotlighting for the entire nation the paradox of
poverty amid plenty
and the miserable realities of America’s
poor;
Whereas Dr. King described the purpose of the poor
people’s campaign to be to dramatize the gulf between promise and
fulfillment, to call attention to the gap between the dream and the realities,
to make the invisible visible
;
Whereas Dr. King was murdered on April 4, 1968, while in
Memphis marching in support of striking sanitation workers, thus depriving the
poor people’s campaign its principal organizer and felling the drum major of
the poor people’s army before it could march to our Nation’s Capital;
Whereas 40 years later, 1 in 8 Americans now lives in
poverty;
Whereas poverty in America now is far higher than in many
other developed nations, as evidenced by the fact that the United States ranks
24th among 25 countries when measuring the share of the population below 50
percent of median income; and
Whereas inequality has reached record highs in America,
wherein one percent of Americans in 2005 had the largest share of the nation’s
income (19 percent) since 1929 and, at the same time, 20 percent of Americans
have only 3.4 percent of the Nation’s income: Now, therefore, be it
That—
(1)the President and
Congress should reaffirm the Federal commitment to eradicate poverty in America
as a leading national priority; and
(2)the President and
Congress should establish immediately a national goal of cutting poverty in
half in the next 10 years and adopt a national strategy to reach that
goal.