The Poor People's Campaign was a march on Washington D.C. to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States that began on this day in 1968, just one month after the assassination of one of its organizers, MLK Jr.

The protest was also organized by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King's assassination.

After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.

Among those demands was a proposal for an "economic bill of rights" that included a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure, and more low-income housing for poor Americans of all races.

The Last March of Martin Luther King Jr.

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    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      So two dueling facts

      • at one point in viking northern europe there was an insult so horrible that if you accused a man of it he legally had to fight and kill you to disprove it. And the law said that if you "proved" it by killing the man in a duel you got to keep his property. You can see how unscrupulous people who were very good at swords could make a living out of this, and they eventually changed the law

      • back in the day people would occaisionally challenge quakers to duels. Quakers are mostly pacifists and wanted nothing to do with it. But the rules for dueling have an interesting quirk; the party that is challenged has the right to choose the weapons. That way the challenged person can pick weapons they're good at so they're not put at an immediate disadvantage by the challenger. So in mockery of the whole idea quakers would choose absurd weapons like cannons or a whole cod fish. According to the rules the challenger had to accept the weapons, but there's no dignified way to defend your honor by slapping a quaker with a fish.