After the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that the wMovement was far from over.  In August of 1967 he began the planning of one of his last demonstrations.  This would be the “Poor People’s Campaign,” in which “[King’s] plan was to mobilize and train thousands of the poor and their allies to come to the nation’s capital and ‘just camp here and stay’ until the country’s elected leaders acted on the urgent needs of the poor” (Harding, 16).

William Rutherford, executive director of the SCLC, stated that the purpose and goal of the Poor People’s Campaign was to focus the attention of the nation and the world on poverty.  The Campaign began four weeks after King’s assassination; it was led by SCLC and Ralph Abernathy.  The SCLC was expecting about 1,500 people to come; and to shelter them, SCLC constructed Resurrection City,  a large camp just outside the Lincoln Memorial.  It was not long before over 2,500 people had arrived.

 Three weeks after the beginning of the campaign, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was fatally shot.  Robert Kennedy had been seen as a new hope for the Civil Rights Movement; he had been present at King’s funeral and many saw him as a friend of the movement.  His death coming so soon after King’s and at a time when the Poor People’s Campaign was coming up against wall after wall of unyielding politicians caused many to become discouraged. On June 24, 1968, the people of Resurrection City were evicted under the fire of tear gas by the police.

Before I go into the description of my shrine I must first thank Jean Lacy for helping our class to put our visions of the Civil Rights Movement and our ancestors into the works we have produced.  It was also meaningful to me to have had Jean's help because she herself was present at the Poor People’s Campaign.

In the foreground of my shrine I have depicted the Three Evils as defined by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  These evils are: Militarism (the toy tank), Materialism (the Wal-Mart smiley-face logo), and Racism.  For Racism I could think of no stronger symbol in America today than the KKK.  To represent this I cut out three Ks from grocery store products.  Two examples are a K from a Coke can and the K from a Kellogg’s box.

 Rising tall above the three evils are a coffee cup and an old glove with a backdrop of the White House.  I found the coffee cup and glove on a walk in downtown Oneonta.  The American flag is centered in the coffee cup.  This is meant to symbolize the poor people and their representation of America, which is a call for help and for change.  Overseeing the entire scene is a picture of King, whose ideologies are what brought full meaning to the Poor People’s Campaign.  The ideology that Militarism, Materialism, and Racism are evil, and they need to be stopped.

The Martin Luther King Day cut out is from a calendar.  It is there to remind us of what King has become in today’s Pop culture.  His message has been diluted, domesticated, and outright twisted, to the whims of politicians and corporations.  It is not often that we hear about the Poor People’s Campaign, or the call to end the Three Evils.  Instead we hear again and again “I Have a Dream.”  To American Pop culture that dream is of a black child holding hands with a white child; to King, the dream was of a world free of evil.  An evil that is being cultivated by our government through the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; an evil that is being embraced by international corporations who are taking full advantage of the WTO and the US globalization policies to destroy third world companies as well as local economies; an evil that continues to be present in the KKK and other racist institutions.

The fight is not over, and I know if King were here today he would not be taking any of these injustices sitting down.  He would be out in the front line battling the Establishment for the people.