King quit the Logans’ apartment that morning, but he wouldn’t let the matter drop. Over the next week he called Logan almost every night. In the motel room on the evening of April 3 he called again, wheedling and badgering her, imploring her to side with him, begging her to trust his judgment.
Logan had the utmost respect for King. She revered him for his genial manner, sense of humor, profound moral sensibility, and oratorical genius. She would tell a reporter: “He was a brilliant man. I don’t need to tell you how he could speak.”21
But his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War was troubling to her. Like several other close friends of King’s, she feared that his antiwar stand would anger President Johnson and result in the loss of White House support for civil rights.
Moreover, she questioned King’s judgment in reorienting the SCLC to fight against poverty. On that Monday night in New York, King had pressed her to see the logic, his logic, for the Poor People’s Campaign. The harder he argued, the more she objected. She restated her concern: he should stick to racial progress for African Americans as his central cause, not pursue broad political and economic relief for all poor Americans. King’s plan for Washington protest seemed to her unwieldy and unrealistic. She believed, as she put it, “We had bitten off a lot more than we were going to be able to chew.”22
Logan had only to read the charter of the SCLC, which was founded in 1957, to see how the organization’s scope under King’s leadership had widened. The charter stated: “SCLC has the basic aim of achieving full citizenship rights, equality, and the integration of the Negro in all aspects of American life.”23 King had led the SCLC in that spirit for a decade in the push to desegregate public facilities and secure voting rights for African Americans. The charter said nothing about ending poverty for all Americans.
Having achieved much of his civil rights agenda in the South, King had reset the SCLC’s agenda. He shifted its focus to remedy what he viewed as the nation’s next great social injustice: the poverty afflicting millions of people, including a disproportionate number of African Americans. He often summed up his thinking with a snappy one-liner: “What does it profit a man to be able to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee.”24
King’s pivot to economic justice did not happen overnight. At least as early as his graduate study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, the nineteen-year-old King identified helping poor people as a goal he aspired to pursue. In a paper during his first semester he vowed that he would be a “profound advocator” on behalf of the poor.25 Two developments in the mid-sixties had propelled him to convert the desire into action. First there was the explosion of civil strife in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, followed by rioting in scores of other cities during the next two summers. Second was the futility of his quest, in 1966, to better the condition of Chicago’s slums.
Chicago taught him that racism was subtler and less visible in cities beyond the South. The object was not desegregating restaurants and movie theaters but improving housing, education, and employment opportunity for African Americans. In Chicago inner-city blacks were caught in a complex web of poverty. Without a radical fix, he concluded, there was no escape.
In early 1968 he announced a fully developed plan of action. He had previewed his thinking in his book published six months before, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? In the book he urged nothing less than the “radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.”26 The restructuring he proposed would end poverty simply by ending it legislatively—that is, by guaranteeing a minimum income for all Americans. For those who could work, it would provide a job. For those who could not, it would provide an income pegged to the median income nationwide.27 In his thinking, the guarantee of a minimum income or a job did not go far enough. He called, further, for massive federal spending on housing and education.
It all was part of what he termed an Economic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged. It would not be cheap. King envisioned a federal antipoverty budget of ten or twelve billion dollars.28 By contrast, President Johnson’s “war on poverty,” which he had launched in 1965, cost $2.4 billion a year (pared to $1.8 billion in later years owing to the fiscal drain of the Vietnam War).
The Poor People’s Campaign was to be King’s lever to force the government to abolish poverty. The campaign was modeled on the Depression-era march of fifteen thousand World War I veterans to Washington in 1932. The veterans, known as the Bonus Army, had flooded into the nation’s capital demanding the bonuses promised to them by the federal government but never paid. They had slapped together shantytowns—Hoovervilles, critics mockingly called them. The veterans declared their intention to remain until Congress and President Herbert Hoover approved the bonuses, but Congress had not complied. His patience at an end, Hoover summoned the army to remove two thousand veterans still refusing to budge from the shantytowns. Soldiers routed the holdouts with tear gas and drove them out of Washington.
Marian Logan suspected that the Poor People’s Campaign would end just as badly.29 King would be mustering thousands of impoverished people from around the country for weeks of protest. They would represent a racial, cultural, and geographic hodgepodge. King was threatening to close down the seat of the federal government.30 He was pledging nonviolence, but like NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, Logan doubted King could prevent violent incidents from erupting during the Washington protest. King was
