As for the rioting in Watts and other cities, King looked at the urban strife as a product of poverty and the associated ills of unemployment, blighted housing, and shoddy public education. To respond to Black Power, King was rolling out the Poor People’s Campaign as a massive, militant, though nonviolent, alternative.
Even King’s support of the strike in Memphis, a labor dispute between the city and municipal employees, was supposed to advance the Poor People’s Campaign. As King noted when he addressed the pro-strike rally in Memphis on March 18, the paycheck of the garbage workers was so paltry that some had turned to food stamps to feed their families. Linking their plight to the wider issue of American poverty would dramatize his case for the Washington protest.
King envisioned Memphis as a springboard to Washington. Instead, the woeful turn of events—the rioting that marred his pro-strike march of March 28 and the imperative to recover by staging a nonviolent march on April 6—was having the opposite effect. Returning to Memphis now would be a costly detour. It would bog King and his staff down for at least five days in a city roiled by racial conflict. They would be stuck there until at least the day of the redemptive march, set for Monday, April 8.
The timing could hardly have been worse. King and his aides were in the final stage of recruiting volunteers for the Poor People’s Campaign. They had a monumental task ahead of them. They were seeking an ethnically diverse cross section of poor people from ten cities in the Northeast and Midwest and from small towns and rural areas in five southern states. The African American preacher who grew up in middle-class circumstances in Atlanta was summoning poor people from across America. He was calling to Washington—in his terminology—not only Negroes but also Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians.
He was promising a “massive mobilization.” It would mean flooding Washington with protesters, settling them in makeshift tent cities on the grounds of the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial. If their extensive demands for antipoverty legislation were not met, he would dispatch the protesters en masse into streets, parks, and office buildings. The protesters would jam the halls of Congress and offices of executive departments, swarm into hospital emergency rooms, and quite possibly tie up the vehicular traffic of central Washington. When asked by a reporter about the latter tactic, King was evasive. But he was clear about his intentions: the protesters would “plague” Washington as long as necessary to achieve their goals.9
To prepare for an operation of that scale, King was shifting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference onto a different track. He had founded the SCLC, in 1957, in alliance with a regional network of mostly Baptist ministers, to struggle against racial segregation in the South. Now the emphasis would fall squarely on economic justice. He reassigned his staff to concentrate on the profuse details of the antipoverty drive. They would help recruit and train the thousands of people in the discipline of nonviolence. They would plan and execute the complex logistics to transport, house, feed, and manage the great mass of protesters.
That was the plan before the debacle in Memphis. Diverting to Memphis for damage control was throwing the Poor People’s Campaign off schedule. As originally conceived, the plan was to enlist a first wave of three thousand poor people to converge on Washington in early April. Thousands more would follow in later months. Hastily revised because of the detour to Memphis, the plan was now for the campaign to begin on April 22. The aim was to draw not thousands but only a “symbolic delegation” to Washington at that time, as the Commercial Appeal reported on March 30.
Recruiting volunteers, whose bodies and honor would be on the line in Washington, would have been hard enough if the Memphis riot had not undercut King’s image as an apostle of nonviolence. Now he believed he had to restore his credibility in order to reassure volunteers. If not, he feared few people would follow him to the nation’s capital.
King’s powerful oratory, his iconic stature as the personification of the civil rights movement, the respect and awe with which millions of disadvantaged Americans regarded him—they were the engine behind the Poor People’s Campaign. On his personal magnetism hinged the success of his appeal for volunteers as he traveled around the country to build support. Without that central pillar of his credibility solidly in place, King acknowledged that the Washington campaign was “doomed.”10
His breakneck schedule in March 1968 allowed him to stump from town to town, city to city, pleading for volunteers. During the eight days that ended March 18, he delivered thirty-five speeches at stops from Michigan to California. The schedule for a single day, March 19, sounded like the bookings of a week or two for gospel singers on a Delta tour. Starting in the early morning, he crisscrossed a large swath of Mississippi. He spoke at small African American churches in Batesville, Marks, Clarksdale, Greenwood, Grenada, and Laurel, finally reaching Hattiesburg and a bed close to midnight.
Marks, Mississippi, would play a special role. It was to be the jumping-off point for a mule train that would plod the one thousand miles to Washington as a sort of moving billboard to promote the antipoverty cause. In his sermon at the National Cathedral he singled out Marks as an example of
