A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 423becoming a “radical” spokesman in 1968—and much of white America was
nervous about it.
King, by planning the Poor People’s Campaign, forced liberals to confront
the limits of their own privilege by calling for a “radical redistribution of
economic power” along with an end to the Vietnam War.Like younger radi-
cals, he was attacking the corporate liberal state at its base, the unequal class
system that left millions without good jobs, housing, health care, or education.
If successful, the Poor People’s Movement could have constituted the greatest
challenge to the power elite and the class system in national history; but that
would not be the case. In the early years of the movement, White liberals and
labor had been crucial and effective supporters of King’s efforts, but, as
Andrew Young—one of the organizers of the new campaign—mildly put it,
they “were less enthusiastic when it came to social justice for the poor.” The
Johnson administration felt great consternation as well. This class-based move-
ment, Young explained, “had the potential of unifying protest against a wide
spectrum of ethnic and underprivileged groups [and] it could also raise mas-
sive civil disobedience to a new level in American life.” In the senate, Robert
Byrd called King a “self-seeking rabble-rouser” and John Stennis told the
“colored people” in his home state of Mississippi to stay away from the cam-
paign since “nothing good for them or for anyone else can come from” join-
ing it. The White House tried to stop the march; and Harry McPherson, one
of LBJ’s closes aides, complained in a moment of liberal candor that “the
Negro... showed himself to be, not only ungrateful, but sullen, full of hate
and the potential for violence.”
With such strong opposition from the Washington political establishment,
the Poor People’s chances for success were not great to begin with, and the
virtually disappeared during the first week of April 1968. King, working fever-
ishly on the march on Washington, traveled to Memphis, Tennessee that week
to show his support for striking sanitation workers. On the night of 3 April,
the Reverend, in an eerily prophetic sermon, told a huge crowd at the
Masonic Temple “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some
difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve
been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live
a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I
just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain,
and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there