The Poor People’s Campaign Reassessed: How MLK Merged Political Strategy with Theological Ethics

Colleen Wessel-McCoy considers how Dr. King's attention to the intersections of racism, materialism, and militarism gave rise to the Poor People's Campaign.

Posted on July 30, 2025 in Featured Review

Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, by Colleen Wessel-McCoy. Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021. 222p, ISBN 9781978710238 $100.00, ISBN 9781978710245 $45.00

In Freedom Church of the Poor, Colleen Wessel-McCoy (Earlham School of Religion) demonstrates how the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. focused attention on the interrelated issues of racism, materialism, and militarism in his Poor People’s Campaign. Although his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech (1963) galvanized the American public to address the problem of segregation, King broadly understood civil rights to be only one step on the path to achieving the greater goal of widespread human rights. Consequently, despite the advances won by the Civil Rights Movement, racial disparities in the United States persist—Black Americans are still disproportionately economically disadvantaged compared to their peers in other racial groups, and they lack access to equitable educational opportunities, both of which partially contribute to significantly higher rates of incarceration in their community. More to the point, the myopic view of King which focuses solely on his fight for civil rights ignores his realization—expressed in two addresses: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in 1967 at New York City’s Riverside Church, and “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” delivered a year later at Washington National Cathedral—that universal human rights need to be addressed to create significant social advancement. Together, these sermons combine theology with a political vision, which culminated in his Poor People’s Campaign. 

King’s leadership helped foster the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which successfully brought down de jure segregation, but it had only modest success ending de facto segregation. Further, segregation represents only part of the problem that the movement, and King specifically, sought to address. As the 1960s wore on, consumer culture continued to expand, and the United States became mired in a war in Southeast Asia to stem the spread of communism, a conflict infused with America’s own issues with race—as Muhammad Ali famously said, “The draft is about white people sending [B]lack people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from the red people.” This motivated King to enunciate a new direction for the movement, which encompassed the three impediments to achieving human rights: racism, materialism, and militarism.

The impetus for the Poor People’s Campaign came from Senators Joseph S. Clark and Robert Kennedy’s 1967 tour of the Mississippi Delta. After witnessing the region’s debilitating poverty, they encouraged King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring poor citizens to the nation’s capital to draw attention to the need to restructure American society. King believed this required two sea changes in the American way of life. First, the movement needed to emerge from grassroots initiatives led by the poor themselves, rather than from top-down government programs. Second, though Wessel-McCoy never mentions Martin Buber’s classic I and Thou (1923), King called for precisely the “I-Thou relationship” that Buber articulates, in which all people are accorded full human dignity across social relationships. 

The goal was, and remains, full civil, economic, and social rights for all, something yet to be achieved.

By uniting poor people, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, King hoped to change the economic system. The goal was, and remains, full civil, economic, and social rights for all, something yet to be achieved. Unfortunately, at the time of King’s assassination, the SCLC leadership had not solidified around the idea of a Poor People’s Campaign. Despite this, Resurrection City, a sixteen-acre tent encampment between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, housed over three thousand people who came to the nation’s capital to take part in the campaign. Though each group who joined the movement had unique interests and needs, Puerto Ricans, Black Americans, white Americans, Hispanic people, and Indigenous Americans “came together under the shared banner that the crises they faced had something to do with poverty and that the conditions in which they lived were antagonistic to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (pp. 41–42). Collectively, they engaged in a variety of activities, from visiting the offices of legislators and department heads to participating in marches and sit-ins. Some events were organized while others were spontaneous. Some were amicable while others were confrontational. People occupied Resurrection City from May 22, 1969, until the third week in June. Unfortunately, it rained twenty-eight of the forty-two days of its existence, creating difficult and unsanitary conditions that eventually caused many to leave in late May. The numbers rose again when two thousand newcomers arrived in early June.

Historically, though men dominated leadership positions in both the Civil Rights Movement and the Poor People’s Campaign, women filled significant roles. The women of the National Welfare Rights Organization led the Mother’s Day march that preceded the caravans bringing people to Resurrection City. The march went through poor neighborhoods of the nation’s capital, calling attention to the reality that the majority of those disadvantaged were women and children. Coretta Scott King implored people to stop focusing on urban violence so as to recognize starvation, unemployment, inadequate housing, and poor education as the real problems facing the nation.

Resurrection City ended on June 24, 1969. The remaining residents waited for a confrontation with the police, but the SCLC had negotiated a quiet end. King’s objective was to gather disparate groups to “build strength as a new and unprecedented social force of the poor across racial lines to make moral claims around class demands” (p. 67). To assess the results, readers must keep in mind King’s March 31, 1968, address at Washington National Cathedral when he said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King understood that shifting the American public’s attention from accumulating wealth to creating opportunities for those less fortunate as a mainstream concern would not be accomplished overnight. Despite this reality, early assessments of the campaign described it as an overall failure—it failed to attract much media attention, which kept the public unaware, as the war in Vietnam continued to dominate the headlines. Wessell-McCoy summarizes this by identifying “three standard assessments of the Poor Peoples Campaign: failure, failure with some short-term wins, or failure with some long-term contributions” (p. 69). The campaign did help to prove that poverty is not indicative of incompetence, and it demonstrated the movement’s religious dimension. Unfortunately, however, the mainstream organized churches were on the wrong side of the movement for human rights, as is all too often the case throughout American history.

One of the central issues of the Poor People’s Campaign was and remains white supremacists’ refusal to acknowledge Black personhood.

One of the central issues of the Poor People’s Campaign was and remains white supremacists’ refusal to acknowledge Black personhood. Added to this is the continuing sanctification of property, which was enshrined during Reconstruction in the Supreme Court’s decision in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873). Congress intended the Fourteenth Amendment to extend the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizenship to the people freed from slavery, made necessary by the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which unequivocally declared that enslaved people were not American citizens. In 1872, however, the Court determined corporations to be persons with the rights to citizenship, thus subverting the amendment’s original intent.

To defeat the evils of racism, materialism, and militarism as King proposed would be faithful to the teachings of Jesus as reported in the Gospels. Essential to progress toward human rights is unity, a collective coming together of all Americans. While this was and remains the thrust of the Poor People’s Campaign, Americans have yet to achieve the goal. However, more recent scholarship on King has broadened to emphasize his understanding that to defeat racism and create the beloved community, we must also address the related evils of materialism and militarism, which may catalyze a new movement. He saw this as “both political and theological, realized and realizable in history as the kingdom of God” (p. 118). Taking the Black church as his inspiration, this social transformation would be led by the poor themselves. For King, the freedom church of the poor tied together the ideas of theology, biblical interpretation, history, and social theory. God’s plan for His people was freedom; since it had been achieved in the past, it could be achieved again in the future. King knew that because the Kingdom of God existed within people, it could become the “inner power to drive the work of justice forward” (p. 135).

Freedom Church of the Poor connects nicely to Reclaiming the Great World House (CH, May’20, 57-2993), edited by Vicki L. Crawford and Lewis V. Baldwin, which describes King’s understanding of how the Black civil rights struggle connected to the global movement to end apartheid and other atrocities.

Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Humanities – Religion

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Duncan R. Jamieson is a professor of history at Ashland University. He has a PhD in American intellectual history from Michigan State University.

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