“The Poor People’s Campaign is the greatest single challenge ever unleashed upon our colonial system.”
Revisiting the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson's essay “Resurrection City: The Dream… the Accomplishments” in the hours after his death is to encounter a morose nostalgia – and, quickly following, an acute rage. “Resurrection City” was published in Ebony magazine in October 1968. In the essay, Reverend Jackson recounts the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., before his April 4, 1968 assassination, for a political program focussing on poverty, economic injustice, and the profound and violent class differences — the brutal divisions between rich and poor — cutting across racial lines in the United States. King’s vision resulted in the Poor People’s Campaign.
Under the leadership of Reverend Ralph Abernathy and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Poor People’s Campaign joined with a cross-racial alliance of advocates for the poor and working class organizations to carry out Dr. King’s vision of an occupation of the US Capitol’s National Mall to make visible the plight of the poor to the US government. Groups organized caravans from all over the US to travel to Washington DC. They began arriving in Washington on May 5th. On May 13th at an opening ceremony, Dr. Abernathy dedicated the site as “Resurrection City, U.S.A.” and construction of the wood dwellings began. The encampment had about 3000 dwellings and more than 50,000 people lived on the site – in the heart of the US government.
Resurrection City is probably better remembered for its quick death than for its short life. It lasted but forty-two days. Media coverage focussed on its internal political difficulties, the apparent failure of its progressive vision for economic reform, and the near-Biblical storms that turned it into a city of mud and wood and frustrated dreams.
Yet in his Ebony essay, Reverend Jackson, dismisses the easy criticisms, along with the one-dimensional and slanted media coverage. He instead pointed to Resurrection City’s accomplishments: its gathering of disparate racial groups of poor people and its attempts to center economics and class as the unifying force of US politics over narrow sectional and racial interests.
It is striking to read the Reverend Jackson of 1968. His personality and politics have been flattened and caricatured in the intervening years: after his two candidacies of the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party (1984 and 1988), with the control of the party by the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and the rise of Bill Clinton, and, especially as Obama engulfed Black politics. Yet, of course, Reverend Jackson was also both the product of a movement and a bellwether of the times. To read in Ebony magazine of all places his progressive demands for jobs and economic justice, his attacks on militarism, imperialism, and oligarchy, and his advocacy of inter-racial alliance suggests something of a long-lost era in US politics. Hence the nostalgia, but also the anger: what has happened to US politics, to Black politics, in the intervening decades has been nothing short of disastrous.
Jackson’s “Resurrection City” is a document of a lost politics — a politics that needs to rise from the dead. We reprint it below.
Resurrection City: The Dream…The Accomplishments
Jesse Jackson
From May to July the Poor People’s Campaign converged on Washington, D.C., to challenge the nation’s economic structure to address the problems of poverty in America. Much has been written and filmed about the campaign, but now I want to submit my reflections on this phase of the struggle for human rights.
From its inception in the mind of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the forceful closing of Resurrection City, the Poor People’s Campaign had an awesome task: to help the nation determine its priorities. In Birmingham, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference challenged America’s priorities in relationship to its social structure. In Selma, that challenge was extended to the political structure. Finally, the time came to raise the economic issues to the conscience of the nation.
America had been alerted that 40 million people, a full one-fifth of the world’s richest nation, were living below the poverty level.
Buried midst the tons of information was the fact that 30,000 jobs were being lost to the labor market each week by technological advances. In order to meet the growing anxiety of the American people, the Poor People’s Campaign took up the burden of raising the issue of poverty to the surface of our national conscience and to expose its devastation in the lives of millions of poor people.
Someone had to cry out for justice in a land that has placed priority on profits rather than persons.
Someone had to ring out with clear moral authority that 10 million people went to bed each night suffering physical destruction from malnutrition to acute starvation.
Someone had to say that not only do we need jobs but that we also need a redefinition of work.
Someone had to plead for a quality in life that offered wages, but more importantly, fulfillment.
Someone had to demand that involuntary starvation should be a punishable crime in a land of surplus and waste.
But so often only the incidentals of the Campaign were communicated to the nation. Such incidents included the record downpour of rain and the resulting mud in Resurrection City. The care of the mule train, the mire and the inherent confusion in a massive task of building a city of many ethnic groups were amplified or printed out of proportion by the news media. Thus the general level of the nation’s insensitivity and unawareness was in part attributable to a press that deals often in sensationalism, personalities and in protecting big business. And the press preferred to print apparent feelings about the death of Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy rather than focus upon the issues damning the poor to hungering insignificance. Thus a nation largely uninformed was challenged to judge the personal behavior of poor people rather than the collective behavior of the Congress.
Given the press preferences for problems of process rather than the purpose of the Poor People’s Campaign, the adversaries of the poor exploded those problems out of proportion in order to avoid the issues of inequity in our economic structure. From mud to personality differences in Resurrection City occupied their time rather than the cries for food, jobs and opportunity that brought Resurrection City into being. But a new idea was moving from the excitement of conception to the fermentation and growth to the laboring pains of anguish when moments of history yield forth new life.
GATHERING THE POOR
What was the difficulty? The pain involved pulling together all of America’s poor: the Indians, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican-Americans, the poor whites, the poor [B]lacks — each of whom had been taught that the others were enemies. Historical circumstances forced each group apart and structured in each disrespect for the other. We had been so obsessed with competing with one another for the few jobs and privileges at the bottom of the economy that we dared not threaten our status with too much public or political identification. We thought competition was our most effective tool, when cooperation is our real challenge. Many of us had analyzed our problem to be simply race, when, in reality, race is only a part of the problem. Class is another part of the problem. There is an inherent contempt that the economic system holds for the suppressed at the bottom of the economy. Yet the economy of the nation rests upon the shoulders of the oppressed.
The first meetings of these different ethnic groups were exciting but tense. The groups were full of fear and mistrust of one another. Each group felt that it had a monopoly on pain and suffering. So meetings were long as we bore with one another’s sermons on the effects of particular aches and pains. This was a period of anxiety when each group began learning to appreciate the other, to gather information about the other.
With our [B]lack-white analysis few of us realized that there are more poor whites in numbers than poor [B]lacks. But in percentages, more [B]lacks are poor than whites. Few of us really understood the insignificant role relegated to the poor white class by the rich white class. We realized that [B]lacks are a despised caste within the poor class. But at least we were a caste which the system calculated to make us suffer but allow us to live. While [B]lacks were slated to be ground up by the economic system based upon slavery, and eliminated as the technological development of the system rendered them unnecessary, the ultimate destiny of [B]lacks was genocide spread from generation to generation. Seldom do we realize that [B]lack capitulation to the tyranny of the slave system provided us the means to struggle for our survival midst our suffering and our destiny to die. White people concluded that “a good nigger was an obedient nigger,” and they taught us that obedience was better than sacrifice. Thus, we developed survival techniques that included acting docile and meek even though we always felt differently. Uncle Tomism because for us an involuntary state of existence developed for survival.
At the same time, America’s Indians were destined to instant genocide, tribe by tribe, day by day. The Indians, with their strong sense of identity and pride, were confronted by the forces of tyranny invading their lands and homes. They remained anti-colonialist and contended that their land had been taken, and for this they were driven from their homes to reservations in the desert regions to die rather than in ghettos or colonies to work. So anti-colonial were their actions that white people concluded that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
Another technique used upon [B]lacks, but not upon other poor minorities, was social integration. We integrated from pain and brutality and humiliation, not toward joy and fulfillment. Blacks have never been covetous of the talents or souls of white folks. Only whites’ privileged status and social protection appealed to [B]lacks. Our total uprooting and separation from our tribes, languages, culture and land is the fundamental reason for our actions. As [B]lacks we were taken from our land and brought here. We experienced the whites as rapists of our dignity. On the other hand, the Indians’ sense of nationhood, or peoplehood, is responsible for their collective behavior for freedom or death. The Indians and the Mexican-Americans experienced the Europeans as rapists of their land.
In Resurrection City the poor whites began to see how they had been used as tools of the economic system to keep other minority groups in check. Perhaps the poor whites were the most tricked of all the poor in that they are in the same economy class as the others. Their problems are basically the same, in fact as ours: a need for food, jobs, medicine and schools. However, they were given police rights over “niggers,” a plan which satisfies their sick egos but does not deal with any of their basic problems.
It was in our wallowing together in the mud of Resurrection City that we were allowed to hear, to feel and to see each other for the first time in our American experience. This vast task of acculturation, of pulling the poor together as a way of amassing economic, political and labor power, was the great vision of Dr. King.
A certain shift in mood and focus was an inevitable by-product of the Poor People’s Campaign. The focus was class, primarily, and race, secondarily, since the issue of hunger cuts across all poor groups. The beauty of Dr. King’s vision, and perhaps the single greatest cause of his death, is that he had begun to redirect the race struggle into a class struggle. The horizontal fight between [B]lacks and whites, based upon emotions, was beginning to shift to a vertical fight of “haves vs. have-nots” based upon economics. Dr. King was making it clear that our nation was built upon the prerogatives of poverty and exploitation. The big industrialists continue to suck the blood of the poor like leeches for cheap labor, for soldiers to conduct imperialistic ventures, as consumers to gain a margin of profit, as live bodies to be foot-stools for inferior-feeling whites in order that they may continue their “superior” isolation.
The Poor People’s Campaign is the greatest single challenge ever unleashed upon our colonial system. And it puts in focus a broad motif for Dr. King’s assassination, for he was the only living man who had the power to pull off such an amazing coalition.
But after the death of Dr. King there was great skepticism about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and its ability to organize the Campaign. Many detractors said SCLC was leaderless and thus defeated in its trust. Others claimed SCLC had a great reputation under Dr. King without examining and understanding the role that SCLS played under Dr. King and will continue to play with new leadership. As an organization, SCLC can never claim to have the solutions. It raised the questions, however, and forced the nation to call upon its human and moral resources to provide the solutions. SCLC is the hammer knocking at the door, representing the conscience of the nation, reminding it of its tendency to break treaties, blast hopes and confuse priorities. The real issue is not how hard or how persistently we knocked, but whether the goods we seek — and all the people deserve — are behind the door. The answer is yes! We live in an economy of abundance — abundance undergirded with poverty.
GOVERNMENT ACCUSED
The Poor People’s Campaign exposed the U.S. Department of Agriculture with its surplus and its political graft. The Department is now famous for its distribution of subsidies to the rich farmers rather than for its distribution of food to the hungry. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman was forced to take a goodwill tour around the world, eating watermelon in Vietnam and making national TV appearances, in an attempt to justify, but never to reconcile, surplus and starvation coexisting in the same land.
Let us look behind the door at which the Poor People’s Campaign knocked to get an indication of why Congress was so anxious for the poor to leave Washington. First, last year Congress appropriated a total of $157 billion. $109 billion went for war, past, present and future. A mere $19 billion went for health, education and welfare. In percentages of the total national appropriations, 69.9% of federal spending was for killing programs while 12.2% was for healing programs. To state it another way, our national priorities were calculated to spend 70% of the national budget to develop quick trigger fingers, but only 12% to develop quick minds and good health.
Second, despite starvation in approximately 300 counties, we discovered that Secretary Freeman sent back more than $208 million to Congress last July 1, even after we had discussed hunger with him. An interesting paradox is that, while Secretary Freeman was sending money back to Congress, the Department of Agriculture claimed that it had neither the funds nor the political power to redistribute food. Further this department has the responsibility for the food distribution programs, but has requested less money for the next fiscal year.
Third, Congressman J.L. McMillan of South Caroline, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, granted one percent of his constituency over $5 million in agricultural subsidies, while over 54% of his constituents live below the poverty line and received only $13.3 million for food.
Fourth, in Texas, a small group of 1,900 farm operators received over $413 million in farm subsidies to not grow crops while the more than 300,000 people living below the poverty line received less than $8 million in all forms of food assistance in order to survive.
Fifth, an absentee farm operator, the J.G. Boswell Co., received over $4 million to not farm in Kings County, California.
Sixth, Senator James Island of Mississippi, a persistent opponent of federal aid to the poor, received $211,000 to not farm in Sunflower County, while over 68% of the families in the area are poor and only 26% participate in federal food programs. The senator receives $13,000 per month to not work, and poor children on his plantation are allowed only $9 per month to survive.
The poor have only begun to knock at the door of America’s substance and abundant promise. The earlier victories of public accommodations and voting rights cost the nation the price of her pride, not from her pocketbook. First, the nation gracefully removed the signs of legal segregation which were undeniably, morally unjustifiable and which were internationally embarrassing and politically impractical. Second, there must be some relationship between those who knock at the door and the person behind the door.
AN INDICTMENT
Obviously, John Kennedy could hear better and see farther than President Johnson. The White House, occupied by Johnson, was more interested in courting the Russian ambassador than in healing the nation’s poor. The silence of the White House, which boasts of its Great Society programs, was appalling, but not surprising. The behavior of the nation’s leader, the President and his staff, reveals an insane irritation with those who dare dissent from the accepted order of the status quo. From the time that Dr. King took his forthright position on the Vietnam war to the present, President Johnson has turned his back on the domestic challenge of hearing the ills afflicting the poor. Across the nation, as well as in Washington, those who have associated with Dr. King’s dream have been treated as strangers in their own land, and ignored in terms of the issues they sought to raise. The frigid wind from the White House continues to create an attitude of despair among the nation’s poor. And the hostile atmosphere confirms the fear of our highest leader’s insensitivity to the plight of the down-trodden.
Compared with earlier domestic crises, Washington in 1968 stands in glaring contrast to the actions from Birmingham in 1963. Birmingham is a symbol of the creative coordination between the prophets and the politicians. In a time of distress a wise and decent politician will use the power of truth of the prophet’s movement to bring change. An unwise politician will use it as a justification to formalize suppression.
To illustrate, if John Kennedy had gone to Birmingham prior to the 1963 movement and upon mere observation had experienced a sense of moral outrage and horror at the signs of southern segregation, his personal conscientious appeal to Congress, based on logic, morality and reason, would have meant little. However, with the [B]lack sufferers of oppression in motion through the daily marches and confrontations with the firehoses and the dogs, in addition to the sound moral and ethical grounds for the [B]lack protest, Kennedy chose to not identify with Birmingham’s status quo represented by Bull Connor in spite of the opportunities for political expediency. And remember, this was prior to the voting rights movement in Selma. The civil rights movement created new alternatives for John Kennedy.
Blacks, who historically had been docile, began to stand up and to demand that whites get off their backs. They demanded their share of the privileges in the City of Birmingham. Kennedy was enabled to go to Congress with an essentially moral argument. He argued that separate facilities were politically unsound, economically unprofitable and morally incorrect. In other words, he took advantage of the crisis created by the civil rights movement to assert a decent position and to educate an insensitive, sick and indecisive nation. For this position Kennedy was ridiculed, and perhaps killed, but his ability to capture the forces of history, to put them in perspective and to choose the right one made him champion of the poor and a friend of mankind.
It is understandable politically, though not morally right, that if the people are asleep and Congress is awake, the President will gravitate to Congress. But if the people wake up and cry for help, and are sound in their needs, they have a right to expect help from the President whom they elected to identify with them during this period of crisis. But the Poor People’s Campaign was brutally ignored.
President Johnson’s behavior toward the poor does not indicate that he is mean, but it does reveal that he is sick or neurotic. A blatant characteristic of the neurotic is his need for total agreement on his programs. When the President found the poor at his doorstep crying out for justice, he could not hear their cries piercing his demand for quiet obedience, and thus he dismissed them.
The nation’s chief executive is unable to bear what the German philosopher, Hegel, calls the mark of the thesis and the antithesis in his own person. He is unable to cope with diverse opinions with the capacity to blend those views for a higher synthesis. And the President’s lack of leadership stifles creativity in such a way that it creates a gulf in leadership from the White House to the neighborhood. In addition to encouraging despair among the poor who sought to relate, the President took away another tool, blasted another hope, and rejected another opportunity to kindle the dreams for a healthy nation. The net result is another lessening of faith in America. Yes, there is a problem of the lack of leadership, but it was not from the poor [B]lack house; it came from the rich White House.
PLACING THE BLAME
Much of the contextual criticism of the Poor People’s Campaign was absurd — our timing, our strategy and our audacity. If there is to be any blame, it must be put squarely upon our friends on the left and the Executive Offices of the government. Those on the left tended to deal with symbols of changes represented in how one looks, rather than in the substance of change evidence in how one behaves. They mouthed the words of radicalism in their criticism of the economic system, but their lives are based upon the prerogatives of that same unjust system — educational opportunities, jobs, food distribution, taxation, travel, housing and so forth. The so-called friends on the left were willing to challenge basic premises of American economics, since such actions appeared to threaten their own favored ways of life for the benefit of the poor. Simply stated, their characters were not in fundamental conflict with the present system. Thus, their protestations of liberalism were essentially irrelevant.
Others on the left had no feeling for our discussion of hunger in America. Their tables overflowed with the abundance of America’s produce, and their stomachs were consistently full. They were unable to recognize or relate to starvation and malnutrition in this rich land. Their incapacity demonstrated their vast distance from the port. The left spent their intellectual energy on revolution, but were unable to discuss food for the hungry.
Some of the traditional, more fundamentalist white churches never confront the government. They shuck their responsibility by transcending the reality of confrontation. In fact, they rendered everything to Caesar and nothing to God, thus eliminating their opportunity to feed the hungry and heal the sick.
Many of the major white church leaders, who marched with Dr. King and who cried crocodile tears at his funeral for his dream to be realized, could not find the ego satisfaction to walk with Dr. Ralph Abernathy. Their hypocrisy was damaging to our struggle.
The right, or more conservative, wing, Congress included, challenged our right to admit there is hunger in the land. Secretary Freeman and congressional committees argued with CBS-TV’s documentary on HUNGER, U.S.A. Freeman literally became the U.S. goodwill ambassador, running around the country to the Joe Bishop Show and many other shows, stating that the poor are not hungry, they are just suffering from malnutrition.
The Poor People’s Campaign had the task of approaching the President and the Congress, not of invading them with an arsenal of arms to force change, but of pulling the cover off the critical conditions of the poor in America. By doing so the general public has the opportunity to see the state of our nation and to demand explanations and programs from their representatives.
SCLC has assumed such roles previously. Along with the coalition of civil rights organizations. SCLC pulled the cover off segregation in public facilities in the south. Then, the nation condemned what it saw, the civil rights bill was passed. Again, in Selma, the cover was jerked from voting restrictions and the nation responded with the voting rights bill.
In both the Birmingham and Selma movements the northern politicians were not injured or even threatened. In fact, the civil rights legislation strengthened them in the following ways: it increased the power leverage over the southern political bloc; it further aided the northern liberal image, and it did not cost the nation anything, nor did it expose any of the graft of the northern politicians. Those civil rights bills did not affect the self-interests of the northern politicians. They debated the right of the south to humiliate [B]lack people. But there is little debate on the fact that the mass [B]lack vote is needed in the northern cities, while the desires of the rich financiers are heeded.
DISPELLING MYTHS
Certain other myths were dispelled by the Poor People’s Campaign. For example, we have broken the myth that the poor are poor because of laziness and indifference. The fact is the poor work the hardest, the longest and perform the nastiest chores, but the rich have the resources for image-making to determine how people view one another’s plight. So smooth is this apparatus that Vice-President Humphrey can make a passionate plea for non-violence on television and express it as a part of the American tradition. But in fact, our tradition is violent: a violent break-away from Britain, the violent extermination of the Indians, the violent debasement of Afro-Americans, the violent seizing of land from the Mexicans, and violent war policy in Vietnam. America can no longer live behind the lies of her myths. The Vietnam war has clearly revealed that the decision for war and peace are made by the upper classes, but the dead and the dispossessed are found in the masses.
The trick artistry of image-making can force the poor who built the nation for little pay to apologize to the rich for being poor, and can thus make the welfare system seem like a privilege when it is a right. A perverted report of history creates a perverted course for the future. Truth must be our presupposition if freedom is our destination.
The four-fifths of the nation who are eating abundantly and wasting sinfully are too ready to conclude that the bottom one-fifth, the nation’s poor, are poor because they lack the will to work. Such images and impressions do not match reality. The fact is that there are fewer jobs for the poor to perform. Employment for the unskilled is a scarcity. And our educational system is not performing in proportion to the need for skilled workers and technicians. Thus the poor cry out for jobs, the need for skilled labor grows, but the educational apparatus has not closed the gap between the two. At the same time our national military policy calls for trained trigger fingers, while our domestic crisis demands enlightened minds. Whose fault is it that elevator operators, small farmers, ditch diggers and railroad porters are out of work? Certainly not the poor, but an increasingly advanced economic system based upon technology.
From the policy-maker to the poor person we are realizing that we live in a new world where old concepts have little meaning. Concepts such as time and space have emerged with new meaning. For example, we no longer ask “What is the distance from Chicago to New York?” New York is not 800 miles from Chicago, but is only one hour and forty minutes away. In this instance the jet plane has rendered time more important than the amount of space to be covered between two cities.
Some economists predict that in twenty years 25 percent of the population will be able to provide enough goods and services for the remaining 75 percent of the nation. One cannot call 75 percent of the nation lazy. But such predictions show that work must be redefined. To go to college and to prepare for the nation’s brain trusts, to raise our children, to clean our homes are all forms of work for which compensation is needed and our economy can afford it.
The nation must exert effort to realize creative measures to the job question. Some policy makers and businessmen have called for one million new jobs in a short period of time. But the loss of 30,000 jobs per week renders one million jobs less than helpful in a matter of weeks.
The production of abundance in American capitalism is unprecedented progress, but the mal-distribution to the lower one-fifth of the population is a crucial defect in the economic system. Unless this flaw is dealt with soon, racism will become even more intense. The racial polarity is strongly proportionate to the rate of unemployment. And either our top heavy government will reassess its relationship to the sweltering masses and take care of their welfare or, inevitably, those masses will say farewell to that government. The poor will voice their positions in perhaps muted and unclear forms, but the disenchantment with a meaningless government will become visible. It may take numerous forms, some of which are evident now, such as the anti-war cry, youth vacating the country to avoid the draft, low voting percentages and others.
VIOLENCE OR NON-VIOLENCE
Another issue in focus is the philosophy of the Movement, whether it is violence or non-violence. Non-violence is an antidote to violence is undebatably the soundest and most humane philosophy, but the circumstances under which poor people struggle make it difficult to absorb as a medicine. Man’s drive to survive is stronger than his drive to be ethical or moral. The intense pain and misery in the ghetto rigs out louder than the politician’s admonitions to be patient and to wait for relief. The cool head and the collective discipline required for non-violent warfare is difficult to teach and to practice under such fiery conditions. The audacity of a well-fed man telling a hungry man to wait is challenged. The voice of a secure man talking to an insecure man whose existence is a disregarded digit is hardly heeded. These gaps between the healthy and the ill define the vacuum of leadership and communication that are growing. Non-violence as a science, not as a mechanism, is designed to overcome these barriers, but the task grows greater daily. It will also prove to be the most potent weapon in man’s struggle to be free, but the burden upon non-violence increases.
Related to non-violence, the question of cowardice must be reexamined and redefined. Cowardice cannot be associated with a man standing on a balcony in Memphis without fear, without bodyguards. The coward is he who throws a rock from the midst of a crowd then hides his hand, or he who pulls a trigger then drops his gun.
America has an illusion of protection which must be dispelled. There is no military protection against ambush, assassination or sabotage in a sick, violent society. President Kennedy was surrounded by an army and Robert Kennedy had his bodyguards, but the contagious disease of violence is not simply carried in a gun. The disease is in the air, it poisons the atmosphere and each person who breathes is subjected to it. We must be concerned with the atmosphere of violence which drives Americans to produce and purchase the weapons of violence.
VICTORIES WON
Finally, we ask if the Poor People’s Campaign was victorious. Yes. We gained victory in the few concrete programs that passed through Congress such as the $100,000,000-a-year food program. But more importantly, our victory was bigger. Victory is revealing the state of hunger in America. Victory is exposing the scandalous agricultural subsidies to the rich. Victory is the evolution of human sensitivity and consciousness to our brothers’ predicament. Victory is the renewed determination of the civil rights movement after the assassination of Dr. King for though the dreamer is dead, the dream lives on. Victory is the poor of the all races coming together. Victory is to be ignored by the political power of the White House but to have the capacity to respond with the soul power of the [B]lack house. Victory is the new relationships created and the lessons learned.
History is on our side. The arch of the universe is inclined toward us in its pathway toward justice. Resurrection City cannot be seen as a mudhole in Washington, but it is rather an idea unleashed in history. The idea was germinated in the mind of Dr. Martin Luther King. Carefully cultivating it, he delicately planted it in the hearts of men on his last great tour.
The idea has taken root and is growing across the country. On April 4th, Dr. King walked away with God and did not have time to recover the idea unleashed.
Because of his life, this nation will never again be the same.
The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, “Resurrection City: The Dream…The Accomplishments,” Ebony (October 1968).
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