[Congressional Bills 110th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Con. Res. 161 Introduced in House (IH)]
110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. CON. RES. 161
Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Dr. King's Launching of the Poor
People's Campaign and Organization of the Poor People's Army.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
May 24, 2007
Ms. Lee (for herself, Mr. Stark, Mr. Meek of Florida, Mr. Ellison, Mr.
Lewis of Georgia, Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, Mr. Grijalva, Mr.
Payne, Ms. Corrine Brown of Florida, Mr. Conyers, Mr. Butterfield, Mr.
Honda, Ms. Kilpatrick, Mr. Serrano, Ms. Jackson-Lee of Texas, Mr.
McDermott, Mr. Nadler, Mr. Rangel, Mr. Cohen, Ms. Schakowsky, Mr.
Kucinich, Mr. Baca, Mr. Scott of Virginia, Mr. Towns, Ms. Woolsey, Mr.
Hastings of Florida, and Mr. Watt) submitted the following concurrent
resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform
_______________________________________________________________________
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Dr. King's Launching of the Poor
People's Campaign and Organization of the Poor People's Army.
Whereas Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. raised the possibility of a poor people's
alliance as early as 1964;
Whereas Dr. King advocated such an alliance in his book entitled Where Do We Go
From Here? Chaos or Community published in January, 1967, and often
spoke of the need to confront the class and racial basis of economic
discrimination;
Whereas America was at war and very polarized during the summer of 1967 and
racked by social and economic injustice and civil strife;
Whereas Dr. King sought to overcome widespread national despair during 1967 and
called for ``transmuting the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive
and creative force'';
Whereas in the middle of August, 1967, Dr. King first revealed his new
organizing vision to his aides in the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) for a nonviolent campaign of mass civil disobedience
in the national capital itself to dramatize the need for jobs and
economic advancement for the poor;
Whereas Dr. King planned to bring thousands of unemployed Americans to
Washington, DC, to camp out in front of government buildings for an
extended period like the Bonus Marchers of 1932 in order ``to cripple
the operations of an oppressive society'' until it listened at last to
the cries of its poor;
Whereas in mid-November, 1967, at an SCLC retreat, Dr. King informed his closest
advisors that ``we are going to take this movement and we are going to
reach out to the poor people in all directions in this country. We're
going into the Southwest after the Indians, into the West after the
Chicanos, into Appalachia after the poor whites, and into the ghettoes
after Negroes and Puerto Ricans. And we're going to bring them together
and enlarge this campaign into something bigger than just a civil-rights
movement for Negroes'';
Whereas he traveled nationwide throughout the fall of 1967 to raise funds for
the poor people's campaign, which he called his ``last and greatest
dream'';
Whereas Dr. King held a national news conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in
Atlanta on December 4th, 1967 to unveil this new campaign, remind the
press that the government ``does not move to correct the problems
involving race until it is confronted directly and dramatically'',
detail the SCLC's plan to recruit 3,000 poor people from five rural
areas and ten major cities, train them for three months in the
techniques of nonviolence, and then bring them to Washington, DC to
disrupt government operations until America responded to the needs of
her poor;
Whereas J. Edgar Hoover and other top-ranking FBI officials actively sought to
sabotage the poor people's campaign, using 44 field officers to stir up
public indignation against it and for the first time specifically
targeted Dr. King in the FBI's COINTELPRO activities against ``black
nationalist hate groups'';
Whereas the announcement of the poor people's campaign markedly increased
assassination threats against Dr. King and precipitated the issuance of
what has now been documented as specific contracts upon his life;
Whereas SCLC leaders officially approved the poor people's campaign in January,
1968;
Whereas in January, 1968, Bernard Lafayette was named to direct the poor
people's campaign and forty veteran SCLC field workers were dispatched
to selected rural areas in the South and to Baltimore, Philadelphia,
Newark, New York, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and other riot-plagued
cities to start recruiting volunteers to establish a poor people's
``tent'' city in Washington, DC;
Whereas several thousand poor people in the first phase of the campaign were
supposed to march into Washington, DC as a poor people's army in late
April, 1968, and encamp in a plainly visible shantytown;
Whereas the poor people's campaign was designed to mobilize the nation to mount
a full-scale, nonviolent assault on poverty through at least three
months of unrelenting pressure on Congress for action during the summer
of 1968 and spotlighting for the entire nation the paradox of ``poverty
amid plenty'' and the miserable realities of America's poor;
Whereas Dr. King described the purpose of the poor people's campaign to be ``to
dramatize the gulf between promise and fulfillment, to call attention to
the gap between the dream and the realities, to make the invisible
visible'';
Whereas Dr. King was murdered on April 4, 1968, while in Memphis marching in
support of striking sanitation workers, thus depriving the poor people's
campaign its principal organizer and felling the drum major of the poor
people's army before it could march to our Nation's Capital;
Whereas 40 years later, 1 in 8 Americans now lives in poverty;
Whereas poverty in America now is far higher than in many other developed
nations, as evidenced by the fact that the United States ranks 24th
among 25 countries when measuring the share of the population below 50
percent of median income; and
Whereas inequality has reached record highs in America, wherein one percent of
Americans in 2005 had the largest share of the nation's income (19
percent) since 1929 and, at the same time, 20 percent of Americans have
only 3.4 percent of the Nation's income: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring),
That--
(1) the President and Congress should reaffirm the Federal
commitment to eradicate poverty in America as a leading
national priority; and
(2) the President and Congress should establish immediately
a national goal of cutting poverty in half in the next 10 years
and adopt a national strategy to reach that goal.
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