IV 
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 Launch-
ing 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 en-
titled Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Commu-
nity published in January, 1967, and often spoke of the 
need to confront the class and racial basis of economic 
discrimination; 
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Whereas America was at war and very polarized during the 
summer of 1967 and racked by social and economic in-
justice 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 re-
vealed his new organizing vision to his aides in the 
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for a 
nonviolent campaign of mass civil disobedience in the na-
tional 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 oper-
ations 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 cam-
paign into something bigger than just a civil-rights move-
ment for Negroes’’; 
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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 Ebe-
nezer 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 in-
volving race until it is confronted directly and dramati-
cally’’, detail the SCLC’s plan to recruit 3,000 poor peo-
ple 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 govern-
ment operations until America responded to the needs of 
her poor; 
Whereas J. Edgar Hoover and other top-ranking FBI offi-
cials actively sought to sabotage the poor people’s cam-
paign, 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, New-
ark, New York, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and other 
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riot-plagued cities to start recruiting volunteers to estab-
lish 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 en-
camp 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 pov-
erty; 
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 
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Whereas inequality has reached record highs in America, 
wherein one percent of Americans in 2005 had the larg-
est 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 strat-
egy to reach that goal. 
Æ 
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