Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974 by Gordon K. Mantler (review)

In December of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. announced a series of marches, demonstrations, and civil disobedience actions aimed at highlighting the extent of poverty across the United States and demanding action from Congress and the White House. Intended to demonstrate the continued effectiveness of non-violent disobedience in the era of Black Power, the Poor People’s Campaign was plagued from the start by interpersonal conflicts, differences over priorities and tactics, and the difficulties of organizing a diverse and geographically dispersed constituency. King seemed hopeful when he travelled to Memphis, Tennessee, where he hoped to launch the campaign by supporting a strike by African American sanitation workers, but his assassination on April 4, 1968, threw the movement into turmoil. Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc), sought to carry on his friend’s “last great dream” by organizing an encampment on the National Mall to house protesters and to draw media attention to the poor. (122) Continued infighting, terrible weather, and poor management turned Resurrection City into a quagmire – both literal and symbolic – for the sclc.

Gordon Mantler does not dispute the common view that the Poor People’s Campaign was, as one sclc leader stated, “the Little Bighorn of the civil rights movement,” but he argues that this conclusion overshadows important qualities and outcomes of the effort. Despite the failure to reinvigorate the civil rights movement or revive the War on Poverty, Mantler contends that “a closer look at the campaign reveals a unique and remarkably instructive experiment to build a multiracial movement designed to wage a sustained fight against poverty.” (5) The day before Resurrection City opened, for example, the National Welfare Rights Organization led an interracial march of several thousand to highlight the plight of poor women. And while the media focused on the disorder at Resurrection City, Mexican Americans, American Indians, and Appalachian whites forged a vibrant interracial network at a nearby high school where they stayed during the campaign. Perhaps most impressive was Solidarity Day, the official culminating rally of the Poor People’s Campaign, which drew between 50,000 and 100,000 people to a well-publicized rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

This history matters, according to Mantler, because it complicates a widespread assumption that the anti-poverty activism of the 1960s was undermined by the rise of race- and gender-based identity politics in the 1970s. In fact, he demonstrates, the Poor People’s Campaign emerged from the convergence of racially identified movements in the early 1960s and its “most important, long-term legacy” (184) was to strengthen those racial identities. “Ironically,” he writes of the years following Resurrection City, “those who boldly pursued multiracial coalition just a year or two earlier stressed race-based identity politics as essential not just to meet their political needs of the moment but also to establish genuine coalition among the nation’s politically weak and disempowered poor sometime in the not-so-distant future.” (189) In the final chapter, he shows how those legacies of the Poor People’s Campaign resonated in the Raza Unida party, the Gary Black Power convention, and other iconic examples of identity politics in the 1970s.

Mantler provides a fresh and persuasive view of the Poor People’s Campaign, but the scope is often too narrow to sustain his broader claims about its significance. He is strongest when reconstructing the varied roots of anti-poverty activism in the civil rights and Mexican American movements of the early 1960s, and in tracing activists who helped merge those movements into the Poor People’s Campaign. Beyond that, however, his argument loses coherence. In detailed accounts of grassroots activism in Chicago and the Southwest, he shows how veterans of the Poor People’s Campaign cooperated to build the Gary Black Power convention and the Chicano convention in El Paso, both of which came to be seen as emblematic...