The Poor People’s Campaign was a march on Washington D.C. to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States that began on this day in 1968, just one month after the assassination of one of its key organizers, MLK Jr.

The protest was also organized by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King’s assassination.

After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.

Among those demands was a proposal for an “economic bill of rights” that included a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure, and more low-income housing for poor Americans of all races.

"I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…

When we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…

That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…"

-MLK Jr., in a 1967 planning meeting

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  • Babs [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    Big things happening in Babs Labs

    This will be a 3lb camlifter-hammersaw, kind of like if you jammed the two bots of Endpoint into one unholy monstrosity.

    It starts by driving into the opponent and getting them on its flat little forks sticking out front. The servo rotates, and the linkages cause the forks to rotate 90 degrees, hopefully high-centering the opponent so it can’t drive away.

    That’s when I rev up the hammersaw, and slam it into to the top of my enemy.

    I probably made it too complicated and fragile, but we’ll see when I actually finish it several months from now.