Abstract
In April 1969, the SCLC held a press conference in Birmingham to announce the beginning of what they called “a second chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign:”1 This second chapter was to begin with a series of marches and demonstrations in Birmingham that would draw attention to what the SCLC felt were urgently needed changes in Alabama’s welfare policy.2 SCLC president Ralph Abernathy also laid out a broader set of goals for a national campaign against poverty: decent jobs for everyone who could work, a removal of the “freeze” on the number of people on welfare rolls, supplemental income for the underpaid, land redistribution, economic development in poor communities, and “political power” for poor people.3 The new Birmingham campaign was intended to jumpstart this effort and help draw national attention to the issue. Ultimately, the organization planned to undertake campaigns in cities and states across the country.4
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Notes
“Chapter Two of ‘Poor’ Drive to Begin in State—Abernathy,” Birmingham News, April 8, 1969. The press conference included SCLC leaders Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams, along with Ed Gardner, the vice president and soon-to-be president of the ACMHR. In 1967, SCLC had also established a Birmingham branch that was separate from the ACMHR and headed initially by Joseph Lowery. See Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 428–429.
On the Charleston strike, see Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of the Hospital Workers’ Union Local 1199 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), Chapter 7; Charleston would also beat out Birmingham as the site of the SCLC’s annual meeting in 1969. On at least one occasion, as well, an event planned in Birmingham had to be canceled because Abernathy had been jailed in Charleston. See “Mule Train Tour of City Called Off,” Birmingham News, April 26, 1969
Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005), xvii.
On this point in another Southern city see Christina Greene, Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 378.
Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beaon Press, 2006).
Felecia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Ibid.; On James and Wiley see Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors, 41; See also Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz, A Passion for Equality: George Wiley and the Movement (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
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© 2013 Robert W. Widell, Jr.
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Widell, R.W. (2013). Poverty and Welfare Rights. In: Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340962_5
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