MLK's Poor People's Campaign continues 50 years later

On Tuesday, a new Poor People's Campaign is returning to Marks — the Mississippi town where Martin Luther King Jr. began the first one a half-century ago

In 1966, King visited a Head Start facility, where he saw a teacher cut up a single apple to feed four hungry children. The sight moved King to tears.

On Monday, leaders of the new campaign marched in Memphis with striking fast-food workers, who are struggling to get by on minimum wage pay and are pushing for $15-an-hour wages.

Over the next few months, the leaders of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival plan to travel from the impoverished Mississippi Delta to Appalachia to the Rust Belt to the Central Valley of California.

The Rev. Liz Theoharis, who co-chairs the campaign, said they are hoping to unite with existing grassroots efforts across the nation to "put a face on poverty and racism, the kind of problems that are causing economic devastation to our communities."

More than 45 million Americans live in poverty (14.5 percent), according to the U.S. Census. In Mississippi, that number is 22.6 percent, or more than a fifth of the population.

When King saw the hungry children, that touched him deeply, said Hilliard Lackey, author of "Marks, Martin, and the Mule Train: Marks, Mississippi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Origin of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train."

"It was his first close encounter of poverty," Lackey said. "He saw hopelessness in the eyes of the kids."

In 1968, King visited Marks a second time and vowed to return. But he didn't live to keep that promise because he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis.

The Poor People's Campaign continued without King, a mule train that left Marks and eventually made its way to the nation's capital, bringing more attention to poverty plaguing the nation.

King intended for this campaign to cross all color lines, Lackey said. "Our collective destinies are intertwined. What happens to some of us really has an impact on all of us."

Sam McCray, 68, of Marks, was among the hundreds of high school students who walked out in 1968 to protest the arrest of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference official.

They sat on the jailhouse lawn until a lawman began swinging a billy club.

The next day, authorities released the SCLC official.

These days, McCray helps operate a farmers' market to bring healthy food to the tables of those living in Quitman County.

"We're a food desert," he said. "There's not a supermarket in all of Quitman County."

There is now talk across racial lines of reopening a grocery store that would benefit all, he said. "Decent food at an affordable price is something we all have a vested interest in."

While there has been success "in the political arena," he said, "one thing that is still lacking is transforming the community to a sustainable economy."

He doesn't envision the return of "brick and mortar industry" to the Delta, but the region has plenty of land, he said. "You don't have to have large parcels or a lot of equipment to become self-sufficient."

Betty Crawford is the 57-year-old cousin of Bertha Burres, who served as the "queen" of the mule train.

Crawford has stitched a quilt honoring that mule train. She grew up in Marks and has since returned to the struggling town.

"It doesn't take a lot of people to make a change," she said. "It just takes a few. I want to help bring about change."