In May 1968, Michael Jossell watched from his front yard as dozens of wagons set out from Marks, Mississippi.

They were carrying 82 people, and heading to Washington DC. The mule train, as it became known, took several weeks to reach the capital, where the passengers – each of them black and poor – joined thousands of others in setting up camp on the Washington Mall.

This was the Poor People’s Campaign, a Martin Luther King-inspired effort that King envisaged as a way to draw politicians’ attention to the plight of poor people in the US – the conditions they were forced to endure, and the lack of hope that King said he had seen in people’s eyes.

This Saturday, just over 50 years after the mules pulled in to Washington DC, thousands of activists will once again assemble in the capital, for the culmination of the “second phase” of the Poor People’s Campaign that began in May as a non-violent protest.

Led by the charismatic Rev Dr William Barber, a North Carolinian minister emerging as a national civil rights leader, tens of thousands of people have spent the last six weeks holding demonstrations outside almost 40 statehouses. There have been hundreds of arrests.

It’s a sign of increased activism and awareness in the US, but also a sign that, half a century after the first campaign, the country is still beset by inequality.

King had been shocked by the poverty he had seen in Marks, located in what was then the poorest county in the poorest state in the country, and decided this should be the starting point for a campaign he hoped would kickstart change in the US.

‘We didn’t know we were poor’

Michael Jossell, now 64, was 14 when people from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference started to travel to Marks to plan the mule train. Activists would gather impoverished black people, the majority of whom worked in the cotton fields that surrounded the town, and hold lectures on social and financial inequality in the US – and what they could do to improve it.

“We didn’t know we were poor,” Jossell said as he drove the Guardian around Marks, located in the fertile farming lands, historically farmed by slaves, of the Mississippi Delta, 70 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee.

“We didn’t know until the light was shone on us. It took others coming in.”

Jossell, who is now a pastor at the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist church in Lambert, four miles south of Marks, remembers working alongside his brothers and sisters – he is one of 10 siblings – in the fields as a child.

“Everybody was basically on the same level,” Jossell said. “Nobody could laugh at anybody going to the fields because the whole town was in the fields.”

Tens of thousands of people have spent the last six weeks holding demonstrations outside almost 40 statehouses. Photograph: Imani Khayyam

In the late 1960s the lives of people in towns like Marks bore distinct similarities to the lives of black people under slavery.

As a child, Jossell’s school year was tailored to working in the white-owned cotton fields. He and his classmates studied on a “split session”, where school ended in March, so the children could spend two months hacking away at weeds growing near the cotton plants. They went back to school in June and July, as the cotton grew, then were sent back out to the fields in July and August.

The men, women and children wore a sack over one shoulder and picked the cotton by hand from each plant. When their sacks were full they took them to be weighed before picking more cotton.

Jossell would usually make $3 a day.

The land around Marks is now surrounded by lush green forest, planted in place of some of the cotton fields. But when Jossell was a boy each side of what is now the I-3 road, which runs north-south through the Mississippi Delta, were cotton fields stretching for miles. The cotton was planted in rows, the fluffy white cotton bolls emerging in late summer.

A median yearly income of $41,099

Marks’s population has shrunk over the past few decades; the town’s hospital closed three or four years ago, and its main grocery store shut down a few months back. The downtown area was once bustling, Jossell said, but was now lined with empty stores with paint cracking on wooden buildings.

Although the town and the surrounding Quitman county may not be as impoverished as they were, Mississippi is far from prosperous. It remains the poorest state in the country, according to the US Census Bureau, with nearly 21% of people living in poverty – the highest in the nation – while its median yearly income of $41,099 is the lowest in the nation. A 2018 study ranked Mississippi last in the US in terms of quality of education. Despite the best efforts of King and the SCLC in leading the March on Washington in 1963 and then organizing the mule train, it is hard to escape the notion that Mississippi and other places in the south are still struggling to escape their past.

That’s what Dr King saw: these people being displaced who had no money, nothing. People were just eking out a living Dr Hilliard Lackey

“The Civil Rights March [in 1963] was about rights and the Poor People’s Campaign [in 1968] was about having the means to exercise those rights,” said Dr Hilliard Lackey, a professor at Jackson State University. Lackey grew up on a plantation in Marks – his family were allowed to live in former slave accommodation as long as they worked the fields – and wrote the book Marks, Martin and the Mule Train, about the mule-driven journey to DC.

“If you have the right to go to the Holiday Inn but you don’t have the money to, are you really any better off?”

In 1968, Lackey had just started working at JSU.

Between 1966 and 1968, Lackey described to the Guardian in the JSU’s canteen, mechanization of the cotton industry was beginning to leave black workers “totally displaced”. Some people left for cities like Chicago in the north, most of those who stayed faced extreme poverty.

“That’s what Dr King saw: these people being displaced who had no money, nothing,” he said. “People were just eking out a living.”

King’s trip to Marks wasn’t planned. In 1966 he was taking part in an anti-racism “Walk Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, when one of the marchers, Armistead Phipps, had a heart attack and died.

Phipps was from Marks, and King travelled to the town to deliver a eulogy for Phipps at Valley Queen Baptist church, where today a sign commemorates the event. It was there that he saw the poverty black people were enduring.

‘Dr King if we had mules and negroes going into Washington then Congress would suddenly take note.’ Photograph: James Goldman

“He went to a pre-school classroom and the teacher said to Dr King: ‘Oh, excuse me, I’m going to have to give them their lunch’,” Lackey said. “And she took a cracker, put a slice of apple on the cracker and gave to each one. That’s their lunch. Dr King said he saw hopelessness in the eyes of children.”

After his visit, which is said to have brought him to tears, King and the SCLC began to organize the mule train.

“He said the mules were identified with the negro,” Lackey said. “He said if we had mules and negroes going into Washington then Congress would suddenly take note and the message would be loud and clear.”

When King was assassinated on 4 April 1968, others picked up the baton and carried on the planning.

Jossell, as a 14-year-old, was among those who gathered outside the jail where one of the organisers, Willie Bolden, was detained after travelling to Marks to gather support. Jossell remembers a demonstration against his arrest, and police beating teachers and children outside the jail where Bolden was being held.

The mule-driven carts left Marks on 13 May, the train making its way to Atlanta before traveling on to DC. Lackey, in his first job, agonized over whether to join the train – so much so that it made him sick.

“I wanted so much to be a part of that,” he said. As he agonized over whether to risk his job and go to DC, he got ulcers and was coughing up blood. In the end he decided to remain in Jackson, but has devoted much of his academic career to aiding people in Marks and elsewhere. Lackey said he sees distinct parallels between the 1968 effort and this second phase.

“The first one was more about abject poverty, this is sneaky poverty,” Lackey said. “Black people used to be misused. And now we’re ignored.”

Speaking about the new People’s Campaign, Lackey said: “It’s almost like we’ve been Rip van Winkle for 50 years and now we’re waking up.”

Final demonstration before DC

On Monday, Lackey was among the 50 activists and religious leaders who gathered at the Mississippi state capitol in Jackson, for their final demonstration before heading to DC.

Protesters march in front of the capital in Mississippi. Photograph: Imani Khayyam

The event started with a prayer before a variety of activists stood at a podium to call out the conditions in Mississippi. Activists complain that education in the state is chronically underfunded, as is healthcare. Angelique Lee, who works for the Parents’ Campaign, an effort to improve public schools in the state, was among the speakers.

“We are still fighting the same issues,” she told the Guardian. “It’s overt racism versus covert racism.”

Despite segregation in schools having been officially ended by a supreme court decision in 1954, states in the south largely resisted integration until the Civil Rights Act passed in 1968. Even today, schools in Mississippi are still heavily split between white and black students, but Lee said it tends to be the black schools that suffer from a lack of investment.

“Some things are as small as having no toilet paper, having a leaky roof, having no fresh air, no air conditioning,’ she said.

After the speeches outside the capitol, the activists marched down Congress Street, towards the governor’s mansion – currently occupied by the Republican Phil Bryant. They crossed Mississippi Street singing Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round”, a song popularized during the civil rights movement.

Outside the mansion, the Mississippi state flag was unfurled.

The flag features innocuous thick blue, white and red stripes running horizontally. But in the top left corner it bears the Confederate symbol. Mississippi, which has the highest percentage black population of any state, is the only state in the US to still bear it.

We are still fighting the same issues. It’s overt racism versus covert racism Angelique Lee

To shouts of: “No hate in our state,” the flag was unfurled and set on fire. A Confederate flag was set alight too.

“It’s burning white supremacy, burning hate,” said Danyelle Holmes, who was born in Greenwood, Mississippi and is now a national organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign.

The route out, Holmes said, is through the ballot box. She sees this as a “multi-year campaign”, to organize and educate people in Mississippi and elsewhere. “We need to get people in these marginalized communities to vote,” Holmes said – to vote in politicians more willing to represent their interests.

“My ultimate goal is to see Mississippi rise from being the bottom of everything that’s good in the rankings and from being the top of everything that’s bad,” Holmes said.

“It’s called persistence; and when you continue to be persistent, and persevere in a fight, change doesn’t come overnight but eventually change will come.”