Horace Cort/AP

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Those famous words spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are ingrained into America’s collective consciousness, cementing his historic legacy as a revolutionary Civil Rights activist. Far fewer, however, are aware of another key pillar of King’s dream for a more just America.

“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

It is his fierce condemnation of poverty that led King, in coordination with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to launch the Poor People’s Campaign on December 4, 1967. The SCLC leadership organized a march on Washington D.C., similar to King’s earlier Civil Rights march, except this time poor people of all races from across the country would create a giant tent city on the National Mall, dubbed Resurrection City, until their anti-poverty demands were met.

The protesters were asking the federal government to pass a $30 billion anti-poverty package pushing for full employment, guaranteed income and more low-income housing (among other things).

In a tragic blow to the campaign, which was set to be launched on April 22, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4. The launch was postponed until May 12 and while 7,000 protesters were present at the campaign’s peak, that was far lower than the estimated 50,000 people organizers were expecting. In another shocking blow, prominent supporter Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated just two weeks before the once-promising campaign fizzled out.

Even though the Poor People’s Campaign did not achieve their policy goals, they provided the perfect framework for us to follow today. By bringing together poor people of all backgrounds behind a common set of economic ideals, we can finally end the scourge of poverty. That is necessary more than ever in 2018.