Pat Skinner

7/16/2008 6:05 PM UTC

Hi Mitch--thanks for listening to listen to my broadcast--loved Barb's dream--God Bless

PPC1

5/2/2008 9:14 PM UTC

In the last decade, countless revisionist scholars have followed in the footsteps of John Dittmer and Charles Payne in the pursuit of creating a more complete and complex narrative of the black freedom struggle through historically grounded local studies. Placing local people at the center of civil rights history rather than at its periphery forces the myths of the movement to crumble. Local studies demonstrate that non-violence coexisted alongside self-defense in the South and throughout the nation. They reveal the role women played as local organizers alongside men who missed the spotlight as national mobilizers. Finally, local studies implode the notion that the civil rights movement took place only in the South between 1954 and 1965 and challenge the sharp dichotomies made between civil rights and black power. The goal now is to connect the local, the regional, the national, and when possible, the transnational. Local people from all over the nation drove the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (PPC)—the first truly national, multiracial anti-poverty movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) built Resurrection City—a temporary shantytown of plywood A-frame houses on the National Mall—to display the appalling living conditions endured by the poor and provide a home base for daily protests at various government buildings. But the nine regional caravans that transported the multi-racial coalition of the poor to the capital connected local movements with the national campaign in Washington, D.C. The caravans enabled local people to place their individual needs in a national context and recognize the systemic roots of their poverty. This presentation focuses on the most dramatic of the nine regional caravans, the Mule Train—a caravan of approximately fifteen mule-drawn covered wagons—and Marks, Mississippi, the small Delta town that served as the launching pad for the Mule Train and the PPC. Caravanning to the capital as a moving political theater, the Mule Train enabled participants to perform the limits on poor people’s mobility—both economic and physical. Cultural geographer Tim Cresswell argues that mobility is a site of ideology construction that often invokes contradictory meanings, since it has meant freedom and opportunity for some and shiftlessness and deviance for others. This analysis considers how representations of the Mule Train and its participants fall along racial, class, and gendered lines and how the caravan used mobility as a form of political resistance. The participants’ courage to endure the long and arduous journey and protest in Washington challenges culture of poverty depictions of the poor as lazy and apathetic. Drawing on interviews with Mule Train participants and SCLC archival materials, this presentation demonstrates how the PPC transformed one Delta community and its residents and considers how representations of and memorials to the Mule Train have affected perceptions of poverty nationally and people’s experiences locally. Connecting the past with the present and concentrating on the process of organizing rather than evaluating whether or not the PPC succeeded in meeting its goals, can help us understand what motivates people to join social movements and how they effect participants’ lives. PPC IN CHICAGO