The Southern Christian Leadership Conference plans a June action designed to bring the nation face-to-face with its poorest people. The focus of this "poor people's" demonstration will be the towns and rural areas of the Mississippi Delta.
Worth your reading:
SCLC plans Poor People's Campaign
ERRIN HAINES
The Associated Press
ATLANTA - The Southern Christian Leadership Conference hopes to mobilize 50,000 people in the Mississippi Delta this summer in a campaign to draw attention to the poverty of a region where some Americans still live in homes with dirt floors and brown water flows from their faucets.
The effort is much like the one envisioned by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was planning a Poor People's Campaign and march on Washington before he was assasinated in 1968.
SCLC Interim President Byron Clay announced the initiative in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. He said the efforts would be centered not on the nation's capital, but in towns along the soil-rich, resource-poor Delta region.
"We will bring this nation face to face with poverty," Clay said. "We are organizing poor people of all colors, to form the kind of beloved community that Martin Luther King Jr. talked about."
A report published earlier this year by Oxfam America found that residents in the Mississippi Delta are living in conditions similar to the world's poorest countries.
[Read more of this interesting report from the AP ]
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