The Poor People’s Campaign was a march on Washington D.C. to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States that began on this day in 1968, just one month after the assassination of one of its key organizers, MLK Jr.

The protest was also organized by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King’s assassination.

After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.

Among those demands was a proposal for an “economic bill of rights” that included a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure, and more low-income housing for poor Americans of all races.

"I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…

When we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…

That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…"

-MLK Jr., in a 1967 planning meeting

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

Theory:

      • forcefemjdwon [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        7 hours ago

        What did I miss? The resolution seemed egregiously eugenic, and that’s ignoring the fact that uplift fiction hinges itself on sentience being primarily a biological phenomenon.

        • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          6 hours ago

          Eugenics isn’t just whenever you do genetics. The Portiids’ plan at the resolution doesn’t eliminate anybody, doesn’t even gesture towards any kind of population control, it just allows a widening of empathy in people who already exist.

          One of the central characters driving the entire plot is a specifically non-biological sentient.

          Unless you’re talking about dualism, which is objectively wrong and not materialist.

          • forcefemjdwon [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            4 hours ago

            And eugenics does not require killing anyone if the desired biological traits can be altered post birth. The Portiids resolve the conflict by using the nanovirus to re-engineer humans to be more empathetic. This reflects the author’s liberal politics that key parts of human (individual and social) psychology are pre-determined by physical substrate rather than social relations. “Human nature,” whether “material” or metaphysical. We already have a way to expand human empathy without conceding to the arguments of 19th century liberal scientists — it’s called communism.

            • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              3 hours ago

              The humans are actively in the process of genociding/xenociding the Portiids when the Portiids use the nanovirus on them.

              Suggesting communism as a cure for arachnophobia is, frankly, deeply unserious.

              That said, once the Portiids gets the humans to stop xenociding them, the Portiids and Humans spend the rest of the series doing Star Trek style IDIC communism across the stars.

              Calling this all eugenicist is very silly.

              • forcefemjdwon [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                1·
                52 minutes ago

                All of this happens because the author wills it according to his personal, eugenicist, politics. I’m not questioning in-universe strategy. I am questioning the politics of this subgenre of science fiction.