Poverty
The Jim Crow system that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked to dismantle depended on economically disempowering Black Americans.
Although Black Americans had worked the land for generations while enslaved, when they became freedpeople they had no claim on the land they had worked for no compensation.
Emancipated Black Americans had to begin from scratch with no money, even as some enslavers were offered compensation from the government for the market value of the Black people they had enslaved. Clark Mills filed a petition for $1,500 in compensation for a man he enslaved named Philip Reid.
Reid was a talented craftsman who helped forge the first equestrian statue and first bronze statue created in the US (left below). Reid was also instrumental in the complex process of casting the Statue of Freedom which still crowns the dome of the US Capitol (center and right below).
(Wikipedia, Public Commons, Architect of the Capital)
Many freed Black people found themselves working the same land they did before emancipation, either for poverty wages or sharecropping under a system that put profits into the pockets of landowners while pushing sharecroppers deeply into debt.
At the beginning of the 20th century, 90% of Black Americans lived in the South, the vast majority in rural areas. Starting in the 1910s, many Black people moved northward to try to seize new manufacturing job opportunities and to escape the segregation, discrimination, and poverty of Jim Crow. By 1970 less than half lived in the South with only 25% in rural areas.
But Jim Crow existed in the North and West too. Housing discrimination meant that the migrants lived in some of the most expensive housing in the city because landlords charged astronomical rents to Black renters, often for squalid accomodations. Systematic employment discrimination limited their economic opportunities and deindustrialization after WWII left many families back in poverty again.
These posters show the activism on both sides regarding racial housing discrimination in Chicago. (CivilRightsVets.com, naraedwards.com)
King’s last campaign before his assassination was the Poor People’s Campaign. King hoped to build a multiracial coalition of poor people who would occupy the national mall and demand economic justice.
Following his death, his fellow activists led a wagon train to Washington, DC. Horse and mule-drawn wagons were an important symbol of this movement.
