Rhetoric Race and Religion
On February 12, 1968, Martin Luther King and his staff completed the master plan for what they dubbed the “Poor People’s Campaign.” The purpose of the campaign was to mobilize masses of impoverished Americans of all races and regions to descend upon the nation’s capital to “place the problems of the poor at the seat of government” and remain until the government announced substantive measures to address their plight. King was uniquely positioned to lead so bold a challenge to the forces of America’s economic and political status quo. Yet he knew the Poor People’s Campaign would attract to him enemies more powerful than he’d faced before. Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4, 1968 — just days before the Poor People’s Campaign was to begin. Was this mere coincidence? Or was there something more at work? A largely forgotten event in American history might reveal an answer.
The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 granted America’s World War I veterans “bonus” pension certificates. However, the certificates could not be redeemed until 1945. As the Great Depression deepened, desperate veterans pleaded for early redemption of their certificates, to no avail. In May of 1932, three hundred frustrated, desperate veterans journeyed to the nation’s capital to demand immediate cash payment. In the next few months thousands of veterans and their families joined them.
By July 1932 some 43,000 “Bonus Marchers,” as they came to be called, had descended on the capital and built more than two dozen camps — the largest with 15,000 people — that they ran with organizational discipline like a bona fide city, digging in for an extended occupation if it came to be necessary.
On July 17 the Bonus Marchers amassed on Capital Hill to await the vote on a hastily crafted congressional bill that would allow early redemption. The legislation was decisively defeated. Congress demanded that the campsites be dismantled, but the bulk of the protestors refused to leave. Tempers flared. On July 28, two veterans were killed during an armed police eviction gone awry. Concerned that there would be more violence, President Herbert Hoover called out the US Army to destroy the camps and forcibly remove the Bonus Marchers from Washington. What followed was a full-fledged military action replete with tanks, infantry and calvary regiments, fixed bayonets and tear gas. By nightfall, hundreds had been injured. A baby and a 12-year old boy later died of their injuries.
Read the rest here
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In