EPISODE 10: THE CAMPAIGN ## CHAPTER 1: A NEW PHASE By late 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. was planning the most ambitious campaign of his life. The civil rights movement had won its legislative victories. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Legal segregation was dead. But Martin understood that legal equality without economic equality was meaningless. "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger?" he asked. "What does it profit him to have access to the hotels of our nation if he doesn't earn enough money to take his family on a vacation?" The next phase had to address poverty directly. Not just Black poverty—all poverty. The millions of Americans, white and Black, who worked full-time and still couldn't feed their families. The structural inequality built into the economic system itself. "We are now making demands that will cost the nation something," Martin explained. "You're asking for something that has never been given before. You're really tampering now with the captains of industry." He called it the Poor People's Campaign. --- ## CHAPTER 2: THE VISION The campaign would bring thousands of poor people to Washington, D.C.—Black and white, Latino and Native American, from cities and from rural areas....