The National Museum of African American History and Culture will commemorate the 50th anniversary and final crusade of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and legacy.
The “City of Hope: Resurrection City & the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign” Exhibition features never-before-seen images from photographers Roland Freeman, Jill Freeman, Robert Houston, Laura Jones, Clara Watkins and Ernest Withers.
The “City of Hope: Resurrection City & the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign” exhibition features rare film and oral histories with those who assisted in organizing the campaign. Activists Marian Wright Edelman and Andrew Young will appear in the exhibition.
The “City of Hope” exhibition also features placards, murals, wooden tent panels and lapel buttons created and used by close to 8,000 people who “occupied the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for nearly a month and a half to call attention to the devastating effects of poverty on minorities, the elderly and children.
“With new and recently discovered film and audio footage, images and objects, this exhibition provides a rare look inside the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign and commemorates the legacy of Dr. King’s final campaign for economic justice,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “This exhibition reminds us that despite the unprecedented economic growth in America over the past five decades, there are still many Americans living below the poverty line.”
The exhibition will be housed in the museum’s gallery as a partner to the “American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith,” an exhibit that explores the “history of citizen participation, debate and compromise from the nation’s formation to today,” a press release announcing the exhibit states.
The Poor People’s Campaign may have fallen short of its goal of ending poverty, but it did spawn a multiethnic and multiracial movement in the name of economic fairness. The campaign’s founders stood for “helping America live up to its ideals.”
For more information visit www.nmaahc.si.edu.
