"We came there in hope and left in despair," Steiner says. Steiner went to the Mall and stayed the entire six weeks, slogging through mud left by frequent downpours until he says police contrived ways to shut it down in June. The assassination of King the month before left the campaign dispirited and bereft of effective leadership. They were to descend on the nation's capital in May 1968, camp out in a tent village on the National Mall for several weeks and carry out massive acts of civil disobedience as King and others urged Congress to pass an Economic Bill of Rights. King conceived the "Poor People's Campaign" as a multiracial coalition of poor people from across the United States. Roughly Speaking podcast: Taylor Branch: King's legacy about the future as much as the past » Months later, King launched a nationwide movement for which the 21-year-old Steiner would volunteer. "A lot of people, especially in SNCC, thought King meant well but didn't push hard enough," he says.Ī year to the day before his death, King alienated many in the movement, including NAACP president Ralph Bunche, but won over Steiner and others with an anti-Vietnam War, pro-social justice speech at Riverside Church in New York. The murder of King, he says,"proved once and for all that the system couldn't be reformed" - and the realization led him to become part, in his own way, of what historian Peter Levy calls the "black power surge" that took hold in the city.īirt watched with interest as members of the Black Panther Party grew more visible store owners hung Black Liberation flags and photos of Malcolm X high school and college students formed black student unions, and a few educators started teaching Swahili.īut the intensity of the battle - Steiner got his nose broken, and was arrested before he turned 18 - and meeting such figures as Gloria Richardson, the African-American housewife who declined to forswear the use of arms in self-defense while leading a local movement in Cambridge, led him to question King's approach. He told stunned white classmates that the damage was their fault - that a history that embraced slavery and lynchings had created a wellspring of anger. He says the feeling has never quite left him.īirt didn't take part in the riots that erupted across Baltimore, but he didn't blame those who did. And Birt, then 15, vowed he'd "never forget they killed Dr. Oliver said nothing had ever hurt him so deeply. Maryland Institute students show their sentiments with this Mount Royal Station sign. My mother might have believed he was the apostle who replaced Judas." But "in my family, and for many people, Dr. "I'm not sure everyone was sold on his philosophy of nonviolence," he says. Birt told any grownup who'd listen that King was "fighting for the freedom of our people." His parents saw King as a nearly biblical figure. The minister's picture was everywhere: in the Birt home, on friends' mantels, in barbershops. It wasn't long before Birt knew King as the man leading the war against such ignorance. "My mother tried to make it clear that it was something wrong not with us, but with the system," recalls Birt, 65, a philosophy professor at Bowie State University. The park's policy became a flashpoint in the local fight for civil rights in the early 1960s. But his mother, Hattie Mae, a Bible teacher, sat him down and shared the harsh truth: Gwynn Oak Park in Baltimore County didn't admit people with their skin color. His father, Oliver, a factory worker, dodged the question.
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