AMERICA:While the rich have seen their fortunes multiply in the last 40 years, the lot of the poor is unchanged, writes Denis Staunton
ACROSS THE United States this weekend, especially in the South, African-Americans will celebrate Juneteenth, the country's oldest commemoration of the end of slavery.
It marks June 19th, the day Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 with news that the Civil War had ended and that slaves had been freed more than two years earlier.
For decades after the Texas slaves were freed, African-Americans took a day off on June 19th, holding barbecues and staging rodeos and parades, often led by a mule-drawn wagon. A couple of weeks before July 4th, Juneteenth was for many blacks their own Independence Day.
"We were Americans and no longer slaves, it's true, but our special segregated day, June 19, said that America was as much our country as it was theirs. A source of pride. A weird paradox at best: The most outrageous sort of social separateness within our still-floundering country was forcing, inexorably, the nation's growth toward humaneness," poet and essayist James Thomas Jackson wrote in 1978.
Juneteenth fell into neglect in the middle of the 20th century as civil rights leaders fought for the integration of blacks and whites but the holiday made a dramatic comeback in 1968, when it provided the theme for the Poor People's March on Washington.
Planned by Martin Luther King before his assassination in April 1968, the Poor People's Campaign brought together blacks, whites, American Indians and Hispanics to demand radical action to combat poverty.
Thousands of people joined the march on May 12th, led by a mule-train and guided by King's successor, Ralph Abernathy. When they reached Washington, the protesters built a makeshift community of teepees and plywood structures which they called Resurrection City.
"We come with an appeal to open the doors of America to the almost 50 million Americans who have not been given a fair share of America's wealth and opportunity, and we will stay until we get it," Abernathy said.
They chose Abernathy as mayor and provided food, sewage facilities and schools while organising a campaign of lobbying key government departments.
"People were organised in their areas of interest," recalled Walter Fauntroy, pastor at New Bethel Baptist Church.
"If you were an Indian, you wanted to go to the interior, to talk to people in Indian Affairs. Let them know that policy needs to change. If you were a farmer, you went to Agriculture."
As torrential rain turned Resurrection City into a mudbath and protesters began to despair at the cold reception they received from some officials, musicians like Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary offered entertainment and a young Jesse Jackson gave the demonstrators hope. "I am somebody," he told them.
"I am God's child. I may not have a job, but I am somebody." The climax came on June 19th, when 50,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for a huge Juneteenth celebration with speeches from political leaders and music by Eartha Kitt.
Five days later, police moved in, firing tear gas into the camp and soon afterwards, bulldozers demolished Resurrection City.
Conventional wisdom said the Poor People's Campaign failed because its demands were too radical, calling for drastic change in the US economic system, including income guarantees for the poor. Time magazine wrote at the time that the campaign's leaders refused to demand anything the government could give under present circumstances. "Instead, they snapped at any outstretched Administration hand," the magazine wrote.
At the time of the march, 25 million people - nearly 13 per cent of the US population - were living below the poverty level, according to the census bureau. In 2006, there were 36 million below the poverty line - more than 12 per cent of the population.
If the situation of the poor has changed little over the past 40 years, the rich have seen their fortunes multiply as inequality reaches levels not seen in the US since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
In 1968, the top 0.01 per cent of US families had an average income 200 times that of the bottom 90 per cent; by 2006 the top earners were making almost 1000 times as much as the rest.