Resurrection City 1968

Region: Palestina, Huila, Colombia
Producer: Multi-Producer Lot
Altitude: 1700 meters
Varietal: Tabi
Process: Washed

Our annual Black History Month Special Release from our Head Roast, JR.

Five simple demands: meaningful work, a living wage, access to land, access to capital, a role in government.

If you’re reading this in 2026, this may sound like what you talk about with your friends and coworkers, your family and loved ones. Most people in today’s hypercapitalist economy feel underrepresented in government, overworked, and blocked from achieving the “American Dream”. College education is no longer enough. Connections are no longer enough. Everything is just hard.

But those five simple demands aren’t from 2026 or 2025 or even post 2000. They’re from the Poor Peoples’ Campaign in 1968. In the aftermath of Dr King’s assassination, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was fresh off the highs of helping President Johnson pass the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, and immediately began to look to creating a nationwide movement of poor people and economic equality. The SCLC understood that poverty wasn’t a racial issue solely, but an issue of class, access, and education. The idea of scarcity rang as false, and the SCLC wanted to take LBJ’s War on Poverty across the country with demonstrations led by the working poor and their first big effort was on the National Mall in DC.

Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the new SCLC president after Dr. King, received permits from the National Park Service for 3000 people to encamp near the Reflecting Pool. Within days after their 12 May start, SCLC workers and folks from the Interior Department built over 600 plywood and plastic sheet huts, while it would later also hold three dining hubs, a medical facility, a nursery, and city hall. This would be Resurrection City, zip code 20013.

Resurrection City would only last 42 days, full of ups and downs, setbacks and progress, but the effect of the campaign cannot be understated. Two successful marches, one on Mothers Day 1968, and 19 June 1968, saw 5000 and 50,000 people respectively, all joined in on a campaign for class consciousness and an end to poverty. Over Resurrection City’s 42 days, the encampment resembled a real city: a mayor, neighborhoods, block parties, and yes, some violent misfortune that allowed the federal government to mostly ignore the work of the Poor Peoples Campaign but not the activists within Resurrection City, nor the locals within Washington, DC.

I don’t want to spoil the entire story, as you look into Resurrection City’s full history on your own, but an idea that began with Dr King bringing coalescence to a multiethnic and multiracial community of poor people and taking them to the footsteps of the elected representatives of all people so that their poverty could not be ignored isn’t just Black history or DC history–it’s American history. It’s a movement that needs more focus and attention and should be taught in schools. The tactics used to dismantle Resurrection City look very much like the tactics used to dismantle mass movements in modern day. 

Five simple demands, of the people, for the people, by the people.