When Milwaukee tried to keep King’s promise — again
Martin Luther King had wanted a second march on Washington in 1968 — this time, focusing on jobs and economic opportunity.
After King was assassinated on April 4 — in Memphis, Tenn., where he had made a sanitation workers strike an example of the economic injustices strangling America — the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, decided to carry on that dream.
The idea was to “occupy” Washington, D.C., for weeks to draw attention to King’s call for action on a $30 billion anti-poverty program. The campaign would culminate in a march May 30.
In Milwaukee, civil rights organizations decided the city could use a march of its own. On May 11, 14 local groups, including the SCLC and the National Association of Social Workers, formed a committee to organize a local Poor People’s Campaign, complete with a march and a tent city, to take place the same time as the march on Washington.
The Rev. E.L. Sherman, Milwaukee staff leader for SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, and Jesse E. Wray, a forklift operator who had recently run for office, were named co-chairmen.
Sherman said the tent city would give “the Common Council, Mayor (Henry) Maier and Chief (Harold) Breier nightmares,” The Milwaukee Journal’s Frank A. Aukofer reported in a May 12 story.
The Washington march had challenges from the start; lead organizer, Bayard Rustin, asked that the march be postponed until June 19.
The Milwaukee group decided to keep its original May 30 date.
The local march was to start in Garfield Park (now Rose Park, at North King Drive and West Burleigh Street) and head south to City Hall. County park officials approved plans for a tent city — The Journal called it a “tent-in” — in the park from May 30 to June 2.
(Tents and cots came from Camp McCoy, which lent them to the organization from surplus.)
On May 27, march leaders announced they had sent telegrams to Maier, County Executive John Doyne, Common Council President Robert J. Jendusa and city Health Commissioner E.R. Krumbiegel, asking the officials to meet the marchers in front of City Hall to receive the group’s list of 78 demands, from a guaranteed family income of $4,000 a year to an all-inclusive fair housing law.
About 300 people — 100 of them white, the Sentinel reported — set out from Garfield Park after a morning rally on May 30. Another 100, “almost all of them white,” joined the march at North 16th Street and West Wisconsin Avenue.
Also in the march: a donkey named Mabel, brought from a farm in Waukesha County, as a symbol of “the plight of the poor,” Charles Gessert, a Marquette University medical student, told the Sentinel.
At City Hall, the marchers were met by Jendusa, the Common Council president, then Sherman and five others went up to Maier’s office to meet with the mayor. By the time the meeting with Maier was over 20 minutes
later, The Journal noted, more than half of the marchers had left.
The remaining marchers headed north on Third Street to Garfield Park, where some had trouble hiding their frustration. “We might take a trip and put (the tent city) in Mayor Maier’s backyard,” former County Supervisor Isaac Coggs told The Journal.
Although the Sentinel initially described the tent city as “carefree and relaxed,” it didn’t remain that way.
Although Sherman had predicted that more than 120 people would camp out in the park, the Sentinel’s Bernice Buresh reported on June 1 that, by the second night, only about 20 people remained — and that included Sherman and several of Operation Breadbasket’s new “Peacemakers,” a bodyguard-like group organized by Sherman that appeared to be similar to the NAACP Youth Council’s Commandos.
Meanwhile, march co-chair Wray quit May 31. He told The Journal’s Aukofer, in a June 3 story: “The problems of the poor, and their suffering, are much too real — and I am too much a part of it — to let myself be used.”
Sherman, who denied there was friction in the movement, vowed to hold a second “tent-in” in Milwaukee. But the County Park Commission rejected the group’s application, approving instead permits for picnics Aug. 1-4, giving the group use of Garfield Park but without camping overnight.