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    How A Mule Train From Marks, Miss., Kicked Off MLK's Poor People Campaign

    Martin Luther King Jr. chose Marks as a starting point for the economic justice fight because of the entrenched poverty he saw there. Today, poverty remains a challenge in Marks.
    by Debbie Elliott May 13, 2018 6 minutes
    The Rev. Michael Jossel remembers excitement about the mule train when he was a teenager. He says people were caught up in the belief that change was going to come, and willing to get fired for supporting the campaign.

    Fifty years ago today, a mule train left the small town of Marks, Miss., bound for the nation's capital. They were answering a call to action the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made just days before he was assassinated.

    "We're coming to Washington in a poor people's campaign," King announced at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968. "I was in Marks, Miss., the other day, which is in Quitman County, the poorest county in the United States. And I tell you I saw hundreds of black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear."

    The civil rights leader described being brought to tears by the conditions he found in the Mississippi Delta — a flat expanse in the northwest part of the state with rich alluvial soil along the Mississippi River. That's why he picked Marks as the starting point for the Poor People's Campaign — a multiracial coalition of poor people who would occupy the national mall and demand economic justice.

    "Bring the

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