NOMA President Bryan C. Lee, Jr. NOMA, FAIA reflects on the impact of Martin Luther King Jr. speech on The Crisis in American Cities in 1967 and his role in prompting the Poor People’s Campaign of 1967.  Watch the full video or read the full transcript on the President’s Desk.

“There is an irony in choosing to challenge a society that cherishes property over people. Because it then stands to reason that the most impactful challenge to that society is necessarily through its property and not its people. In essence, any movement or any challenge would need to occupy the spaces and places, the property of power, as a point of pressure.”

“Now, I’m paraphrasing a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech The Crisis in American Cities in 1967. This was a central provocation for the Poor People’s Campaign that came the year following. The campaign was a follow up to the March on Washington in 1963.

This was an effort of the SCLC, most of you know as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the idea was to bring together poor communities from across racial demographies and cultural geographies to protest the indignities of systemic poverty. It also marked a significant shift in the movement’s focus from the immediacy of racial justice as a means of survival to the sustainability of racial justice through economic empowerment, this was a direct push of economic and spatial justice, demanding better housing, better schools, better neighborhoods, and all of it centering around the access of capital land and all of its derivatives for, with, and in communities.”

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