Sylvie Laurent seeks to rehabilitate and highlight the significance of the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s work on behalf of economic justice in the late 1960s, which she sees as the culmination of a radical black tradition dating back to the end of slavery. Whereas some accounts of the PPC portray it as a futile and failed effort to force policy makers to direct more resources to solving poverty in an era when urban riots, white backlash politics, and the growing influence of conservatives in Congress undermined support for the black freedom movement, Laurent argues that its participants’ analysis of the structural defects of capitalism were both accurate and prescient. Excavating King’s writings along with works by other Americans who examined the sources of racial and economic inequality in the United States, Laurent challenges the notion that civil rights activists were “radicalized” after 1965, demonstrating that...

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