Content area
Full Text
Smithsonian Exhibit
While Martin Luther King, Jr. is most famous for using non-violent tactics to secure civil rights for Blacks, his struggle for economic justice on behalf of all poor people is "often undervalued and less understood," said Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The museum attempts to rectify that by highlighting King's last human rights crusade in a new exhibit called "City of Hope: Resurrection City & the 1968 Poor People's Campaign."
The exhibit centers on a 43-day demonstration with nearly 8,000 protestors living in Resurrection City, a makeshift community they occupied on the National Mall to protest poverty. The exhibit opened Jan. 9 in the gallery the museum maintains at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History located in Northwest D.C. Commemorating the 50,h anniversary of Resurrection City is how the museum will recognize King's upcoming Jan. 15 birthday.
"In 2018, there will be so much attention and discourse - rightly so - about the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr," Bunch told reporters Jan. 9 at a media preview of the exhibition. "At the National Museum of African American History and Culture, we decided to acknowledge that moment, not by focusing on King's death, (but) by helping the public remember his legacy and the issues, some of which are still unmet that he challenged America to address."
In 1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helmed by...