A two-day national conference at the university to commemorate the Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train that trekked from Marks to Washington, D.C. 50 years ago kicks off today.
The conference is officially called “Honoring the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Mule Train/Poor People’s Campaign by Implementing Classroom Theory in Marks, Mississippi” and will take place Wednesday and Thursday in several locations on and off campus, including Marks, which is where the campaign originated.
This conference is part of a yearlong series of events to remember the 1,000 mile trip from Marks (an hour west of Oxford) to the nation’s capital by 28 wagons pulled by mules in an effort to draw attention to poverty, according to a UM press release.
Martin Luther King Jr. was set to lead the campaign against poverty after visiting Marks in 1966 and seeing the poverty-stricken community. He was assassinated April 4, 1968, shortly before the trip, which was initiated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King had been president of before his death.
The goal of the campaign was to lobby the federal government for better access to jobs and living wages, according to a history of the campaign published on mississippistories.org.
Wednesday’s first event will be a workshop meant to encourage community-based research for faculty, students and any interested members of the community between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Wednesday at Insight Park in Oxford.
John Green, co-coordinator for the conference, explained that community-based research focuses on interactions between community residents, leaders and researchers that can benefit everyone involved.
“The idea is to conduct applied research that helps communities address issues of concern while also generating knowledge that is useful to others,” Green said. “Oftentimes, this is done in a participatory manner where community members are involved as co-researchers themselves and engage in various parts of the research process.”
Green said the plan for this workshop is to focus on opportunities to conduct this type of collaborative research across a wide range of topics.
“However, many of the examples and lessons learned will be drawn from projects focused on education and workforce development, food and nutrition and health outcomes in the Delta region,” Green said.
Presenters at the workshop will include representatives from the McLean Institute for Public Service and Community Engagement, Tri-County Workforce Alliance (a nonprofit organization based in the Delta) and the Center for Population Studies, which houses the Community Based Research Collaborative, according to Green.
The conference’s keynote address will be delivered by the Rev. Michael C. Jossell Sr., pastor of Mt. Zion M.B. Church in Lambert, at 2:30 p.m. in the Barnard Observatory. He is set to discuss his participation in the waggon campaign 50 years ago, among other topics.
Curtis Wilkie, UM professor and Overby fellow, will discuss researching and addressing issues (including those which motivated the Poor People’s Campaign) with a panel of UM faculty and community members from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Friday. The panel will take place at the Jackson Avenue Center in Auditorium A and will also be livestreamed for viewers in Marks.
The conference will wrap up with another workshop from 5 to 7 p.m. in Marks led by UM journalism instructor Ellen Meacham. She was asked to help with the workshop because of her experience in the Delta. Meacham has been working for several years on a book titled “Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi” that will be released next month.
The workshop developed because people in Marks had expressed that they thought there were still quite a few people who had stories to share, whether on paper or in photographs, documents or diaries.
“It sort of grew out of the idea that there were still quite a few people who had valuable memories,” Meacham said. “My area of skill is telling stories and helping students tell stories, so I felt that was something I could offer.”
Meacham said she isn’t sure what the end result will be but said they hope for the Marks community to take the lead.
“We’re going to be there as a resource and offer the training that we have, but they will be the ones who decide what they want to preserve and how they want to approach it,” Meacham said. “Hopefully they will be better informed on how to go about that and trained with a few basic skills to be able to do a better job of it.”
There are lessons to be learned from the Poor People’s Campaign, and the people of Marks will be able to piece together a more complete picture of it through participating this conference.
The campaign came after a crucial moment when the civil rights movement had some successes with voting rights and access to education and commercial areas, according to Meacham. The movement then pivoted to economic issues, which is where the Mule Train to D.C. came in.
“This was a part of that larger movement and making the people in Washington aware that all of post-war America wasn’t just extremely prosperous,” Meacham said. “There were people who missed out on economic expansion and were making sure there was better, equal kind of approach.”
The conference is co-sponsored by the university’s McLean Institute for Public Service and Community Engagement, Center for Population Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
The observance of the Mule Train’s 50th anniversary began in May 2017 and will wrap up in Marks with a week of scheduled events between May 13 and 18 with a closing ceremony featuring former U.S. Rep. Andrew Young Jr.
