After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, his successors led one last march on Washington. This was “the Poor People’s Campaign” – a campaign planned by King before his death, in an attempt to transcend race and address the social eco-nomic question of poverty. Attracting leaders of all colors and creating a feeble yet operational coalition, King aimed to bring people in poverty to the capital in hopes that their presence would make their plight clearer and harder to ignore.
Using the method of narrative analysis, this paper goes deep into a neglected part of a mostly neglected campaign: the testimonies before Congress of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. I analyze congressional records to expose the narratives of people in poverty who were brought to give testimony of their needs in front of Congress.

In the age of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and other social uprisings, the im-portance of individual lived experience in the face of oppression is emphasized. But what is the place of individual stories told in the process of legislation and law-making? Specifically, this paper will discuss what is the place of such testimonies in the legislation of poverty laws that are inherently legislated for the “othered.” Traditionally controlled and conducted by ‘experts’ focused on macro- economics, those laws are biased toward epistemic hierarchy valuing statistics and ‘objective’ data over experience and personal testimonies.

This case study, taken from the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, shows how people in poverty choose to present two seemingly opposite claims to achieve the same goal: epistemic power. At the same time, the speakers emphasize their proximity to the listeners and their vast distance. Exposing this dual narrative is important to under-standing resistance and poverty alleviation discourses today.

Click to Continue Reading We are Exactly the Same, We are Totally Different: People in Poverty’s Dual Narrative in Striving for Epistemic Standing