Activists channel Martin Luther King with new national climate campaign

The Poor People’s Campaign, which revived King’s anti-poverty efforts, is taking a modern focus on the environment after the Flint crisis

The Poor People’s Campaign’s attempt to stage a “moral revival” across dozens of US states echoes much of its 1968 antecedent – a guttural cry to shake America from a miasma of racism, poverty and militarism. But the modern version has also opened up a new battleground – the environment.

Last week, as several hundred protesters tried and failed to gain entry to the Kentucky statehouse, concerns over healthcare roiled the crowd. But the campaigners also decried the pollution of air and water by the state’s mining industry, which has sickened residents and contributed to a sprawling, existential crisis – climate change – that was barely on the horizon when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.

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