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Assembling The Poor People's Campaign (1968) Queer Activism And Economic Justice, Christina Juhasz-Wood

American Studies ETDs

This thesis attempts to bring the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) of 1968 into contemporary discussions about queer scholarship and activism. The PPC assembled a diverse racial and ethnic constituency in an unprecedented way to produce a massive, national political campaign to end poverty. This complex assemblage was largely indecipherable to the press and many historians, which has contributed to the view that the campaign was a failure, particularly in relation to the civil rights movement . I describe how the mainstream gay rights movement appropriates the civil rights movement as normative to seek forms of national inclusion. I argue that …