The Nation - News from April 6, 1988

Marchers in a cross-country pilgrimage for the poor stepped off from the small Memphis, Tenn., motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died 20 years ago. “We’re trying to stir up the countryside. We’re trying to bring people out to express their outrage about poverty,” said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization founded by King. In their travels through Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, the group plans to ride in vans for the rural parts of the trip and stage marches and rallies at towns along the way. The pilgrimage is expected to arrive in Atlanta on April 29.