The cache is a flat black-painted waterproof matchstick container
with a log inside. Please bring your own pen or pencil. This cache
is in dedication to the Mule Train, which traveled from Marks to
Atlanta, GA, and eventually ended in Washington, D.C. in 1968. The
Mule Train was a part of the Civil Rights Movement. Here's the
history lesson!
Marks,
Mississippi & The Mule Train
During the mid-to-late
1960s Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the small Delta town of
Marks, Mississippi on two occasions, both of which moved him to
tears and prompted him to intensify his commitment to combating
poverty. His second trip to Marks ensured that this little Delta
town would be the local focal point for his grandest national
campaign. While many journalists and politicians recommended that
government officials travel to the pockets of poverty throughout
the nation, King insisted that poor people caravan to the seat of
government so they could be seen and heard. The Mule Train, along
with the other regional caravans, was the key to connecting the
local experience of poor people with the national anti-poverty
movement. Marks and the Quitman County area would remain a focal
point as home of the Mule Train.
On Sunday, May
12, 1968, Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) participants joined
with Coretta Scott King and National Welfare Rights Organization
(NWRO) activists in Washington for a Mother’s Day march
launching the national stage of the PPC. The following day, as
Ralph Abernathy broke ground declaring the site on the National
Mall as Resurrection City, the two lead mules, Bullet and Ada,
steered the Mule Train along the first day of its journey.
Approximately one hundred people and fifteen Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) staff set off in seventeen mule-drawn
covered wagons. The group included more than forty women and twenty
children, with ages ranging from eight months to over seventy years
old, with the majority being between seventeen and thirty years of
age.
Most of the
people the Mule Train encountered were kind and charitable, but the
caravan faced resistance from the very beginning. Opposition was
not the caravan’s only problem. They also had to cope with
the forces of nature and the challenges of traveling in a mule
train alongside busy highways. The caravan started out slow to
appease both the mules and the nervous travelers making their first
stop in nearby Batesville, just ten miles east of Marks. On their
second day, the group headed down Highway 51 to Courtland, just
five miles south of Batesville, and arrived the following day, May
16, in Grenada, Mississippi. The group stayed in Grenada, an SCLC
base since 1966, for four days before making their way on through
Duck Hill, Winona, and Kilmichael, Mississippi between May 20 and
May 22. On May 24 the Mule Train rolled through Starkville, home of
Mississippi State University. In the following days, the Mule Train
plugged along through Columbus and on to the Mississippi-Alabama
border. After spending a couple of days in both Reform and
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the Mule Train rounded out the month of May
with stops in Cottondale and Bessemer, Alabama, where they lost one
of their wagons. In the following days, the Mule Train proceeded
through Alabama, making the arduous journey through the foothills
of the Appalachians surrounding Birmingham. They arrived in the
legendary civil rights city on June 2, where they would remain for
the next few days.
Most of the Mule
Train participants were from Quitman County, but wherever the
caravan stopped throughout Mississippi and Alabama the group picked
up new participants. In Birmingham, Ralph Abernathy’s entire
family joined the group and traveled with the Mule Train on its
remaining journey between Birmingham and Atlanta. This stretch of
the journey was particularly difficult. Not only did the mules have
to muster the strength to make it up hills, the Mule Train also had
to face a new problem - traveling downhill with no brakes. Ropes,
poles, and other make-shift gadgets to improvise a braking system
for the would-be run-away wagons had to be used.
In its first
month of travel, the Mule Train covered approximately five hundred
miles averaging about twenty-five miles per day. It took the
caravan from May 13 to June 15 for the Mule Train to make its way
from Marks, Mississippi to Atlanta, Georgia. The caravan made it
through both Mississippi and Alabama with no major confrontations,
just minor heckling from small contingents of whites and local or
state police. The caravan finally arrived in Atlanta on June 15,
where the weary travelers spent several days visiting King-related
sites before they were shipped out on trains to Alexandria,
Virginia.
While the
participants remained unidentified, the Mule Train was able to
display their poverty, their pride, and their persistence to people
throughout the nation.
Credits
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2007/wrighta71412/wrighta71412.pdf
(Amy Nathan Wright)
Ernest C. Withers (I Have A Dream pic)
Roland L. Freeman (mule train into AL pic)
As always, please be sure to place the lid securely on the
container and please place the cache back exactly as found. Be safe
and happy hunting!