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In that fraught and unsettled spring of 1968, Kenneth Jadin had a problem.
The 25-year-old architecture professor at Howard University needed a chunk of land. A big, big chunk of land.
Jadin and others had been tasked with the difficult challenge of figuring out how and where to house thousands of activists who would be flooding into Washington DC for an anti-poverty demonstration so grand in scale and so ambitious in scope that no one had ever seen anything like it.
Decades before Occupy Wall Street mainstreamed the notion of protest as semi-permanent encampment, Washington was about to become the scene of a demonstration so fixed in place that it would have its own zip code: 20013.
The demonstration was to be the centrepiece of Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign, which he envisioned as a bold call to action to pressure the government to do more to address poverty. Jadin had a meeting scheduled with King, a man he admired but had yet to see in person, to discuss the difficult logistics of his plan to occupy Washington. That meeting was set to take place the first week of April.
But first, King would travel to Memphis, where an assassin's bullet took his life.
The shots fired by James Earl Ray did not, however, halt King's vision for a nonviolent show of civil disobedience - featuring a diverse array of African-Americans, as well as Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and Appalachian and rural whites - intended to rattle the capital and its powerful inhabitants. Jadin and other volunteers kept planning. They'd been considering staging the demonstration site - which would take the name "Resurrection City" - at an abandoned airfield or on undeveloped land owned by a cemetery. But now they pressed for approval for their first choice.
"We're going to get the National Mall," Jadin, now a professor emeritus at Howard, remembers telling colleagues. "They can't say no now."
And he was right. In the weeks to come a city grew on the expanse of land between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. At its height, 3,000 people would take up residence there in tents that Jadin designed.
But in a sense what they did there has been lost to time, wedged as it...