In March 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. visited Marks to gain support for a Poor People's Campaign, envisioning masses converging on Washington in a plea for new anti-poverty projects and wanting the march to begin in Mississippi with mules and wagon trains. Shocked on visits to Marks, Mississippi, in 1966 and 1968 by the number of destitute families and impoverished schools there, he decided to launch the campaign's march on Washington, DC, from Marks using mule-drawn wagons to dramatize its theme. After King's death on April 4, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the Marks Mule Train and his lieutenants, including Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young, James Bevel, and Willie Bolden, came to Marks, met with community activists at the Eudora A.M.E. Zion church, and planned rallies as marchers converged on the town and stayed with local families and in churches. Mules were brought in from outside Marks because mechanized tractors had long displaced them, and torrential rain, inexperience with harnessing and shoeing mules, and the work of assembling covered wagons delayed the caravan about ten days. On May 13, in inclement weather, approximately fifty people, including Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff, set out in about fifteen covered wagons drawn by two mules each, accompanied by two cars and a truck carrying portable toilets, food, and belongings, while twelve Greyhound buses carried additional marchers separately to Washington. The Mule Train traveled from Marks by way of Batesville, Grenada, Winona, Columbus, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Atlanta, where mules and passengers boarded trains for Washington, DC, and along the way passengers slept in wagons, cars, churches, and local homes while encountering both bomb threats and heckling and encouragement from onlookers. In its first month the Mule Train covered approximately five hundred miles at about twenty-five miles per day, taking from May 13 to June 15 to reach Atlanta, and though finally forced to travel by other transportation, Mississippians joined others in the National Mall encampment called Resurrection City.