If we are serious about developing a more humane economic system in the wake of our nation’s recent woes, it might make sense to reflect on Martin Luther King, Jr’s "dream" of economic justice.
Early in life, King was influenced by the social gospel preached by his father and grandfather, a theology that emphasized the "malignant relationship" between poverty and racism, criticized both capitalist and communist materialism and highlighted a worldly obligation to the poor and downtrodden, ideas that remained central to King’s worldview until his death. King’s academic work as a young man brought him into contact with ideas that reinforced and extended this "christian socialist" philosophy. In the social and theological writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, Mordecai Johnson, Howard Thurman and others, King found support for his opposition to the corrupting influence of wealth and the exploitation of the poor. During the late-1950s, in campaigns from Montgomery to Birmingham, King strove to create a working-class coalition that might strike a deathblow against southern white supremacy and initiate a system of social democracy in the United States. As early as 1957, King told a conference in North Carolina, "I can never accommodate myself to this capitalist system of economics because it denies necessities to the many in order to provide luxuries for the few." He increasingly believed that only a national crusade against poverty, combined with massive political mobilization from below, could secure full equality and liberation for African Americans. Travels to Ghana and India expanded King’s vision of economic justice. While abroad, he discussed political economy and Pan-Africanism with Ghana’s president, Kwama Nkrumah, and the redistributive policies of economic and political "atonement" in India with prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This budding global perspective found public voice in 1956 when King advocated a world in which "privilege and property [are] widely distributed, a world in which men will no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes... [a] world in which men will throw down their sword" in order to love and serve others.
Following the legislative achievements of the mid-1960s, King turned his attention to the enduring problem of economic inequality. He confessed that the "dream" he spoke so eloquently about in 1963 was shattered by the reality of widespread impoverishment. "I still have a dream," he explained, "that one day all of God’s children will have food and clothing and material well-being for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, and freedom for their spirits."
King rejected the growth model of development, pointing out that despite the nation’s longest sustained economic boom, poverty remained pervasive, disproportionately concentrated in minority communities, but also easily seen in deteriorating white working-class neighborhoods and across rural America. Progress was meaningless, he said, when the economy expanded and stock values rose, but millions of Americans did not receive a living wage, health insurance, pension or economic security.
King criticized corporate welfare and "business control" of the state, describing the American system as "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor." He pointed out, "basic industries such as steel, transportation and oil are subsidized," while people "[cry] against welfare handouts to the poor." Congress, he complained, passed laws mainly to "make the rich richer."
King also lamented the "thingification" of American culture, arguing that materialism created a "poverty of spirit" that stood in "glaring contrast" to the abundance of society. "The richer we have become materially," he declared, "the poorer we have become morally and spiritually."
King believed poverty was "the result of ongoing economic exploitation, low wages and income inequality; it was the inevitable outcome of steps taken by the privileged classes to sustain their privileges." The working class and poor were "damned" to segregated, ghettoized neighborhoods, chronic unemployment and low-paying, meaningless jobs that contributed little to community improvement. "Pervasive and persistent want" demoralized the poor, undermined human dignity and led to family disintegration, drug and alcohol abuse, violence and crime. The "violence of poverty," King thought, destroyed "the soul and bodies of people," making it a moral evil.
King understood the relationship between struggling urban communities and affluent suburbs. "The poor and discriminated huddle in the big cities," he noted, "while affluent America displays its new gadgets in the crisp homes of suburbia." King called suburbs "white nooses around the black necks of the cities." "Housing deteriorates in central cities," he groused, "[while] suburbs expand with little regard for what happens to the rest of America." King chided whites’ fixation on crime, violence and other symptoms of urban poverty, claiming it obscured the larger structural roots of economic inequality. "The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society," King asserted. "Negroes live in them but do not make them." Crime, drug use and violence in poor urban neighborhoods were, in King’s view, smaller and "derivative" transgressions compared to the big crimes of policy makers who constructed the unequal system.
King also underscored the link between domestic poverty and American militarism. As Vietnam soaked up more public resources, political pressure to cut back domestic social welfare and urban renewal programs grew. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift," King warned, "is approaching spiritual death." To King, "racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together" in a system of oppression. He urged Americans to reject war and "look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth," at home and abroad.
Disillusioned by the Great Society, King believed that structural change was essential to the liberation of the poor. "True compassion," he said, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." The solution was rooted in a "revolution of values." The nation must place "democratic principles and justice above privilege." He said, "When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Yet, King did not share his culture’s faith in technology. "We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish," he observed, "but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers." King asked, "Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life?" "There is no deficit in human resources," he concluded. "The deficit is in human will."
King advocated "democratic socialism," noting that Sweden had achieved an "equitable division of wealth," eliminated slums and homelessness and provided quality education and medical care for all citizens. He began organizing an interracial movement of the poor, aimed at mobilizing thousands to descend on Washington, D.C., until Congress enacted an "economic bill of rights," a $30 billion package guaranteeing full employment, an annual income, and increased construction of low-income housing. King new his dream of economic justice would not be easy to achieve. "We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out," he cautioned. "Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting," but require the "battering rams of justice." King concluded, "Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.
King emphasized the vulnerabilities of the poor, not their incapacities. What the poor needed most was meaningful and stable work. Full employment would end poverty, stabilize families and stem the growth of urban ghettos. King called for "massive public works programs [to build] decent housing, schools, hospitals, mass transit, urban renewal, parks and recreation centers." These public investments would "enrich society" and spur private investment. King believed that a guaranteed employment program was "dignifying" for the poor and consonant with national values, like work, self-help, and opposition to welfare dependency. "Freed from the smothering prison of poverty that stifles... generation after generation," King asserted, "people could chart their own path and fully realize their human potential."
Tragically, King’s assassination in April of 1968, coupled with the rise of a new conservatism in America, dealt a terrible blow to his dream of economic justice. Over the ensuing decades, the problems of poverty, materialism and militarism have persisted. In an era of billion dollar bank bailouts, home foreclosures, double-digit unemployment and continuing urban crisis, perhaps we might listen anew to King’s vision of economic justice.
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If you want to learn more about MLK, see:
• Tom Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice
• "Citizen King" (documentary film)
• Listen to Nina Simone, "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)"