Sunday was supposed to be the dedication of the new memorial on the National Mall to Martin Luther Kinge, Jr. Late yesterday evening the foundation responsible for it postponed the dedication because the changed path of Hurricane Irene means the seat is likely to be subjected to heavy rains overnight Saturday Night and possibly into midday Sunday. Eugene Robinson had already written this column in which he notes that as we honor King we should
not obscure one of his most important messages in a fog of sentiment. Justice, he told us, is not just a legal or moral question but a matter of economics as well.>
This is an important column which reminds us that King did not see racial justice in isolation rom the other issues that trouble this nation. The famous speech, gi en 48 years ago this Monday, was given at an event that
was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Meaningful employment was a front-and-center demand.
Those reading these words here might well remember that King died while at another event concerning economic equity, the strike in Memphis of the sanitation workers. If you don't. Robinson will remind you of that in his column, as well as pointing out that post-Memphis King was planning the Poor People's Campaign.
I urge you to read and pass on the Robinson column. To that end I am going to offer a few more snippets and a few observations of my own.
Robinson reminds us that the genesis of the 1963 March was from A. Philip Randolph, who was first and foremost a labor leader, having founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters that worked for and obtained better working conditions and pay for thousands of railroad workers, the majority of whom were African-American. Randolph, like King, knew that full civil rights could not be obtained nor sustained in the absence of better economic conditions for African-Americans. Robinson notes that both men understood the importance of jobs that paid living wages in providing the opportunity for social an economic mobility and thus fulfilling the promises of the nation, and writes of King and Randolph that if they
were alive today, given the devastating blows that poor and working-class Americans have suffered, I’m confident they’d be planning a “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom II.”
Our racial equity has come very far since the days when the Civil Rights movement was in its full bloom, even though as Rachel Maddow noted last night the people most likely to be active in the Tea Party movement tend to have low opinions and hostile attitudes towards people of color.
On economics, however, we are clearly going backwards. People here are likely to know the statistics on the shift of wealth and income to the wealthiest 1% or so of our people. Robinson provides more that is relevant:
Between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War, the typical income for an American household roughly doubled (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Since then, the Economist magazine noted last year, income for a typical household rose by just 22 percent — and even this modest increase was due to the fact that women entered the workforce in large numbers. The Pew Research Center found that if you look just at men in their 30s, they earned 12 percent less in 2004 (again, inflation-adjusted) than their fathers did at a similar age.
Robinson rightly makes the connection with what has happened to unions:
In 1983, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to a union. In 2010, only 11.9 percent were union members.
The result? In 2010, the median weekly pay of a male worker over 25 who belonged to a union was $982, according to the BLS. The comparable figure for a worker not represented by a union was $846.
The new Memorial is just South of Independence Avenue, and many mornings on my way to school I drive past it, especially when I am taking my spouse in to work. Although not yet officially dedicated, it has been open to the public for the past week, although I have not yet had an opportunity to do more than glance at it when I am stopped in traffic (there is a stoplight perhaps a hundred yars or so after the entrance).
I have often written about words by King spoken or written on occasions other than August 28, 1963: his Letter from Birmingham Jail, his speech on Vietnam given at Riverside Church in NYC the year before he died, etc. His was a prophetic voice in the sense of that word from the Hebrew Bible: not so much that he predicted the future as that he called the nation and the people to justice, as the Hebrew Prophets did to the Kings of the Jewish people and those people themselves.
It is in that sense that I will end as Robinson does, with his final paragraph, and before then wish us all
Peace.
The new King memorial is inspirational. When I visited Wednesday, the crowd of visitors was large, diverse and generally awe-struck at the memorial’s simplicity and power. Once again, the great man stands in Washington to challenge our morality, our faith and our conscience.