“Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
Having come to Washington on August 28, 1963, I remember that the official title of the event was the March for Jobs and Justice.
I also remember that King was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, because the Memphis Sanitation workers, who had jobs, were struggling for better pay and working conditions.
As Robinson reminds us in this column, titled "MLK’s prophetic call for economic justice",
“Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day?” he asked striking sanitation workers. “And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.”
Today, Thursday January 15, is the actual anniversary of King's birth in 1929. For his Friday
Washington Post column, Robinson rightly, and powerfully, reminds us that King advocated not only for civil rights, but for economic rights. And as I well remember, also against our adventure in Vietnam.
Please keep reading.
It will soon be 45 years since King was assassinated.
We have a national celebration of his birth.
Many people know PART of his legacy.
They should know more.
Robinson's column helps with that learning.
His (Robinson's) opening words makes clear the intent of this column:
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s economic message was fiery and radical. To our society’s great shame, it has also proved timeless.
At a time when too many in our society still argue against a reasonable minimum wage, to say nothing of agreeing to a true living wage, when the burden of unemployment and low wages falls disproportionally on people of color, that second sentence is an appropriate condemnation of our national failure, that Kings fiery and radical economic message is still with us:
To our society’s great shame, it has also proved timeless.
I will push normal fair use, since so much of Robinson's column consists of King's words. This is true of the following three paragraphs, offered without imbedded hyperlings:
“One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality,” King said. “That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. . . . But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.”
Those who lived in the other America, King said, were plagued by “inadequate, substandard and often dilapidated housing conditions,” by “substandard, inferior, quality-less schools,” by having to choose between unemployment and low-wage jobs that didn’t even pay enough to put food on the table.
The problem was structural, King said: “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”
Socialism for the rich - bailouts for Wall Street bankster who created the crisis that cost so many their retirements and their jobs, their economic security and their hopes for a better life for themselves and their offspring, or as we read in the social contract of this nation, the Preamble to the Constitution, the notion that we would
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
a security that does not exist absent economic security.
Robinson rightly describes King as a prophet. In the Hebrew Bible, the role of the prophet was not to foretell the future, but to call the powerful and the nation to account, especially for the existence of injustice.
This is a column worth reading and passing on.
Robinson not only begins it well, but has an equally strong close, so I will end this exploration of the column with the words of that close:
Paying homage to King as one of our nation’s greatest leaders means remembering not just his soaring oratory about racial justice but his pointed words about economic justice as well. Inequality, he told us, threatens the well-being of the nation. Extending a hand to those in need makes us stronger.