In another effort to bring attention to the issue of poverty, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized a Poor People’s Campaign to take place in 1968. The campaign attempted to reach out to the economically marginalized people in our country. This meant not only African Americans but also Native Americans, migrant farm workers, and whites living in Appalachia. He described the situation in a speech titled “The Other America” that he gave to Union Local 1199 in New York City in March of 1968:
By the millions, people in the other America find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. . . . The fact is that the black man in the United States of America is facing a literal depression. Now you know they don’t call it that. When there is massive unemployment in the black community, it’s called a social problem. But when there is massive unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression. With the black man, it’s ‘welfare,’ with the whites it’s ‘subsidies.’
What Dr. King referred to in this last line is a fact of United States history that most of us have conveniently or intentionally forgotten. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, white Americans benefited significantly from government programs that helped lift them into the middle class, most prominently Social Security and the GI Bill.
How These Measure Contributed to The Other America
Both measures discriminated against African Americans at first. Social Security initially denied benefits to workers in the two professions in which most blacks worked at the time, these being agricultural labor (for black men) and domestic service jobs (for black women). The GI Bill discriminated against African Americans because its authors designed it to do so. By writing the bill so that implementation took place at the state and local level, when the state and local officials charged with administering the bill were themselves racists and segregationists, the result was that African Americans received only a fraction of the benefits their white veteran counterparts did. (For more on the ways that this happened, please see the book When Affirmative Action Was White, by Ira Katznelson.) King’s final line also refers to the fact that farmers received (and still receive) government handouts in the form of subsidies not to overproduce certain crops, but without the stigmas of laziness and being dependent on government.
It is also instructive to remember what King was doing at the time of his assassination. On April 4, 1968, he was in Memphis, Tennessee. Not for any civil rights initiative, but to support a strike of sanitation workers asking for a living wage. On March 18, King addressed them in a speech titled “All Labor Has Dignity.” He pointed out the many victories achieved by the civil rights movement. However, he also said, “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?”
In this address, King also retold the familiar biblical parable of Lazarus, a poor beggar, and Dives, the rich man who ignored Lazarus and consequently went to Hell. He reminded the audience, “Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich. His wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he passed by Lazarus every day, but he never really saw him. Dives went to hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived.” King then went further: “This may well be the indictment on America.”
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Why We’ve Forgotten King & the Other America
This is the Martin Luther King we have forgotten. In reducing his life’s work to the “I Have a Dream” speech, nonviolent protest, and the idea of voting rights and human equality, we have lost what made him one of the true radical thinkers of twentieth century America. King’s fight on behalf of these things, amazing and inspirational as it was, is only part of his social philosophy of radical Christian love. Obfuscating the rest of his life’s work diminishes his true contribution to our nation.
Society proved willing to accommodate African Americans voting and having full access to public places, despite the kicking and screaming of segregationists. This is, I suspect, because making this a reality required no material sacrifice on the part of most Americans. Recognizing the full extent of King’s vision, however, would require a major reshuffling of the deck of our nation’s priorities. It would require most Americans to make some kind of sacrifice, taking them outside their current economic and philosophical comfort zones. I believe this is why, collectively, we have forgotten the real Martin Luther King and have simplified him to meet our tastes of the moment.
King’s Radicalism
King knew just how radical he was. At one point, he asked his close friend Harry Belafonte, “Are we integrating into a burning house?” because of the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.” He also added, “I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain. I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done. The whole thing will have to be done away with.” As he said in another part of his 1967 speech at Riverside Church,
As I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart . . . many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining in the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the sources of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.
Despite decades of our nation’s leaders pretending to care about poverty, the problem is no nearer a solution than ever. Racism is alive and well, even if more subtly disguised than the open hatred so in evidence in Dr. King’s time. Militarism flourishes, as more than a decade of continuous war, combined with outspending any other nation in the world many times over on military materials, clearly testify. Materialism is more difficult to quantify, surely, although it is hard to imagine anyone arguing that the United States has become less materialistic in the past five decades. One of King’s close friends, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, once said, “The whole future of America will depend upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.” The question is, which Dr. King?
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