MLK’s fight for economic justice continues
Martin Luther King Jr. knew that gaining equality before the law was only a first step to ending white supremacy; equity in economic opportunity was more critical and challenging.
“The prohibition of barbaric behavior, while beneficial to the victim, does not constitute the attainment of equality or freedom,” he wrote in an essay for The Nation magazine on March 14, 1966.
“Someone has been profiting from the low wages of Negroes. Depressed living standards for Negroes are a structural part of the economy. Certain industries are based upon the supply of low-wage, underskilled and immobile nonwhite labor,” he added.
The United States has made huge strides since King’s 1968 assassination. But so many of his words still apply today.
“Conflicts are unavoidable because a stage has been reached in which the reality of equality will require extensive adjustments in the way of life of some of the white majority,” he wrote. “There is no discernible will on the part of white leadership to prepare the people for changes on the new level.”
Today’s politics are just as defined
by ethnicity as they were in 1966, though roles have changed. The Republican Party, which gave us Abraham Lincoln and the fight against racist oppression, today opposes efforts to expand voting and economic programs to end racial inequities.
Democrats, meanwhile, remain guilty of prioritizing power over justice. Those representing majority-white populations oppose voting rights protections and tax credits to lift children from poverty. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema provide cover for many neo-Dixiecrats in Congress.
Opposition to anti-poverty programs makes little economic sense. We know that when people make more money, they require fewer government services and pay more taxes, lessening the burden on everyone else. Pandemic-relief efforts make the case.
“Stimulus payments, enacted as part of economic relief legislation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, moved 11.7 million individuals out of poverty,” the Census Bureau reported in September. “Unemployment insurance benefits, also expanded during 2020, prevented 5.5 million individuals from falling into poverty.”
Social Security, the program that former Gov. Rick Perry called a Ponzi scheme, moved 26.5 million people out of poverty in 2021, the bureau added in its analysis of the Supplemental Poverty Measure.
Corporations have also proven the wisdom of diversity. Companies where boards of directors include women and people of color generate higher profits and greater innovation, according to data analysis firm MCSI and investment bank Morgan Stanley. The private sector is taking notice.
“Directors who are Black, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern or from another nonwhite ethnic group now occupy 4,500 board seats among companies in the Russell 3000 stock index, 25 percent more than they did at the end of 2020 and nearly 50 percent more than at the end of 2019,” the New York Times reported, citing data from ISS Corporate Solutions.
Yet the U.S. economy remains far from race-neutral. Bishop William J. Barber II and the Poor Peoples Campaign are fighting for a fairer system that boosts wages for the 43 percent of U.S. citizens who make so little they do not pay taxes and rely on government assistance.
“Stopping $15 and a union for working people who are struggling to survive is a form of abuse,” Barber said, protesting Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better bill last month. “Not addressing poverty when you know it kills 250,000 people every year is a form of abuse. Blocking a child tax credit that will help 39 million families — 61 million children — is a form of abuse.”
Barber’s radical idea is that all Americans should be treated equitably. That low-income workers can and should expect their democratically elected
representatives to provide great- er protection from exploitation by employers.
“We believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the richest nation
ever to exist,” the Poor Peoples Campaign’s manifesto says. “We recognize the centrality of systemic racism in maintaining economic oppression must be named, detailed and exposed empirically, morally and spiritually.” While many will consider the campaign radical, it’s simply an extension of King’s work.
Blacks “need the opportunity to advance on the job; they need the type of employment that feeds, clothes, educates and stabilizes a family,” King wrote. “Negroes expect their freedom, not as subjects of benevolence but as Americans who were at Bunker Hill, who toiled to clear the forests, drain the swamps, build the roads — who fought the wars and dreamed the dreams the founders of the nation considered to be an American birthright.”
As we honor King this holiday, we must remember his work is incomplete. We’re just getting to the hard part.