Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to the struggle for racial equality are undeniable. Every third Monday in January, America’s leaders and laypeople alike gather across the country to remember King and recall his legacy. But all too often these tributes are a mere lesson in history and King’s ideas are forgotten until a mid-winter day the following year.
In many ways King’s vision on race has been achieved, but at the same time, in many other ways there is still ample room for progress. If he were alive today, what might concern the great civil rights leader the most about modern American society is how little progress has been made in the fight for economic equality – a crucial part of his legacy that is all too often ignored.
In 1968, King organized what was known as the “Poor People’s Campaign” to bring attention to the strife of the impoverished of every race – though he recognized that “that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.” The ultimate goal of the campaign was to pass an economic bill of rights.
It is impossible to truly discuss King’s legacy today without revisiting some of the bill’s provisions in a modern context. The authors criticized the government for prioritizing billions of dollars on a foreign war over welfare for the neediest Americans. It also stipulated that “every man, woman and child should be guaranteed health care.”
Among other provisions, the proposal asked for the creation of millions of public sector jobs for the poor, a proposal that makes the provisions of the often perfidiously labeled “socialist” American Recovery and Reinvestment Act seem modest. This is not to mention the proposal for a guaranteed income for all Americans, which would have been fixed to the cost of living and gross national product – something Congress has repeatedly failed to do with even the minimum wage.
While some of these provisions seem radical and it would be a fallacy to say King’s solutions are necessarily the best solution, the most proper way to truly honor the life of King would be to give attention to the whole of his life’s work, not just his efforts against Jim Crow. The issue of economic equality today is just as crucial – if not more so – than it was in 1968. Income inequality in the United States hit an all-time high in 2012, according to the International Business Times. In 1968, 12.8 percent of all Americans were living in poverty, in 2012 that number was 15 percent.
Unfortunately King’s leadership in this movement was cut tragically short by an assassin’s bullet while he was organizing sanitation workers in Memphis early that April. The economic bill of rights was never passed.
