For Richer or For Poorer: the 'Forgotten' Martin Luther King....

In his President's Address to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the SCLC in August, 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said,

We've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.  We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place.  But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Now that he is a national icon - the only 20th century American to have a national holiday celebrated annually in his honor, in fact - we tend to remember the inspirational King of the Civil Rights Movement and of the I Have A Dream speech and less so the tired and intrepid warrior whose last years were spent fighting less successfully for economic justice and world peace.  In fact, King's career had two very different phases, the first decade being focused on the social and political emancipation of Blacks in the South (with the attendant gains for the rest of the Negro community assumed therein) and a second one, far shorter (i.e., from approximately 1965 until his assassination in 1968), in which his focus shifted to the economic structure of American society and the need to achieve liberation and peace for oppressed peoples throughout the world.

Ultimately, because it was and is hard to argue that Blacks should not receive their full complement of the civil rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement - crowned by the I Have A Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963 and followed and reinforced by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - is considered a success and its most visible (and influential) leader, Rev. King, is now viewed, in effect, as a secular saint.  By contrast, the Poor People's Campaign and the economic- and peace-focused work of King's last years is largely forgotten or, if not, typically underappreciated in terms of its true significance.

To me, it's this second phase of Dr. King's work that matters most ... in no small part because the work that he began almost a half-century ago remains largely unfinished today.  And as the issue of entrenched urban poverty re-enters our public discourse from time to time - however 'coincidentally' in election years and most often raised by politicians looking to make political hay with it (as opposed to evidencing any sincere or deep concern for those so afflicted) - it occurs to me that Dr. King's vision is ever more prescient and pressing today.  As we reflect on the fact of the widening income and wealth gap in our society (both nationally and globally) and the reality that social mobility has greatly decreased (if not all but disappeared) in the past thirty years or so in modern America, we do need to begin to ask questions about "an edifice which produces beggars" and whether it does need some "restructuring."

Before this questioning leads to a reflexive suspicion that I am a Socialist - a sobriquet with exceedingly negative connotations in modern American society - I want to state for the record that I am in fact a firm believer in Capitalism ... but a capitalism that is conscious of its own natural limitations and thus practiced with a corrective intent.  (And, I feel compelled to note, this is an area in which Dr. King and I differ appreciably from a philosophical standpoint.)  I have no qualms with great wealth, but I do have grave concern that it is so concentrated and that the levers of our society have been geared to make this more difficult to address and ameliorate in recent years (which is an area in which Dr. King and I align completely).  And, even worse from my perspective, we have grown more comfortable with efforts that perpetuate and exacerbate this uneven allocation of access and opportunity (and thus lead to an even more skewed allocation of income and wealth over time).

For example, one of the great things about America has been and is that one can become wealthy from successfully pursued innovation: if you build a better mousetrap, you can indeed become rich, and often fabulously so in today's global economy.  Yet, what is equally (if not more meaningfully) true is that the vast majority of people in this society - both the now-struggling middle class and the historically struggling working class - have no such real opportunity.  In fact, collectively speaking, their life chances have diminished appreciably over the past thirty years as real/effective wages have plateaued (and in some cases declined).  And the game is ever more skewed against them, in part because of their political participation or lack thereof.  Although it is a truism that the poor don't vote (in proportion to their numbers) and that many middle class voters tend to support policies that are not in their own economic interest (i.e., they tend to vote aspirationally), these things are also true ... and troubling.

And as the gap between the rich and the poor widens - especially as it leaves many in the middle class more vulnerable/likely to slide down the economic spectrum rather than up it - our public discourse has changed as well and in ways that exacerbate rather than ameliorate this challenge.  So often now the poor are demonized as "takers" when in fact the vast majority of them are working hard to overcome the largely structural impediments to improving their economic status, a reality that rarely if ever is acknowledged in our public discourse, let alone discussed/addressed.  And we are constantly encouraged to support policies that make it easier for the affluent and rich in our society to keep more of their earned rewards under the guise of their status as "job creators."  If this last fictitious and politically motivated construct were true, based on the significant tax cuts for the wealthy a decade ago (or those a generation ago), we would be awash in jobs opportunities at present, which, of course, is not the case.  And we can now identify that government assistance to corporations and the wealthy who mostly own their stock absolutely dwarfs the oft-decried "welfare" provided to those at the bottom of our economic pyramid in need of economic and social services support.  As one popular social media meme describes it, 

If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.

And if one raises the issue of this mal-distribution of resources and the system that has been created to produce it, one is immediately and pejoratively labeled, often as a "Socialist," as if this were some morally despicable thing to be.  In fact, to question the status quo in modern America is to risk both derision and demonization - which, historically speaking, is consistent with Dr. King's experience a half-century ago - because, ultimately, it is to raise the issue of power, as in who has the right to determine the 'boundaries' within which we choose to live and how those boundaries affect the life chances of all therein.  And as the great nineteenth century abolitionist and Reconstruction leader Frederick Douglass reminded us so poignantly over 150 years ago, 

Power concedes nothing without demand.  It never did and it never will.  Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Given the realities of modern American life, and especially the widening gap between the allocation of life chances that is beginning to tear our social fabric asunder, as Dr. King challenged us so long ago, it is indeed time to question the structure of our society because of the nature of the outcomes that it produces.  Does this mean that Capitalism must be dismantled and replaced by another mode of social organization that is more equitable?  No.  In fact, history has shown us that other systems, including Socialism, tend not to work as well (largely because the powerful decision-makers who lead them prove fallibly human, too).  What it does mean is that we need to take a serious and thoughtful look at how we (re-)structure our society, especially economically and politically, so that we can restore some meaningful measure of equality of opportunity (and not necessarily equality of outcome).  To make it plain, we need to consider how to make our society more equitable and open so that all may share more meaningfully in the incredible wealth and abundant experience of life that our country offers.


And we need to return to an ethic that celebrates the commonweal, not exceptional wealth.  For, as Dr. King (and Malcolm X) predicted years ago, the upheaval that will result once the poor feel they have no options will be even more costly than choosing to change proactively.  Many of us were not alive to experience the watershed societal shifts of the 1960s - and thus do not fully appreciate the attendant violence and disruption that the urban riots of that period revealed to the broader society as being a frightful consequence of economic oppression and a sense of powerlessness - but our history tells us that continuing down this path - where the few have disproportionately more and the many have troublingly less - is a road to (short-term) prosperity for a few, (medium-term) ruin and (long-term) re-alignment.


To paraphrase the great Frederick Douglass, in regard to the less fortunate among us, what we need is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.  If we commit to creating a more just society, we will also create a more sustainable one, as Dr. King envisioned so long ago....