Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a leader for our times. A
thoroughgoing revolutionary, he advocated peaceful yet determined
resistance to not only racial but also economic subjugation.
Though his approach was nonviolent, he never to advised passivity in
the face of injustice or acceptance of the “politics of the possible.”
His was a call to prolonged protest and self-sacrifice among people of
conscience, a resolve strong enough to force a humanistic reordering of
national priorities and transformation of the political economy. In
opposing militarism and denouncing the Vietnam War during the height of
its popularity, King proposed spending money instead on full employment,
universal healthcare, affordable housing, and massive investments in
education. He repeatedly cautioned that technology and corporate wealth
were being used for selfish ends:
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base
distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our
abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until
they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breath of meaning it
is necessary to adjust this inequity.
On this national holiday, as we debate austerity measures, the jobs
crisis, and gross inequality, we would do well to recall the entirety of
King’s mission.
• • •
King believed that racial justice was not the final aim of black
Americans’ struggle, but rather part of a broader and more fundamental
struggle for economic justice. Economic justice also was not the
ultimate goal, but it was a condition of that goal: upholding the
dignity and promise of human beings everywhere. While he supported
blacks’ efforts to win political offices and championed black pride as a
counter to negative anti-black stereotypes and black self-hatred, King
continuously reminded black audiences that winning meaningful
improvements required strong alliances with poor whites, Latinos,
Asians, and Native Americans.....
Some progressives, desperate for signs of hope, look to the labor
movement. King believed it was imperative to redesign the economy to
protect workers and sought an alliance with labor leaders. He told the
national AFL-CIO convention in 1961:
In the next ten to twenty years, automation will grind
jobs to dust as it grinds out unbelievable volumes of production. This
period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into
impotency. . . . To find a great design to solve a grave problem, labor
will have to intervene in the political life of the nation to chart a
course which distributes the abundance to all instead of concentrating
it among a few. The strength to carry through such a program requires
that labor know its friends and collaborate as a friend.
....
Tragically, following King’s assassination, most black political leaders
were too fearful to follow his example. They retreated from building a
multiracial movement for full employment. By the early 1970s, most
accepted affirmative action—a far less costly strategy than full
employment, created by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to quell
urban rioting and appease elites—rather than befriending and
collaborating with other minority groups and poor whites in the service
of transforming society....