CommentsGUEST WORDS-In one of the most politically fraught eras in the history of the United States since the Civil War, many Americans last week turned their thoughts to commemorating the life and work of civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
First celebrated nationally in 1986, Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 18 marked the 35th nationwide observance of this federal holiday, passed through legislation in 1983. The day commemorates a masterful organizer, orator, and thinker whose work is not yet complete. His “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on August 28, 1963, before a crowd of more than 260,000 people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, is considered one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would not have been passed without his and others’ tireless struggles.
After those legislative successes, King expressed opposition to the Vietnam War, calling attention to the connection between wasteful expenditures on war and entrenched, generational poverty for people of all races. In an April 4, 1967, speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” (Zinn and Arnove, 2009, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, p. 424), King explained why he had brought the war in Vietnam “into the field of [his] moral vision,” even though he was being roundly denounced for it:
“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
That same year he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched the Poor People’s Campaign to draw attention to the need for massive, federal poverty-alleviation programs in urban and rural areas. The SCLC envisioned broad grassroots efforts to engage in nonviolent actions to pressure elected officials to address economic inequality.
Assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, King did not live to see the fruit of this organizing effort. Instead, his longtime colleague Ralph Abernathy, led a 50,000-strong Poor People’s March on June 19, 1968, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where, among other speakers, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, addressed the gathering.
The Poor People’s Campaign demanded a $12 billion Economic Bill of Rights, which to this day has not been fulfilled. Among its proposals were employment guarantees and a prohibition against discrimination in housing. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Michelle Alexander describes this “Poor People’s Movement” as one that civil rights leaders of the time envisioned as a pathway toward building multiracial coalitions around the goal of eliminating economic inequality (p. 39).
Toward the end of his life, in a speech delivered on August 16, 1967, King asked the critical question, “Where do we go from here?” He called for the “restructuring of the whole of American society,” noting the link between “the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war” (Arnove and Zinn, 2009, p. 419). His commitment to the eradication of poverty was expressed, too, in a book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), in which he demanded a guaranteed income and described how it must work (see Sasha Abramsky, 2013, The American Way of Poverty, pp. 79–80). One of the measures he promoted was a guaranteed income “pegged to the median income of society.” King’s insights and proposals remain relevant.
Each shock, whether political, economic, or epidemiologic, to the American social and economic structure results in differential impacts across U.S. racial groups. The pandemic, for example, has disproportionately harmed people of color and their communities, including here in Los Angeles.
In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, Black Americans in urban and rural areas lost so much wealth, and so much more wealth than white America, that author Eddie S. Glaude Jr. has dubbed that time period the Great Black Depression (see Eddie S. Glaude Jr., 2017, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, p. 17). Household-level gains of modest wealth accumulation for America’s Black communities were largely erased (p. 18). Citing the Pew Research Center, Glaude notes that by 2011, Black families “had lost 53 percent of their wealth.” As a result, poverty in Black households and communities has grown.
In the City of Angels, the twin social problems at the top of mind of many people are the skyrocketing cost of housing and the exploding numbers of unhoused people. Los Angeles has become the site of intense and widespread human suffering that has attracted the attention of the United Nations.
The announcement of the 2020 Homeless Count results on June 12, 2020, brought bad, but not surprising, news.
Homelessness increased 12.7% countywide over 2019 and 14.2% citywide, before the pandemic caused widespread shutdowns, throwing millions of Californians onto the unemployment rolls. In LA County alone, more than 600,000 people lost their jobs. The Homeless Count, conducted in January, revealed that 66,433 people in the county were homeless, while 41,290 were homeless in the city.
The Homeless Count data revealed racial disparities. Although 8% of the county population is Black, 34% of homeless people in the county are Black. Systemic racism in housing, health care, economic policy, and criminal justice is a major contributing factor to the disproportionate number of Black Angelenos in the homeless population. Black people are four times more likely to become homeless than members of other racial groups.
These disparities are among many that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spent his life’s energy fighting to overcome. As Americans reflect on his work and his legacy, particularly in the aftermath of the horrendous display of white nationalism and terror on January 6 at the Capitol building in Washington D.C., we would do well to remember Dr. King for more than just one day. The work of economic justice will benefit the whole of American society. It is time for more whites, in particular, to embrace anti-racist struggles, like Black Lives Matter and the New Georgia Project, a voting rights effort that delivered the U.S. Senate to the Democrats in January.
In King’s words: “Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.”
Angelenos, we have work to do.
(Gina K. Thornburg, PhD, is an author, community organizer, and scholar-activist based in Woodland Hills. She can be reached at [email protected]. A previous version of this essay appeared in the Monthly Democratic Luncheon, Newsletter No. 82, published on January 25.) Graphic by Pixabay. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
