Let’s Keep Pursuing Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream of Economic Justice

Dr. King’s economic advocacy

For years, TV commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday has focused on his call for all of us to overcome racial prejudice, highlighting his “I have a dream” speech as a wistful hope and ignoring his strong economic message.

In 1967, Dr. King told us, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.” That remains as true today as it was then.

Dr. King was a strong advocate for working people and America’s labor movement, believing that the struggle for racial justice goes hand in hand with the struggle for economic justice, and that all people, regardless of race, occupation, or socio-economic status, have the right to earn a fair and dignified living. Republicans have feared the power of labor unions, which are also a source of campaign funding for Democrats, and have successfully tried to reduce their power, particularly since the Reagan administration. So it has been uplifting to see President Biden openly advocating for unions. We hope all Democrats do the same.

Republicans have hated Democrats’ people-oriented economics since Herbert Hoover fought Franklin Delano Roosevelt over the New Deal. In January of 1944, FDR outlined an Economic Bill of Rights for the American people (see References below) in both a radio address to the public and in a State of the Union address to Congress, but he died three months later, so it was never implemented.

The birth of the Poor People’s Campaign

In 1968, Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the Poor People's Campaign to carry on FDR's theme, creating an updated Economic Bill of Rights to educate the nation and its political leaders about the nature of poverty and the measures necessary to end it.

In the more than 75 years since FDR proposed the original Economic Bill of Rights, Democrats have continued to advocate for those goals. While Republicans have spent billions to depict the idea of spending our taxes to help our fellow citizens as outlandish, unaffordable, and even evil, a century of experience has proven that investing in people lifts the economic prosperity of the entire nation and pays for itself many times over in the long run.

Because economic proposals like Biden’s are so popular, Republicans resort to racism to oppose it. They convince their voters that people-oriented spending would give too much help to people of color, and that therefore Republican voters should be willing, even happy, to suffer as long as it means “those people” don’t benefit. This “divide-and-conquer” political agenda has led to profound income inequality.

A new Poor People’s Campaign for a new generation

During the vicious backlash of the last administration, the Reverend Dr. William Barber II and the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis decided it was far beyond time for a moral revival, another Poor People’s Campaign. Inspired by the original vision of building a broad, multiracial fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country, they launched “The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival” in 2018. It picked up Dr. King’s unfinished work, bringing people together all over America to confront, in the campaign’s words, “the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.”

The Poor People’s Campaign understands, as Indivisible does, that as a nation we are at a critical juncture and need a movement that will shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections at every level of government, and build lasting power for poor and impacted people.

“If America does not address what’s happening with visionary social and economic policy, the health and well-being of the nation is at stake….What we need is long-term economic policy that establishes justice, promotes the general welfare, rejects decades of austerity and builds strong social programs that lift society from below.”
— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Shailly Gupta Barnes, and Josh Bivens, “Moral Policy = Good Economics“

Read more about the Poor People’s Campaign’s demands, their fact sheets on a range of issues, and their call to pass the full Build Back Better Act now.

And on that note, please keep calling your senators to urge them to pass the Build Back Better Act!