Public Employee Press

Part 3 of a series on poverty.

Poverty and inequality:
What would King say?

By JANE LaTOUR

Today, 13 million children under 18 live below the poverty line in the United States — more than 38 years ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

King was killed as he fought for racial and economic justice for striking Memphis sanitation workers, members of DC 37’s national union, only a month before the first contingents of his Poor Peoples’ Campaign set out for Washington, D.C.

“God never meant for some to be wealthy while others live in abject, deadening poverty,” King said. Denouncing “our vicious class system,” he charged that, “Every condition ­exists simply because someone profits by its existence.”

Just weeks before he died, he traveled to Marks, Miss., in what was then the poorest county in the United States — in preparation for the Poor People’s Campaign. Listening to descriptions of their destitution from some of America’s most impoverished citizens shook his sensibilities.

PEP discussed King’s message on poverty and income inequality with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch. “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68,” the third volume of his trilogy on King and the civil rights movement, was published in February.

A lever for change
“In some ways, this is the most neglected part of Dr. King,” said Branch. “He called racism, poverty, and war the Triple Scourge. He saw them as kindred evils that each subjugated the human spirit.

“His first lesson is that you need to make the poor visible,” said the author. “We refuse to see them. We dehumanize poor people, build invisible walls so as not to see them and to keep them poor.”

Branch said King “referred almost daily to Lazarus, his favorite parable. The rich man didn’t get into heaven, not because he was rich, but because he didn’t see the humanity of Lazarus, the poor man on his doorstep. So first, we have to see the poor as human beings and second we can focus on alleviating the conditions that keep them poor.”

The Memphis strike brought attention to the plight of the low-paid sanitation workers, and the Poor Peoples Campaign “was about making the poor visible,” said Branch. In the campaign, King planned to bring the most massive civil disobedience ever to Washington to focus the nation on poverty and economic inequality and press for full employment, and more low-income housing.

King “always framed his message in a much larger context,” said Branch. King said: “I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.” But his concept for the Poor People’s Campaign transcended race and concentrated on class.

“It must not be just black people,” said King, “It must be all poor people — American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, even poor whites.”

“People didn’t want to see him as a spokesperson for larger questions. But for him, race, war and poverty were related,” said Branch. In King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he explained the theme that unified his message — nonviolence. “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial ­political and moral question of our time — the need to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression,” King said.

A way forward
Today in New York City, the faces of the poor come in all colors and many of our most impoverished neighborhoods are filled with immigrants. Congressional District 16, covering the South Bronx, has the highest poverty rate in the United States — more than 40 percent. The Bronx is the only county in the northeastern United States where more than 40 percent of children live in families below poverty level.

Even in the dark shadow of great wealth and privilege, the poor are not invisible to DC 37’s thousands of poverty fighters. These dedicated union members are on the frontlines, delivering services to the homeless, the hungry, the HIV-infected.

Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement accomplished miracles and left us a giant legacy to mine. But his life was cut short as he worked to unite people of all races to fight economic oppression.

In his last public appearance, Dr. King spoke to the strikers and their families at the Mason Temple in Memphis. Tornadoes raged and rain beat down as he said: “When students all over the South started sitting in, they were standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to the great wells of democracy.” Most certainly, Dr. King would say, now it’s time to go to those wells again.

Research assistance provided by PEP Editorial Assistant Sherry E. Springer.