“We are tired of smothering in an air tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,” said Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., 46 years ago.
It was March 18, 1968, and Rev. King was addressing a rally in Memphis, Tennessee. Gathered together were black sanitation workers on strike for equal pay and conditions, as well as labor and civil rights organizers and local supporters.
King was in Memphis to support the protest and the black garbage workers who earned so little they qualified for welfare. King’s presence underscored his new public focus---economic justice. He believed eliminating poverty was vital to bringing about social justice.
As he told the crowd that night, “ what does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter, if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”
This was the same Martin Luther King who -five years earlier- had inspired a nation with his dream of racial equality for his four little children. For many, that King, the great orator, is frozen in that moment, but, in fact, the civil rights leader was a frustrated activist who saw racism, war, and poverty as ‘triplets’ of oppression. At the time of the Memphis speech he was planning a Poor People’s Campaign to Washington. He wanted a massive demonstration to raise awareness about income inequality, and to push through legislation to close the gap.
“Do you know,” King asked the Memphis crowd, “that most of the poor people in our country are working everyday? They are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation.”
Eerily, today a chorus of voices echo in increasing urgency what King said nearly 50 years ago- the Occupy movement, economists like Robert Frank, writing recently in the New York Times, who warned “ the proportion of our citizens who never make it out of rags will continue to grow,” and the President who has characterized income inequality as the “defining challenge of our time.”
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. never lived to see his Poor People’s Campaign—he was assassinated a month after that Memphis rally.
But in what turned out to be the last weeks of his life, King talked about what he called “America’s opportunity to bridge the gap between the haves and have nots. The real question, he said, “Is whether we have the will.”
Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 85 years old this month. On this national holiday celebrating his life, I feel certain that Reverend King would want no greater tribute than to know that his fight for the poor goes on.
