Martin Luther King, Jr鈥檚 Last Crusade
In 1967, King embarked on what would be his last crusade. He was encouraged by President Lyndon B. Johnson鈥檚 War on Poverty and the 鈥淕reat Society鈥 legislative package, with the help of our own Tom Gill, U.S. Representative (D.HI), that brought to fruition the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the resulting Office of Economic Opportunity (which is responsible for Head Start, Job Corps, Community Action Program and VISTA 鈥 Volunteers In Service To America), Medicare, Medicaid, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, among others.
But after passage of Civil Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” 鈥 including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power. “True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began organizing a national campaign against poverty. 鈥淭he Poor People’s Campaign鈥 was an effort to gain economic justice for people of all colors, genders, young and old, gay and straight, in the United States.
However, before the completion of the 鈥淕reat Society鈥 the Johnson Administration turned its full attention to the war in Vietnam.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy asked Marian Wright Edelman to “tell Dr. King to bring the poor people to Washington to make hunger and poverty visible since the country鈥檚 attention had turned to the Vietnam War and put poverty and hunger on the back burner.”
Thus, the Poor People鈥檚 Campaign was to inaugurate, as a new phase of civil rights, extending the struggle for racial equality to the cause of economic justice for all of America鈥檚 poor. In his last months of his life, King crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington.
The campaign was met with hostility from the start. The administration read the campaign as a potential siege on Washington. Congressmen openly called for the censure of any other congressmen who proposed meeting with the campaign鈥檚 officials. The Washington Post demeaned him; writing that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people.” Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
On April 4, 1968, while campaigning for black sanitary workers in Memphis, King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. In spite of the hole in her heart, not long after that fateful day, Mrs. Coretta Scott King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy decided to move ahead with the campaign.
The next month, thousands of demonstrators gathered at the National Mall demanding federal action to alleviate poverty as SCLC leaders, joined by the National Welfare Rights Organization, lobbied Congress to introduce an 鈥淓conomic Bill of Rights鈥 that would include $30 billion for the creation of employment programs and low-income housing and a guaranteed minimum annual income for all Americans.
Now, 46 years later, we find that the United States is still in need of an Economic Bill of Rights. Hawaii is one of the most expensive cities in the United States. While most states set income tax thresholds high enough to exempt from taxes a family of three where the employed person works full-time at minimum wage, seven states do require such a family to pay: Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Montana, Ohio, and Oregon. We are in desperate need of a minimum wage raise, as well as affordable housing.
Though less prominent than the Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and less successful than the Civil Rights movement of the early 1950s and 1960s, the Poor People鈥檚 Campaign evinced a widespread commitment to ending poverty in America and deserves a place in the public memory.
While we in Honolulu will not walk to Washington, D.C., we will walk to the Hawaii State Capitol and make our wishes and issues known.
About the author: Marsha Rose Joyner is the president emeritus of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition Hawaii.
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