Had he lived, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned ninety this January 15. A new book looks back on one of his final efforts, the Poor People’s Campaign, and how it fit into King’s larger views on economic inequality.
Scheduled for release on January 21 (this year’s annual Martin Luther King holiday), King and the Other America: The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality (University of California Press) by French cultural historian Sylvie Laurent argues that King’s vision for the campaign was prescient and has been a misunderstood piece of his legacy.
“Rather than a sideshow or a deviation, the Poor People’s Campaign is brought to center stage in these pages and cast as the culmination of King’s lifelong thinking on the nature of justice,” Laurent writes in the introduction.
The 384-page volume is a meticulously researched look into the development of King’s thought. It argues that his pointedly radical speeches and actions in the years following 1965—after the signing by President Lyndon Johnson of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act—were not an aberration, but rather an extension of his early statements and writings.
“King’s black radical critique of the liberal paradigm and his indictment of America’s systemic flaws with regard to economic injustices and imperialism did not develop after 1965,” writes Laurent. Rather, “his critical theoretical framework had developed very early on.” For instance, she says, he “stressed the perils of economic injustice as being as harmful to inclusion as was racial prejudice,” in an article published in June 1956.
And in September 1962, King proclaimed, “One-tenth of one percent of the population controls almost 50 percent of the wealth.”
Laurent notes that the message of the Poor People’s Campaign became obscured following King’s assassination and other events of 1968, along with a concerted effort by the FBI and other government actors to discredit it.
“The widely accepted narrative was, and still is to some degree, that the [Poor People’s Campaign] diverted the fervor for further civil rights to less fruitful channels,” she writes. But in her view, “King’s reframing of a populist and progressive constituency based on a diverse grassroots movement was clairvoyant.” It foresaw that “the growing divide between the haves and have-nots, between a handful of the extremely wealthy and a growing impoverished population, put the very idea of democracy at risk.”
“What good is it to be allowed to eat in a restaurant if you can’t afford a hamburger?”
The Poor People’s Campaign, she writes, was meant to “challenge a flawed liberal democracy which thrived on a racially divided working class as well as those unemployed or underemployed.” The campaign was, like his involvement during this same time with striking sanitation workers in Memphis, “an embrace of the working classes of all races and ethnicities afflicted by injustice, exploitation, misery, and disenfranchisement.”
As King wrote in 1968, “What good is it to be allowed to eat in a restaurant if you can’t afford a hamburger?”
King was killed by an assassin in Memphis just a little more than a month before the campaign was scheduled to begin. His article “Showdown for Nonviolence,” which described the campaign and called for an Economic Bill of Rights, appeared in Look magazine on April 16, twelve days after King’s death. On May 21, thousands of people arrived and set up a series of temporary structures on the National Mall known as Resurrection City. It would last about six weeks.
“As the first massive interracial protest on behalf of the poor to demand social welfare policies, minorities rights, redistribution of wealth, and anti-imperialist internationalism,” writes Laurent, “the Poor People’s Campaign’s nature and aim were far greater than suggested by the few muddy square miles on which the campaign was staged.”
Laurent notes the irony that the fiftieth anniversary of both King’s death and the Poor People’s Campaign were commemorated “under the presidency of Donald Trump, whose election engendered the current debates about white working-class politics in America.” Looking at the landscape of division today, Laurent muses, “had King’s more radical and dialectical grasp of the nexus of class inequality in a racialized democracy been considered, the political splintering of the working class along racial lines could, perhaps, have been prevented.”
Today, as Laurent notes in the book’s final chapter, there is a new Poor People’s campaign, led in part by the Reverend William J. Barber II and the Reverend Liz Theoharis. It seeks to build on the legacy of 1968, under the slogan of Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick and Jimmy Collier’s famous anthem of the first campaign, “Everybody’s Got A Right to Live.”
As we commemorate King’s life and legacy, Laurent’s important new book highlights the depth of the wisdom and organizing skill he brought to the movement for economic justice.
“King’s interracial Poor People’s Campaign offered an alternative to the facile dichotomy between social and economic justice,” Laurent concludes. “It was an attempt to anchor poverty in the realm of universalism and a demand for cultural recognition. It was race- and ethnic-conscious as well as class-conscious. It refused to choose between economic equality and specific anti-discrimination demands.”