The Black Commentator - Between The Lines: King’s Unfinished Fight

The celebration of the federal King holiday brings about a whole host of conflicts and convolutions. This year was no different. The only man to have a federal holiday named in his honor in the 20th holiday (that wasn’t a President), the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lost his life in a perpetual struggle to bring about freedom, justice and equality to the masses of people in this country. The fight for social justice in America very quickly turned to a recognition of the economic disparities that subjugated Blacks and others in a way that compromised their freedom and quality of life. King’s last commitment to the struggle (besides ending the Viet Nam war) was to eradicate poverty in the most affluent nation in the history of the world. King did not believe it was right that one would speak out on social injustice, but remain silent on the questions of the war and poverty. Dr. King’s sense of rightness was based on his sense of justice. King knew that the right to stand for right couldn’t be a relative engagement. Right had to be right because in its rightness, justice would be evident. The fight for economic justice today has become a relative engagement. Forty years later, we see greater disparities in wages and wealth than when King was living. Those who claim to support King’s legacy need to finish King’s last fight, ending poverty. We need another Poor People’s Campaign.

The days leading up to the King holiday, every year, is filled with events that romanticize the period that was the most volatile (outside of the Civil War) in the nation’s history. It is supposed to be a period of retrospection, a period of rededication to the life and principles of Dr. King. But most times it is an engagement in relativism of how people and certain groups try to fit their relative rightness into the King paradigm. In the same day, I was on a conference call with people trying to plan an honest dialogue between the African American and Latinos communities without addressing the impact the immigrant influx has on the undermining of work and wages in the black community. That evening, I was on a panel where the topic was supposed to be, “King: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” but quickly evolved into a debate as to whether gays rights are civil rights. In both instances relative logic was being used to advocate for human injustices that conflict with social standards. While social and economic discriminations are real within both populations, to frame them in the King paradigm is a reach for both, and not prevalent to the extent of race and gender discrimination in America for which civil rights were constructed. The poverty question came up in both dialogues and while a sub-context in both conversations, the realities of economic subjugation were evidenced in both arguments as impacting both populations. The poverty question is a justice question, not a circumstantial “rightness” question like gay and immigration rights where folk can hide sexuality or citizenship or disclose it selectively when they want to pursue the rights, privileges and benefits of citizenship and marriage. Blacks are always black, women are always women, and the poor always poor. The difference between the fight for right and justice is that what is right may not always be just, but what is just is always right. The post-King society has lost sight of this, and the relativity of rightness has taken over society, where justice is nowhere to be found. Everybody is right and nobody is wrong anymore. That’s why President Bush can still believe he’s right to send 21,000 additional troops to Iraq and spend hundreds of million more dollars in the face of overwhelming public opposition. Yet, the poverty question can’t be raised in any realm of American society without the ideologues twisting the issue.

King understood this relationship between unbridled militarism and unaddressed poverty. At the same time King was speaking out against the war, he was planning a campaign to address poverty. In what would end up being King’s last fight, a Poor People’s Campaign was planned to coincide with the 1968 Presidential Election and major party conventions to highlight the issue of economic injustice in America. The campaign was informally launched as King went to Memphis, Tennessee to show solidarity with striking sanitation workers whose fight was not only about livable wages but dignity in their effort to make an honest living. The mantra of the strike was simply, I Am A Man. While King didn’t live to see the Poor People’s campaign, and Resurrection City went forth in a largely symbolic measure, the question of poverty went ignored and unaddressed for the remainder of the 20th Century. Now the poverty question is back on the front burner of the nation’s conscience, and like war, is being dealt with in a relative manner. It is right to speak of eradicating poverty, but little is being done about poverty in a way that brings the poor any real justice. In the meantime, America is doing more to bring about democracy in Iraq than it is doing to bring about democracy in the urban cities of America. With the money we’ve spent in Iraq, most of the social ills of the top 50 urban cities in America could have been addressed in a significant way. It is not right, nor is it just to continue to ignore poverty in the way America does.

During this last King week, a young labor leader out of Los Angeles, Tyrone Freeman, president of one of the largest SEIU locals, is calling another Poor Peoples Campaign, to make poverty a campaign issue in the upcoming 2008 presidential election. In Los Angeles, forty percent of the nation’s second largest city live at or below the poverty line, making them eligible for pubic assistance. But there is no assistance to be found, and nobody has the integrity to address the question. We need another Poor People’s Campaign to refocus this nation on decent wages and a livable quality of life for all. This generation needs to finish King’s unfinished fight on the eradication of poverty in America. The most fitting tribute to King and American society would be to return justice to the question of what is right in our society, and move away from relativism.

BC Columnist Anthony Asadullah Samad is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of 50 Years After Brown: The State of Black Equality In America. His website is AnthonySamad.com. Click here to contact Mr. Samad.