We have come this far. We have farther to go. Together.
The Reverend Martin Luther King was murdered after he started his poverty initiative. Malcolm X was murdered after he broke with the Nation of Islam and he set upon a path of rediscovery of Islam and the meaning of what it is to be an American. Both men were cut down as they seemed to be coming to a meeting of the minds.
We are left with their speeches and writings. Now, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, as the middle class has shrunk, as the Black community is in great suffering and again, the old fears are stirring up violence. We need a new leader, part Martin, part Malcolm, to guide us to unity and healing.
Black Lives Matter. Moral Monday. Unite!
Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Solution to Poverty
In his final book, the civil rights leader laid out his vision for a universal basic income that would raise all Americans into the middle class.
When Americans stop to commemorate Dr. Matin Luther King, Jr. each year, we tend to do a great disservice to the man’s legacy by glossing over his final act as an anti-poverty crusader. In the weeks leading to his assassination, King had been hard at work organizing a new march on Washington known as the “Poor People’s Campaign.” The goal was to erect a tent city on the National Mall that, as Mark Engler described it for The Nation in 2010, would “dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation’s leaders.” The great civil rights leader was killed before he could see the effort through.
So what, exactly, was the reverend’s economic dream? In short, King wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income—an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.
To be crystal clear, a guaranteed income—or a universal basic income, as the concept is sometimes called today—is not the same as a higher minimum wage. Rather, the idea is to make sure each household has a certain concrete sum of money to spend each year. One modern version of the policy would give every adult a tax credit that would essentially become a cash payment for families that don’t pay much tax. Conservative thinker Charles Murray has advocated replacing the whole welfare state by handing every grown American a full $10,000.
King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington’s previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been “piecemeal and pygmy.” The government believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one—by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, “the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.”
It was time, he believed, for a more straightforward approach: the government needed to make sure every American had a reasonable income.
