To Washington by mule cart
MLK economics (Final)
To Washington by mule cart
By Mark Engler
The Poor People’s Campaign was conceived to create the political pressure required to enact the types of economic changes that Dr. King and his advisors believed were necessary. “It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters,” King said during a February 1968 trip to Mississippi, “but now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.” The same month, he announced to reporters demands for a $30 billion annual investment in antipoverty measures, a government commitment to full employment, enactment of a guaranteed income, and construction of 500,000 affordable housing units per year.
Most of the time, though, King was content to frame the objectives of the Poor People’s Campaign in broad terms. Its purpose, he believed, was to dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation’s leaders. Historian Rick Perlstein cites one of King’s early expressions of his vision, in which the reverend stated, “We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, ‘We are here; we are poor; we don’t have any money; you have made us this way… and we’ve come to stay until you do something about it.’”
Another early proposal that resonates amid our still-unresolved healthcare crisis was offered by advisor Andrew Young, who envisioned having “a thousand people in need of health and medical care sitting in around Bethesda Naval Hospital, so that nobody could get in or out until they get treated. It would dramatize the fact that there are thousands of people in our nation in need of medical services.”
Sadly, the movement’s plans were violently thrown into disarray. Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, just weeks before the Poor People’s Campaign was set to commence.
We will never know what the impact of the mobilization might have been if Dr. King had lived. On May 12, in the wake of rioting in more than 100 cities, Rev. Ralph Abernathy led a group of several thousand to Washington, D.C. and set up a shantytown called “Resurrection City” on the Mall. At the height of the Poor People’s Campaign, nearly 7,000 residents and supporters of the camp lobbied Congress and organized events to focus the nation’s attention on poverty.
However, the campaign was plagued by persistent, intense rain that turned Resurrection City into a muddy sprawl. Conflicts over leadership took root. And the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, who was becoming an ever more resolute voice for economic justice, further dispirited the encampment. On June 8, shortly before the protestors disbanded, Kennedy’s funeral procession stopped in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands of people, including many from Resurrection City, stood in the light rain and paid their respects, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Arguing, mobilizing, agitating
Nearly forty years later, on January 21, 2008, Democratic presidential candidates John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama participated in a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day debate sponsored by CNN and the Congressional Black Caucus. Each candidate was asked whether Dr. King would endorse his or her campaign if he were alive.
Barack Obama gave the right answer. “I don’t think Dr. King would endorse any of us,” he said. “I think what he would call upon the American people to do is to hold us accountable… I believe change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. Dr. King understood that. It was those women who were willing to walk instead of ride the bus, union workers who are willing to take on violence and intimidation to get the right to organize…. Them arguing, mobilizing, agitating, and ultimately forcing elected officials to be accountable, I think that’s the key.”
A year into the administration, it has become a cliché to say that President Obama needs pressure from an enlivened popular movement if there is to be progressive change in Washington. Yet it would be a disservice to Dr. King to argue otherwise. To those who believed that it was not politically feasible for the Poor People’s Campaign to score a legislative victory, King explained, “Two years before we went into Selma, the Civil Rights Commission recommended that something be done in a very strong manner to eradicate [discrimination]… And yet nothing was done about it until we went to Selma, mounted a movement and really engaged in action geared toward moving the nation away from the course that it was following.”
For King, there was no path to just economic policy except for organizing “to bring pressure to bear on Congress, and to appeal to the conscience and the self-interest of the nation.”
Without people taking action in the spirit of Martin Luther King’s vision, a few Americans may continue to gather inordinate wealth, but many others, thrust against their will into idleness, insecurity, or foreclosure by today’s crisis, will have little recourse but to wait for relief from a capricious and uncertain economy.
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the Web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance provided by Rajiv Sicora.
