Jan. 19, 2025—While Dr. Martin Luther King, whose birth we celebrate this weekend, is rightly viewed as the pre-eminent voice for Black civil rights in the 20th century, it would be a mistake to limit his role to the fight for racial justice alone. Dr. King was committed from his earliest days to what is called the Christian “social gospel,” which demands that Christian ethics be applied to social and economic governmental policies. By 1967, he put these issues at the very top of his agenda.[1]
His first dramatic step outside racial concerns per se came on April 4, 1967, when King used a speech at Riverside Church in New York City to denounce the U.S. government’s involvement in the War in Vietnam. The second was his decision in the fall of that year to call for a Poor People’s March on Washington that would demand implementation of an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans. The march was scheduled for April 1968.
Martin Luther King (center) leads marchers for the Memphis sanitation strike days before his assassination.
King was never able to follow through on this campaign, of course. He was gunned down on April 4 of that year while in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was campaigning for the rights of the largely Black sanitation union in that city. The march on Washington went ahead, and turned into what was known as “Resurrection City,” but never gained the traction and prominence that King had hoped for. Virtually none of the demands of the Poor People’s campaign were met, and the political climate – and tensions between whites and Blacks for jobs – grew more and more tense as policies of austerity, along with the 1970s financial crises, came to dominate the nation.
Let’s take a look at what King was demanding.
First, Some Background
In calling for an Economic Bill of Rights, Dr. King was echoing President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR used his fourth inaugural address, given January 11, 1944, to present this challenge to the Congress and the nation. I quote that portion of the speech:
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people — whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth — is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights — among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however — as our industrial economy expanded — these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.
FDR giving his 1944 State of the Union Address
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.
There is good reason to believe that FDR was quite serious about getting the government to adopt the laws and policies that would guarantee these rights. He had to have had in mind the way in which the deadly austerity imposed on Germany after World War I contributed to the rise of Hitler, and wanted to ensure such a development never occurred in the United States. The president also showed his desire to popularize his proposal by choosing this section of his Inaugural to be played in news reels throughout the county – a common practice in those days.
Bayard Rustin, King collaborator
The “Freedom Budget”
King’s and the civil rights movement’s first venture in the direction of a broad, multi-racial program for ensuring economic progress for all, came in 1967. The A. Philip Randolph Institute, led by Bayard Rustin, issued a “Freedom Budget for All Americans.” Dr. King wrote a foreword to that document, which read as follows:
After many years of intense struggle in the courts, the legislative halls, and on the streets, we have achieved a number of important victories. We have come far in our quest for respect and dignity. But we have far to go.
The long journey ahead requires that we emphasize the needs of all America’s poor, for there is no way to find work, or adequate housing, or quality integrated schools for Negroes alone. We shall eliminate slums for Negroes when we destroy ghettos and build new cities for all.
This human rights emphasis is an integral part of the Freedom Budget and sets, I believe, a new and creative tone for the great challenge we face.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference fully endorses the Freedom Budget and plans to expend great energy and time in working for its implementation.
It is not enough to project the Freedom Budget. We must dedicate ourselves to the legislative task to see that it is immediately and fully achieved. I pledge myself to this task and will urge all others to do likewise. The Freedom Budget is essential if the Negro people are to make further progress. It is essential if we are to maintain social peace. It is a political necessity. It is a moral commitment to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded.
A New York City slum neighborhood — in 1987!
The document went on to outline the following seven objectives, to be reached within 10 years:
To provide full employment for all who are willing and able to work, including those who need education or training to make them willing and able.
To ensure decent and adequate wages to all who work.
To assure a decent living standard to those who cannot or should not work.
To wipe out slum ghettos and provide decent homes for all Americans.
To provide decent medical care and adequate educational opportunities to all Americans, at a cost they can afford.
To purify our air and water and develop our transportation and natural resources on a scale suitable to our growing needs.
To unite sustained full employment with full production and high economic growth.
Next, the document elaborated on how this program will increase the wealth of the nation, not aim to simply redistribute existing wealth. Politically, however, it went nowhere. Among the major reasons why not was the lack of leadership, accomplished in part by the assassination of the Kennedys and King himself.
King’s Economic Bill of Rights
In May of 1967, Dr. King used a staff retreat to raise the question of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), moving to act on the economic issue. We passed the voting rights act, he said; now “we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution… In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.”
Martin Luther King addresses the 1963 March on Washington from the Lincoln Memorial. The demo called for jobs
His first formulation of the demands of the campaign he proposed were: “$30 billion annual appropriation for a real war on poverty; Congressional passage of full employment and guaranteed income legislation [a guaranteed annual wage]; and construction of 500,000 low-cost housing units per year until slums were eliminated.”
Dr. King then conceived the idea of the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to bring impoverished individuals of all races to Washington, D.C. in April 1968 to carry out broad civil disobedience: i.e., to effectively block up Washington nonviolently until the urgent issues of economic hardship were effectively addressed by Congress. He devoted months to agitating for this idea, including dealing with a lot of blowback from members and collaborators of the SCLC.
The SCLC’s involvement with the Memphis sanitation strike was, to King’s mind, part and parcel of this new emphasis on demanding economic justice, in combination with the unions and the poor.
Just before his assassination, King wrote an article which further specified the elements of the Economic Bill of Rights which he envisioned. After his death, the Committee of 100, a group King had assembled to conduct the Poor People’s Campaign, issued the following document outlining their demands to President Johnson and the Congress:
Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, architects of the Poor People’s Campaign, have outlined 5 requirements of the bill of economic & social rights that will set poverty on the road to extinction:
A meaningful job at a living wage for every employable citizen.
A secure and adequate income for all who cannot find jobs or for whom employment is inappropriate.
Access to land as a means to income and livelihood.
Access to capital as a means of full participation in the economic life of America.
Recognition by law of the right of people affected by government programs to play a truly significant role in determining how they are designed and carried out.
While the SCLC movement is credited by some with reforms outlawing discrimination against Blacks in housing and so forth, the Poor People’s Campaign had no significant impact on changing the economic policies that were obstructing its objectives. It had narrowed its scope, and totally ignored the financial reforms which would be required to meet its aims.
No Room for Despair
It can be depressing indeed to look at the lofty objectives of 1945 and 1966, and see where we are today. Many of those industrial jobs with decent wages have been sent overseas by the financial barons, leaving us unable to manufacture many crucial products for ourselves. Nearly a quarter of our workforce makes under $17 an hour. The country is full of formerly industrialized towns which are struggling to make it, and are populated by demoralized people who often turn to drugs. The suicide rate among farmers is more than three times greater than among the general population.
Our infrastructure is in dismal shape, an embarrassment compared to many nations in the world. Income equality is constantly increasing to an obscene degree.
And while access to health care and education may have increased, general conditions are such that this progress has not resulted in a high quality of life.
This is not to say that Dr. King’s anti-poverty campaign had all the answers which we needed to deal with our economic problems. But Dr. King and his key colleagues did understand that creating a prosperous economy was essential to achieving racial and political justice. They understood that we need the government to promote manufacturing, higher wages, and infrastructure.
What’s the use of moving to the front of the bus, if the bus isn’t going anywhere? To honor King’s legacy, we need a political economy devoted to progress for all.*
[1] King considered these ideals to have been promised in the United States’ founding documents, as he said so eloquently during the 1963 March on Washington. The economic policies which could fulfill these ideals are discussed at length in my book Hamilton Versus Wall Street : The Core Principles of the American System of Economics.
I should add that Dr. King did not limit his demand for economic justice to the United States; he had a vision of international peace and prosperity, and confidence the United States could play a key role in producing it.
