Economic Justice: Where Do We Go From Here?

By Marc Morial

President and CEO of the National Urban League

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar…it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Earlier this week, the nation paused in annual tribute to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – the man who awakened a nation with a dream of equal rights and forever changed the world with his message of nonviolent social change.  But, in what would have been the 85th year of his life, what still remains a lesser-focus in the celebrations of and reflections on Dr. King is his message of economic justice in the achievement of true equality.

Perhaps it is because Dr. King’s life was taken before he could fully realize the “Poor People’s Campaign” – focused on economic inequality and poverty –  that this part of his work is seldom spotlighted on a national stage.  While efforts around desegregation and voting rights will forever remain critical hallmarks of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King’s primary focus during the last year of his life to improving the economic and social condition of the nation’s poor is its unfinished business.  Dr. King recognized that “the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice” and subsequently called for a Bill of Economic and Social Rights addressing jobs, minimum income, decent housing, education, and healthcare.

He knew then what we also know now.  With more than 46 million Americans currently living in poverty and roughly 27 percent of African Americans living below the poverty line, economic inequality is the biggest domestic threat facing our nation.  As new challenges face us on the civil rights front, old ones confront us with as much force and clarity as they did 50 years ago.  The challenge of this generation is the completion of  our unfinished business.

“The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. … The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. ” – Excerpted from Dr. King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)