Finishing the Unfinished Business of Dr. King

A Move­ment, Led by the Poor, To End Poverty
Estab­lished in May 2003, the Poverty Ini­tia­tive of Union The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary exists “to raise up gen­er­a­tions of reli­gious and com­mu­nity lead­ers com­mit­ted to build­ing a move­ment, led by the poor, to end poverty.”

As we enter the 21st Cen­tury, we face increas­ing polar­iza­tion of the rich and poor. This is the defin­ing social issue of our time. The Poverty Ini­tia­tive believes that it is pos­si­ble to end poverty—not merely man­age it. It is our moral imper­a­tive and the­o­log­i­cal call­ing to do so. This is a spir­i­tual journey.

The cor­ner­stone of the Poverty Ini­tia­tive is the Scholar-in-Residence Pro­gram. Willie Bap­tist has served as the Scholar-in-Residence since its incep­tion in 2004. The Poverty Initiative’s sig­na­ture event is the Poverty Truth Com­mis­sion inspired by Truth Com­mis­sions held in South Africa and else­where. Poverty Truth Com­mis­sions are orga­nized to hear the sto­ries of peo­ple from around the coun­try whose lives are in jeop­ardy due to poverty. Promi­nent reli­gious, aca­d­e­mic, and com­mu­nity lead­ers hear and respond to these tes­ti­monies, just as the Poverty Ini­tia­tive itself began as a response to the tes­ti­mony of the Rev. Dr. Mar­tin Luther King Jr.

Unfin­ished Busi­ness
In impor­tant ways, in the last years of his life, King antic­i­pated many of the eco­nomic, polit­i­cal, reli­gious, and eth­i­cal prob­lems of the present times. In the jour­ney from the Mont­gomery Bus Boy­cott to plan­ning the Poor People’s Cam­paign, he became more than just a black civil rights leader (for 1950s and 60s Amer­ica), but a bearer of a still-relevant vision, set of val­ues, and mis­sion for the entire nation and globe. Today, he stands as a model of lead­er­ship and com­mit­ment for all who are right­eously con­cerned about the cry­ing injus­tice and inhu­man­ity of aban­don­ment in the face of abun­dance, of poverty in the midst of plenty.

This broader vision and analy­sis is expressed in his strate­gic turn from a civil rights to human rights frame­work. He laid this out in an address to the South­ern Chris­t­ian Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence staff in May of 1967, which deserves to be quoted at length:

We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise cer­tain basic ques­tions about the whole soci­ety. We have been in a reform move­ment… But after Selma and the vot­ing rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of rev­o­lu­tion. We must rec­og­nize that we can’t solve our prob­lem now until there is a rad­i­cal redis­tri­b­u­tion of eco­nomic and polit­i­cal power… this means a rev­o­lu­tion of val­ues and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, eco­nomic exploita­tion, and mil­i­tarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one with­out rid of the oth­ers… the whole struc­ture of Amer­i­can life must be changed. Amer­ica is a hyp­o­crit­i­cal nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.[1]

This analy­sis sug­gests the neces­sity of build­ing a broad-based move­ment in order to make plau­si­ble any sig­nif­i­cant “redis­tri­b­u­tion of eco­nomic and polit­i­cal power.” The prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tion of this stance required the unit­ing of poor whites with poor peo­ple of color on the basis of what they have in com­mon: their poverty and powerlessness.

In a num­ber of respects, the Poor People’s Cam­paign of 1968 antic­i­pated the chal­lenges of our times. We are in a time of acute eco­nomic cri­sis, both in the United States and glob­ally. The acute­ness of the cri­sis has revealed its unique chronic aspects as expressed in the impov­er­ish­ment of increas­ing seg­ments of the mid­dle income strata, the so-called “mid­dle class.” Along­side ris­ing hunger, home­less­ness, and eco­nomic inequal­ity, we find hints of a grow­ing protest move­ment at the grass­roots level. At the same time, the cur­rent eco­nomic cri­sis has seri­ously ques­tioned the pre­vail­ing ide­o­log­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal ortho­dox­ies, which have defined the lim­its of the “real­is­ti­cally” pos­si­ble for at least the last forty years. The global finan­cial col­lapse has shown the eco­nomic arrange­ments are con­tin­gent and fal­li­ble, and that we can legit­i­mately imag­ine new and dif­fer­ent ways to struc­ture eco­nomic insti­tu­tions. But with­out a move­ment issu­ing from the bot­tom demand­ing a more just set of arrange­ments, it is unlikely that the cur­rent cri­sis will be resolved in a direc­tion qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent than that of the past two decades, which saw a his­tor­i­cally unprece­dented redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth upward. An account­ing of the lessons of King’s Poor People’s Cam­paign and a study of their appli­ca­tion to the con­tem­po­rary strug­gles of the dis­lo­cated and dis­pos­sessed is thus both timely and necessary.

Almost all dis­course about King has focused on his lead­er­ship of the Civil Rights Move­ment, his the­o­log­i­cal cri­tiques of Jim Crow, his ora­tory skills, and even his short­com­ings in gen­der pol­i­tics. Lit­tle has been said about his com­mit­ment to end­ing poverty and even less about his vision for a Poor People’s Cam­paign as a his­toric effort of the poor to unite across racial, gen­der, eth­nic, reli­gious, and geo­graphic lines. Lit­tle has been said about how, in devis­ing the strat­egy and tac­tics of that cam­paign, he drew on the his­tor­i­cal lessons pro­vided by sim­i­lar efforts of pre­vi­ous cam­paigns, such as the strug­gles in the 1930s of the South­ern Ten­ant Farm­ers Union, an orga­ni­za­tion of the poor cot­ton pick­ers united across color lines, and of the unem­ployed white and black vet­er­ans united in the famous Bonus March on Wash­ing­ton D.C. Noth­ing has been said about how this piv­otal aspect of the Poor People’s Cam­paign was a counter to the age-old ‘divide and con­quer’ strat­egy applied as far back as the old slave plan­ta­tion days. The slaveoc­racy uti­lized the poor whites to hold down the black slaves, while uti­liz­ing the wealth and power derived from the exploita­tion of the black slaves to entice and manip­u­late poor whites. For more infor­ma­tion on these plan­ta­tion pol­i­tics, see W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Recon­struc­tion.