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.