The following introduction is from an article at Media Beat.
In his last months, Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington—engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be—until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor”—appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”
How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was five years old, his father took him to see the bread lines where people stood in line for food. It was during the depression of the 1930s. The experience had a profound effect on the 5 year old toddler. Years later, when King was a first year student at Crozer Seminary, he wrote an autobiography as a class assignment. In it he wrote that his early experience of seeing grown men and women reduced to standing in line to wait their turn for a charity handout had been at the beginning of the formation of his anti-capitalist views. Poverty was not a personal issue for King; it was a human issue; it was a love issue. Martin Luther King was middle-class; he was the son of the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He came to the bread lines as one of the helpers, not as one of the many children his own age he found there, who stood beside their parents waiting in line for bread. Yet at the end of his life, on the day he died, King was leading a Poor People’s movement made up of whites, and blacks, and Latinos, and people of every color found in our rainbow nation. King was ready to accept the anti-racist whites who threw themselves body and soul into the struggle for racial justice for blacks. He knew what it was to be committed by love of humanity to solving a problem that was not his personal problem. There were middle class people in America who threw themselves body and soul into the struggle for economic justice for people of all races, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of them.
When King led the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, Michael Harrington had recently written The Other America, a book which revealed that in what was then the richest country in the world, a quarter of the population was poor. America was a 75 – 25 society, with a vast prosperous middle class that included a well paid working class; what King found unconscionable was that in the midst of this historically unprecedented wealth, millions were still living in misery. Two weeks ago, at the beginning of 1999, a survey in my home town in California showed that 41% of the children in school were living below the federal poverty line. Since 1973, the average real income of American working people has steadily gone down. We have experienced the de-industrialization of America, the rust belt, an epidemic of homelessness, Reaganomics, the Contract on America, and the crippling of labor unions. Hans-Peter Martin, a West German economic journalist, has argued that West Europe and the USA are headed toward a 20-80 society, with wealth concentrated in the upper 20%, as is depicted, for example, in the futuristic film Blade Runner. In 1999, it seems clear that we are part of a global economy where the worldwide majority is poor, and it seems clear that if in our own nation we do not already have a majority suffering from poverty and economic insecurity, we will soon.
The next questions we need to ask are, “What are the causes of poverty?” and “What are its cures?” These are huge and complicated questions. Great interests are at stake. All the concepts used to answer these questions are what the philosopher W. B. Gallie calls contested concepts; most of them are hotly contested concepts. Millions of dollars are spent every year to create ideologies, academic departments and think tanks, and governmental and international agencies devoted to giving misleading, specious, and false answers to these questions. Yet I suspect that most of us know in our hearts that the true answers to these questions require what Dr. King called a revolution of values. They require what Dr. King called the Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief that we must love one another, which is the foundation stone for the building of what Dr. King called the beloved community. I believe that most of us recognize, too, that the natural sciences have messages for our species that homo sapiens needs to hear. There is an ecological reality that is not socially constructed, which the human species needs to conform to, in order to build a sustainable future; it is the reality of the earth, the water, the air, and the living plant and animal forms that share this blue planet with the human family. Perhaps I am mistaken when I think that amidst the infinite confusion surrounding the questions, “What are the causes of poverty? and What are its cures?” there is an emerging consensus around love values and earth values, but, mistaken or not, here is my short statement of what you and I need to do in order to become part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. We need to contribute to empowering the poor, which is, at the same time, to contribute to empowering ourselves. Because community building is empowerment. We need to find our security more in what Cornel West calls non-market relationships, and less in money. We need to live simply that others may simply live. We need to insist that government do its part, but we need to be free of the illusion that poverty can be cured by governmental programs. We need to support improvements in the United Nations, but we need to be free of the illusion that international agencies can solve global problems without the support of what Elise Boulding calls a global civic culture. We need to support measures to reduce population growth, of which two of the most important are old age security for everyone and the reproductive empowerment of women. We need to deal with the realities of the lives of poor people, and that means dealing with alcohol, drugs, and mental illness; it means caring and sharing, and bonding with real people and taking responsibility for their problems. We need to be realistic and aware of our limitations; we cannot solve all the problems of all the poor people, but we can solve some of the problems of some of the poor people. We live in a global society that is composed roughly of 50% have and 50% have-nots, and in it we can be an example of Kant’s categorical imperative; we can live in such a way that if everybody lived the way we live, there would be no poverty. We can take responsibility for living in a cooperative and interdependent ways in our families, in our extended families, and in wider circles of caring. We can eat lower on the food chain, so that if everyone ate as we do there would be enough food for all, and we can recycle and use renewable sources of energy whenever we can. To do our part to cure poverty, we can join the conscious and ethical counter-culture that is emerging worldwide, in response to the deepening global crisis. We can join the counter-culture of simplicity, of non-violence, of community, of solidarity, of service, of respect for diversity, of activism, and of ecology. This is what Dr. King called beloved community, a community that uses the resources of wealth to end poverty so that all God’s children can have the basic necessities of life.
I have been suggesting that Dr. King’s theory about how to eliminate poverty is a theory calling for a revolution in values, inspired by the ideal of beloved community. “Beloved community” is the name King gave to the “dream” he evoked in his famous “I have a dream” speech. It is the ideal stated in the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Council) mission statement, which King composed. It includes ending poverty, as well as ending other forms of injustice. Nonviolence as a strategy is part of a larger strategy, which King called a revolution in values, or conversion. Or perhaps “nonviolence” is another name for conversion.
When I ask myself specifically, “What can I do to contribute to eliminating poverty?” and when I ask myself that specific question after reading Dr. King’s philosophy, I see immediately that King has taken away all the easy outs.
If my theory were not King’s, but instead the theory that the free market left to itself will do away with poverty, then my strategy would be to do nothing. Every two years I would vote for candidates who would do their best to make sure that the government would also do nothing. That would be an easy out.
If my theory were that poverty is the government’s problem, that the government ought to solve, then I would advocate that the government do something about poverty, and every two years I would go to the polls and vote for progressive candidates. That would be another easy out.
If my theory were that the poor needed to revolt, then I would sit back and wait for them to revolt, or perhaps teach a course on the history of revolutions. Another easy out.
If I had no theory at all, but instead maintained held [sic] that nobody knows the cause and cure of poverty, then I would apply for a grant to do research.
And so on.
King does not leave us any easy outs. He was convinced that poverty is not necessary; on this earth there is enough for all. Solutions to the problem are known. What is lacking is a collective conversion, the redeeming of the soul of America, a transformation of the social will, which requires of me as an individual member of society my own ethical response. That does not leave me any easy outs. Nobody will believe me if I advocate the transformation of other people’s wills, if I do not allow the gift of grace to transform my own.
Nevertheless, when I get down to details of planning my daily list of things to do, and when I ask myself, “What will I do today to fulfill King’s dream?” the next question I ask myself is, “Am I really up for this? Do I really want to rise with the ranks, not from the ranks, or do I mainly want to be darn sure that I am among the prosperous 20% in the 20-80 society?” And then the next question I ask myself is, “Where will I find the Time? Do I really have time after a hard day at work or at school to be a volunteer? An activist? A citizen?”
I do not have good answers to these questions, and I propose them for discussion hoping that someone else will have better answers than mine.
But I do want to contribute something positive to the discussion. I know that around the world millions of people are involved in thousands of community-building efforts. I call them growth points. One that I am working with in California is called Chrysalis Point; it is a movement by and for the homeless mentally ill. It is an empowerment project, seeking more participation by clients in the administration of welfare and disability, and in politics generally. It is also a self reliance project, creating jobs recycling donated items. I do not offer Chrysalis Point as an example of avoiding structural issues by committing random acts of kindness, but rather as an example of confronting structural issues by doing something concrete about them. Hopefully in the discussion, others will share their experiences in anti-poverty projects, or any ideas for new anti-poverty projects.
Dr. King called upon us to be transformed nonconformists, who are willing to violate conventional wisdom and adopt a minority viewpoint. Although the counter-culture I have been advocating is not small, it is certainly a minority viewpoint.
The conventional wisdom is that movements to eliminate poverty have failed. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was a failure in that the campaigners eventually abandoned their tent city and gave up the effort to stay there until the conscience of the nation was awakened. At the time of the campaign Lyndon Johnson was already heading a “War on Poverty”, which is a war America lost. Socialist revolutions have failed. The welfare states of Western Europe, which were once the models to which all the rest of the world aspired, have been cut back, and now you see homeless people on the streets of London just as you do on the streets of Los Angeles.
And yet what Dr. King said is still true, even if his is an unpopular minority viewpoint. There is still enough for all, if we would live together like brothers and sisters. Solutions to the problem of poverty are still known, but not put into effect. A revolution in values is still needed. The transformation of society is still possible. But the transformation of society will not happen unless some people are willing to live unconventional lives for the sake of the greater good.
“Honesty compels me to admit,” wrote Dr. King, “that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six year old daughter ask ‘Daddy, why do you go to jail so much?'”
Nonconformity may also mean that your parents do not understand you. It may mean that your friends do not understand you; your friends may even hate you for being too good and making them look bad because of their indulgence in the normal vices of the conventional majority, such as burning unnecessary fossil fuel and eating unnecessarily high on the food chain. Living the ideal of the beloved community will mean that allies on the traditional left will not understand you. You may be perceived by the traditional left as weakening the working class in its struggle for political power, and as advocating mere opium for the people.
Welcoming multiple gender orientations and women who have had abortions will mean that the traditional right will not understand you. Your lover or your family may resent the time, energy, and money you put into building the beloved community, and you may have to answer the question who comes first in your life, your significant other, your children, or your social causes.
These are practical questions in the life of the conscientious nonconformist.