As the nation honors the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a stirring new memorial on the National Mall, let’s not obscure one of his most important messages in a fog of sentiment. Justice, he told us, is not just a legal or moral question but a matter of economics as well.
In this sense, we’re not advancing toward the fulfillment of King’s dream. We’re heading in the opposite direction.
Aug. 28, the day organizers chose for the dedication of the King memorial (the ceremony was postponed because of Hurricane Irene), is the anniversary of the 1963 march and rally at which King delivered the indelible “I Have a Dream” speech. That event—one of the watershed moments of 20th century America—was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Meaningful employment was a front-and-center demand.
The idea and impetus for the march came from A. Philip Randolph, one of the most important labor leaders in the nation’s history. Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union that demanded and won decent pay and better working conditions for thousands of railroad employees, most of them African-American. By 1963, Randolph had become a vice president of the AFL-CIO labor federation.
King and his fellow civil rights leaders understood the importance of good jobs that paid a living wage—and the social and economic mobility such jobs provide—in forging a nation that honors its promise of fairness and equality. If he and Randolph were alive today, given the devastating blows that poor and working-class Americans have suffered, I’m confident they’d be planning a “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom II.”
As an African-American old enough to remember Jim Crow segregation in the South, I’m amazed at the progress toward racial justice. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re light-years from where we started.
King was a passionate advocate for economic justice, speaking not just for African-Americans but for all Americans seeking to pull themselves out of poverty and dysfunction. On this score, we haven’t just failed to make sufficient progress. We’ve stopped trying.
With unemployment above 9 percent, what task absorbs our elected leaders? Certainly not an urgent search for ways to put people back to work. Instead, we’re obsessed with deficit-reduction measures that, if applied in the short term, would destroy jobs rather than create them.
Look beyond the recession. Between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War, the typical income for an American household roughly doubled (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Since then, the Economist magazine noted last year, income for a typical household rose by just 22 percent—and even this modest increase was due to the fact that women entered the work force in large numbers. The Pew Research Center found that if you look just at men in their 30s, they earned 12 percent less in 2004 (again, inflation-adjusted) than their fathers did at a similar age.
As everyone knows by now, the top 1 percent of earners capture an increasing share of national income. The rich, without a doubt, are getting richer. The middle class and the working class are seeing their incomes stagnate or fall. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is an outrage. Food, clothing, housing and transportation on $7.25 an hour? There aren’t enough hours in the week.
It’s no coincidence that this massive transfer of wealth—basically, from workers to investors—took place at a time when union membership was in steep decline. In 1983, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to a union. In 2010, only 11.9 percent were union members.
The result? In 2010, the median weekly pay of a male worker over 25 who belonged to a union was $982, according to BLS. The comparable figure for a worker not represented by a union was $846.
King was assassinated in Memphis, where he was supporting the demands of sanitation workers for more pay, better working conditions and the right to unionize. The civil rights leader was increasingly focused on the economic dimension of the freedom struggle, and was planning a massive Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his death.
The new King memorial is inspirational. When I visited Wednesday, the crowd of visitors was large, diverse and generally awe-struck at the memorial’s simplicity and power. Once again, the great man stands in Washington to challenge our morality, our faith and our conscience.
Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
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By Krystalyn, September 8, 2011 at 3:34 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Slam dunkin like Shaquille O’Neal, if he wrote informative atriecls.
By jude moriarty, August 29, 2011 at 3:24 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
I am sick - sick that anybody would attend this travesty (memorial service). Dr King would be spinning in his grave.
A run of the mill - Communist Statue!! King a lover of mankind - should (if there were a memorial) be shown amidst a crowd of those he spent his life with/ King holding with little children.
King throwing open the doors of a jail cell - with the words, “I’ve come to set the captives free”. NOT this debacle. We have MANY great black artists—-WHERE is the outrage.
Don’t just sit there and shrug (as usual) Everyone send this link and your outrage to ALL DETROIT papers Black Agenda Report etc. Believe me, many people are not aware of this INSULT.
Did you know (never reported on the anniversary of his death) that (Clinton administration) a CIVIL court found the government guilty of CONSPIRACY in killing the good Dr. King. The KING family NEVER believed (they visited him often) that James Earl Raye killed their father/husband. WHY isn’t this news?
You’re really doing justice to his message here, Eugene. He was bigger than just a racial identity; he was a rounded person and thinker. The standard portrayal is conspicuously - and insultingly - reductive. His assassination was untimely for good people everywhere; it seems likely that his economic activism could have made a big difference. Setting the record straight claws back a little of what might have been.
But I have yet to hear an apology from the FBI, and the Republican party for what they did to Dr. King…
He was treated as an enemy of the state, and our government controlled, by right wing Republicans, did everything they could to discredit Dr. King and his message. To intimidate him, and to slander him…
Until there is a full,complete and open investigation of the governments role in what our government did to Dr. King, there will never be any fitting memorials to Mr. King, and what he sacrificed for this country.
KNOWN MARTIN KING SINCE 1963 SORRY TO SAY THE NEW
MEMORIAL BUILT=MADE BY COMMUNIST CHINA CHECK OUT THE
DEEPLY CHISELED SIGN. THIS IS A STANDARD STATE STATUE
IN COMMUNIST CHINA, CERTAINLY NOT ONE OF A KIND “LIKE
THE KING”!IN Communist China hundreds many thousands
just like it only Mao`S face who killed 60 million
people. MAO WITH NEGRO FEATURES! THE FBI-J.EDGAR
HOOVER THE GAY CROSS DRESSER RULED FBI AND ACCUSED
King of being a communist & SET KING up to Be
ShOT!AND NOW! The BLACK COMMUNITY is “UNCLE TOMMING
IT” allowing communist CHINA MAKE STATUE= WHERE by
the way are NO BLACKS NO HUMAN RIGHTS but they have
to make MAO a negro face and call in MLK: SHAME I
FEEL ANGER TO YOU BLACKS= SHAME ON YOU ALL THAT BLACK
ATHLETIC MONEY FOR NOTHIN! BLACKS will be COMMUNIST
CHINA`S NEW SLAVES: WHERE IS TESTICKLE cutting
JACKSON NOW NO BALLS! OR AL SHARPTON THE NEW MURDOCH
SLAVE SHAME ON ALL OF YOU IN THIS BLACK COMMUNITY:
No offense meant to Dr. King’s memory, but I’ve got to say this. His statue looks
like it was commissioned in North Korea. It has a “Dear Leader” vibe that is
repulsive and antithetical to Dr. King’s beliefs and teachings.
SC: During Dr.Kings life in America, anyone talking about a more egalitarian society was labelled a pinko communist.
True enough. We never got over, it seems, the McCarthy Era when even socialist “talk” was considered traitorous. We are long way from the time, at the turn of the century, it was a central point of political dialog.
Of course, when the Communist Curtain came down in the 1980s, Reckless Ronnie crowed about how American Democracy had “prevailed” over the forces of evil. The Evil Empire was dead - praise be the Lord!
Whilst he brought down taxation (on marginal income and capital gains) that would precipitate, 30 years later, in the Great Recession of 2009 - the worst in 80 years. Don’t believe this causality?
See this info-graphic here. Look at the period of the 1980s, during Ronnie’s tenure. Now explain how taxation has “no effect” on Public Debt and it’s “all the fault” of profligate expenditures (on “entitlements”).
POLITICAL REACTIONARY
The Crazies are focusing on “entitlement profligacy” because they think such expenditures are “wasteful spending”. They haven’t the slightest notion of Social Justice. As this quote above suggest, those proposing Social Justice are just “pinko Communists”. Why are the Crazies so obsessed with a history long since past?
The phrase for such a sentiment is “political reactionary”, that is, opposing all political or social progress or reform of any kind. Which is why their ideology is encrusted in biblical references and, of course, Social Justice is just godless Communist Bunkum.
Nothing has changed in this world for half a century. Reckless Ronnie was rRight. It’s all a tidy amalgam, by which their dogma is not only ideologically correct but preordained by God.
Neat political marketing, all that, particularly to numbskulls prepared to swallow it hook, line and sinker.
THE WHEEL TURNS ...
Meanwhile, this past half-century, other countries took another road. One called Social Democracy, paved with the intent to distribute the fruit of everyone’s labor more equitably, rather than see it all aggregate with a small, select percentage of the population.
As a result, they live a better life than most Americans:
*Their health care is free (or nearly free) – no one is put out of house and home when a serious illness befalls them.
*Their children go to postsecondary education free, or nearly free – from which they are bright, ambitious and mature.
*They’ve caught up with America in terms of Home Ownership – and with market oversight controls that forbid the “wheeling ‘n dealing” of predatory lending that gave rise to the SubPrime Mess. House foreclosures are practically non-existent, because pressure from the government forces banks to make repayment accommodations such that people keep their homes.
*I could go on, but the above is sufficient.
They have fulfilled the basic ideals of socialism, without reverting to totalitarian communism.
MY POINT
Uncle Sam missed the boat on Social Democracy, however. And – fifty years later – here we are gridlocked by the very same useless, tedious and infertile debate about “entitlements” - as if they were sacrilegious profligacy and against God’s will.
By Caroline, August 26, 2011 at 4:47 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
dukesman2000 said that the mention that so much progress has been made
since MLK is why not enough progress has been made. Surely it is never enough
when one considers that the ratio of black youth not employed is double that of
other races. dukesman2000 needs to be reminded that many of battles that the
people have to fight are ongoing and almost perpetual and often it is one step
forward and two steps back.
The struggle for equality for black and women have been pretty equal it seems
to me. Women don’t feel that enough progress has been made either. Why,
there are even certain ideologues that want to return back to their good old
days where women had no control of any part of their lives, and slavery and
indentured servitude was just dandy.
Let’s celebrate this wonderful honor to MLK on the National Mall. We still do
have a long way to go, and true that equality has yet not completely been
reached.
“As an African-American old enough to remember Jim Crow segregation in the South, I’m amazed at the progress toward racial justice. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re light-years from where we started.”
That statement alone speaks to the reason why Black people haven’t made any progress. Black people accepts tokenism at the drop of a dime. Black people have been stabbed in the back by white people with a nine inch knife and because they’ve pulled it out six inches, you have uncle toms like ER who will push out their chests and say “look at the progress we’ve made.”
Dr. King would be appalled to see that a monument to him would replace action in his name. He would be appalled to see the first black president, a man elected as the very embodiment of his own “dream”, squander the opportunity and betray the trust won in his name. And, yes, he would be appalled to see that the United States is still the “greatest purveyor of violence” in the world.
Dr. King would take to the streets in fierce opposition to Barack Obama, and he would take back the rhetoric and legacy that the president usurped and cheapened as an election tactic.
By SarcastiCanuck, August 26, 2011 at 6:56 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
During Dr.Kings life in America,anyone talking about a more egalitarian society was labelled a pinko communist.Perpetuated by the rich,it always amazed me how many middle class and poor also repeated this mantra.It seemed to be brainwashing on a grand scale.I believe it had something to do with what is known as the ‘American way of life’,which I still don’t understand to this day.What is so unique about it compared to the rest of the world?
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By Krystalyn, September 8, 2011 at 3:34 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Slam dunkin like Shaquille O’Neal, if he wrote informative atriecls.
Report thisBy jude moriarty, August 29, 2011 at 3:24 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
I am sick - sick that anybody would attend this travesty (memorial service). Dr King would be spinning in his grave.
A run of the mill - Communist Statue!! King a lover of mankind - should (if there were a memorial) be shown amidst a crowd of those he spent his life with/ King holding with little children.
King throwing open the doors of a jail cell - with the words, “I’ve come to set the captives free”. NOT this debacle. We have MANY great black artists—-WHERE is the outrage.
Don’t just sit there and shrug (as usual) Everyone send this link and your outrage to ALL DETROIT papers Black Agenda Report etc. Believe me, many people are not aware of this INSULT.
Report thisDid you know (never reported on the anniversary of his death) that (Clinton administration) a CIVIL court found the government guilty of CONSPIRACY in killing the good Dr. King. The KING family NEVER believed (they visited him often) that James Earl Raye killed their father/husband. WHY isn’t this news?
By Gordy, August 29, 2011 at 12:11 pm Link to this comment
You’re really doing justice to his message here, Eugene. He was bigger than just a racial identity; he was a rounded person and thinker. The standard portrayal is conspicuously - and insultingly - reductive. His assassination was untimely for good people everywhere; it seems likely that his economic activism could have made a big difference. Setting the record straight claws back a little of what might have been.
Report thisBy prisnersdilema, August 29, 2011 at 11:49 am Link to this comment
Maybe I missed something…
But I have yet to hear an apology from the FBI, and the Republican party for what they did to Dr. King…
He was treated as an enemy of the state, and our government controlled, by right wing Republicans, did everything they could to discredit Dr. King and his message. To intimidate him, and to slander him…
Until there is a full,complete and open investigation of the governments role in what our government did to Dr. King, there will never be any fitting memorials to Mr. King, and what he sacrificed for this country.
Report thisBy Peter Knopfler, August 27, 2011 at 10:29 am Link to this comment
KNOWN MARTIN KING SINCE 1963 SORRY TO SAY THE NEW
Report thisMEMORIAL BUILT=MADE BY COMMUNIST CHINA CHECK OUT THE
DEEPLY CHISELED SIGN. THIS IS A STANDARD STATE STATUE
IN COMMUNIST CHINA, CERTAINLY NOT ONE OF A KIND “LIKE
THE KING”!IN Communist China hundreds many thousands
just like it only Mao`S face who killed 60 million
people. MAO WITH NEGRO FEATURES! THE FBI-J.EDGAR
HOOVER THE GAY CROSS DRESSER RULED FBI AND ACCUSED
King of being a communist & SET KING up to Be
ShOT!AND NOW! The BLACK COMMUNITY is “UNCLE TOMMING
IT” allowing communist CHINA MAKE STATUE= WHERE by
the way are NO BLACKS NO HUMAN RIGHTS but they have
to make MAO a negro face and call in MLK: SHAME I
FEEL ANGER TO YOU BLACKS= SHAME ON YOU ALL THAT BLACK
ATHLETIC MONEY FOR NOTHIN! BLACKS will be COMMUNIST
CHINA`S NEW SLAVES: WHERE IS TESTICKLE cutting
JACKSON NOW NO BALLS! OR AL SHARPTON THE NEW MURDOCH
SLAVE SHAME ON ALL OF YOU IN THIS BLACK COMMUNITY:
By hemingdale, August 27, 2011 at 7:39 am Link to this comment
No offense meant to Dr. King’s memory, but I’ve got to say this. His statue looks
Report thislike it was commissioned in North Korea. It has a “Dear Leader” vibe that is
repulsive and antithetical to Dr. King’s beliefs and teachings.
By Lafayette, August 27, 2011 at 1:12 am Link to this comment
JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM
True enough. We never got over, it seems, the McCarthy Era when even socialist “talk” was considered traitorous. We are long way from the time, at the turn of the century, it was a central point of political dialog.
Of course, when the Communist Curtain came down in the 1980s, Reckless Ronnie crowed about how American Democracy had “prevailed” over the forces of evil. The Evil Empire was dead - praise be the Lord!
Whilst he brought down taxation (on marginal income and capital gains) that would precipitate, 30 years later, in the Great Recession of 2009 - the worst in 80 years. Don’t believe this causality?
See this info-graphic here. Look at the period of the 1980s, during Ronnie’s tenure. Now explain how taxation has “no effect” on Public Debt and it’s “all the fault” of profligate expenditures (on “entitlements”).
POLITICAL REACTIONARY
The Crazies are focusing on “entitlement profligacy” because they think such expenditures are “wasteful spending”. They haven’t the slightest notion of Social Justice. As this quote above suggest, those proposing Social Justice are just “pinko Communists”. Why are the Crazies so obsessed with a history long since past?
The phrase for such a sentiment is “political reactionary”, that is, opposing all political or social progress or reform of any kind. Which is why their ideology is encrusted in biblical references and, of course, Social Justice is just godless Communist Bunkum.
Nothing has changed in this world for half a century. Reckless Ronnie was rRight. It’s all a tidy amalgam, by which their dogma is not only ideologically correct but preordained by God.
Neat political marketing, all that, particularly to numbskulls prepared to swallow it hook, line and sinker.
THE WHEEL TURNS ...
Meanwhile, this past half-century, other countries took another road. One called Social Democracy, paved with the intent to distribute the fruit of everyone’s labor more equitably, rather than see it all aggregate with a small, select percentage of the population.
As a result, they live a better life than most Americans:
*Their health care is free (or nearly free) – no one is put out of house and home when a serious illness befalls them.
*Their children go to postsecondary education free, or nearly free – from which they are bright, ambitious and mature.
*They’ve caught up with America in terms of Home Ownership – and with market oversight controls that forbid the “wheeling ‘n dealing” of predatory lending that gave rise to the SubPrime Mess. House foreclosures are practically non-existent, because pressure from the government forces banks to make repayment accommodations such that people keep their homes.
*I could go on, but the above is sufficient.
They have fulfilled the basic ideals of socialism, without reverting to totalitarian communism.
MY POINT
Uncle Sam missed the boat on Social Democracy, however. And – fifty years later – here we are gridlocked by the very same useless, tedious and infertile debate about “entitlements” - as if they were sacrilegious profligacy and against God’s will.
Heaven help us … (pun intended).
Report thisBy Caroline, August 26, 2011 at 4:47 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
dukesman2000 said that the mention that so much progress has been made
since MLK is why not enough progress has been made. Surely it is never enough
when one considers that the ratio of black youth not employed is double that of
other races. dukesman2000 needs to be reminded that many of battles that the
people have to fight are ongoing and almost perpetual and often it is one step
forward and two steps back.
The struggle for equality for black and women have been pretty equal it seems
to me. Women don’t feel that enough progress has been made either. Why,
there are even certain ideologues that want to return back to their good old
days where women had no control of any part of their lives, and slavery and
indentured servitude was just dandy.
Let’s celebrate this wonderful honor to MLK on the National Mall. We still do
have a long way to go, and true that equality has yet not completely been
reached.
Peace.
Report thisBy dukesman2000, August 26, 2011 at 10:30 am Link to this comment
“As an African-American old enough to remember Jim Crow segregation in the South, I’m amazed at the progress toward racial justice. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re light-years from where we started.”
That statement alone speaks to the reason why Black people haven’t made any progress. Black people accepts tokenism at the drop of a dime. Black people have been stabbed in the back by white people with a nine inch knife and because they’ve pulled it out six inches, you have uncle toms like ER who will push out their chests and say “look at the progress we’ve made.”
Report thisBy david451, August 26, 2011 at 8:23 am Link to this comment
Dr. King would be appalled to see that a monument to him would replace action in his name. He would be appalled to see the first black president, a man elected as the very embodiment of his own “dream”, squander the opportunity and betray the trust won in his name. And, yes, he would be appalled to see that the United States is still the “greatest purveyor of violence” in the world.
Dr. King would take to the streets in fierce opposition to Barack Obama, and he would take back the rhetoric and legacy that the president usurped and cheapened as an election tactic.
See http://corporateconstraint.blogspot.com/2011/08/what-might-martin-luther-king-say.html for more.
Report thisBy SarcastiCanuck, August 26, 2011 at 6:56 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
During Dr.Kings life in America,anyone talking about a more egalitarian society was labelled a pinko communist.Perpetuated by the rich,it always amazed me how many middle class and poor also repeated this mantra.It seemed to be brainwashing on a grand scale.I believe it had something to do with what is known as the ‘American way of life’,which I still don’t understand to this day.What is so unique about it compared to the rest of the world?
Report thisBy thecrow, August 26, 2011 at 4:54 am Link to this comment
“Justice” Department
http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/look-into-your-heart/
Report this