Dr. King's Economic Justice: OUR UNFINISHED WORK

For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help.  He will take pity on the poor and the needy, and save the weak from death (Psalm 72:12-13).

Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith, and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him (James 2:5)?”

You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain . . . .  You oppress the righteous and take bribes, and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts (Amos 5:11-12).

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On a Thursday evening, the 10^th of November last year, a 37-year old man, a Christian, and an active member of his church was arrested and charged with bank robbery and the murder of a police officer.  After allegedly robbing the Bank of America in Vallejo, California, he fled the pursuit of a 45-year-old, 19-year veteran of the police department there-also a Christian.  Both men were married, fathers of children.  The 37-year-old suspect was out of work.  He had been convicted of crimes before, but had stayed out of trouble for more than 11 years, and had seemingly turned his life around, becoming a responsible member of the community.

The alleged assailant had been unemployed for more than a year and the family home was about to be foreclosed on.  It is speculated that his financial troubles may have been behind his seeming spiral into violence.

The officer was not only a 19-year veteran patrolman with a spotless record, but he was a pillar of the community.  He was committed in word and deed to improving the quality of life for at-risk urban youth in Vallejo, California.  He volunteered as a basketball coach for the local high school, a community center, and in fact had served as a role model for one of the associate pastors of his alleged slayer’s church.  The community was hit hard, grieving both for the slain officer and the family of the alleged slayer.  It appears that though devout and sincere in his faith and his personal transformation, the alleged assailant was unable to hold it together against the economic strain his family faced.  His church’s general negation of the social crises around them in favor of preparing members for prosperity on earth, and encouraging them in their individual spiritual growth and authority as they await heaven, was unable to stem his penchant for criminal activity and his return to the same when he found the promised prosperity disappearing around him. 

The so-called issues of the Social Gospel are the issues of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The exploitation, abuse and injustice leveled by the rich and powerful against the poor are themes in the burden of the Prophets, the Law of Moses, the compassion of Siddhartha, and several Surahs of the Qur’an. 

The church can spiritualize and ignore the real problems of real human beings all it wants, or like some mainline communions, it can cater to the middle and upper classes and get amnesia about the very people that John Wesley dedicated himself to in England, and Richard Allen in America: The poor, the marginalized, the outcast, and those who were being used as human machines for plantations and the new industrial revolution.  Yet these issues do not go away and will continue to have an adverse effect on our people.  Furthermore God will judge us for this neglect, this apathy, this rush to comfort, acceptability and popularity that we seem so compelled to pursue.

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On November 27, 1967, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a Poor People's Campaign to address issues of economic justice and housing for the poor in the United States, aiming itself at rebuilding America's cities . . . . Martin Luther King Jr. labeled the Poor People's Campaign the "second phase," of the civil rights struggle - setting goals such as gathering activists to lobby Congress for an "Economic Bill of Rights," Dr. King also saw a crying need to confront a Congress that demonstrated its "hostility to the poor " - appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

Under the "economic bill of rights" the Poor People's Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with an antipoverty package that included housing and a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.  Dr. King pointed out that "the wealthy who own securities have always had a guaranteed income, and the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits."  For this reason he argued that the guaranteed income should be "progressive, set at the median income of society rather than at the bottom," and that it should "automatically increase with inflation."

Dr. King had recently published, Where Do we Go from Here: Chaos of Community (1967). In that book, Dr. King called for the complete economic redistribution of wealth in America.  He wrote further:

          Up to recently, we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative, and fragile family     relationships, which distorted personality development.

Dr. King went on to explain in that same chapter of the book:

          I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to   be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it    directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.  . . .  We are likely to find that the attempt to eliminate the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished....  

          The curse of poverty has no justification in our age . . . . The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

We have now gone full circle.  While King’s birthday celebration approaches the vulgar corporate secularism of Christmas, or of a pre-convention political rump session, where the most opportunistic of people with money and power dominate the platforms proclaiming their allegiance to something nebulously referred to as King’s Dream, most fail to remember his speech of December 24, 1967, in which he stated,

"In 1963...in Washington, D.C....I Tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess...that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare.”

In an interview with NPR regarding the Poor Peoples’ Campaign on Dr. King’s birthday, 2008, the Reverend Joseph Lowery stated:

"The nation became conscious of the fact that it has an expanding poor population," says Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King. "It's one thing to have the right to check into the Hiltons and the Marriotts, it's another thing to have the means to check out."

For many of America's poor, there hasn't been much progress in the 40 years since the Poor People's Campaign. In 1968, 25 million people — nearly 13 percent of the population — were living below the poverty level, according to the Census Bureau. In 2006, 36 million people or more than 12 percent of the population were living below the poverty level.

Poverty has been rapidly rising for some time.  The black middle class, in fact the entire American middle class in a recent report from NewsMax, is disappearing all over the country.  Opportunities for higher education are evaporating, even for those who would attend public colleges and universities.  The dropout rate, murder rate and the incarceration rates for black and brown boys and men is outrageous, and growing for black and brown women. 


The ranks of jobless and homeless people are growing exponentially while the gap between rich and poor accelerates. Wealth is more concentrated in the hands of the few. “Pew reported last week that there is a growing rift and resentment between rich and poor in America, due in part to “the underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society.” Pew also reported, “According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, the proportion of overall wealth — a measure that includes home equity, stocks and bonds, and the value of jewelry, furniture and other possessions — held by the top 10 percent of the population increased from 49 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2009.”  Democracy itself has vanished or is vanishing as corporate lobbyists exercise almost complete control over the U. S. House of Representative and the Senate. 

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So where are the organizations that are addressing King’s economic vision for America?  Where are the progressive economists, business people, educators, clergy and laity who will collectively lift up his vision for economic democracy in America in 2012?  I’m not simply talking about giving speeches like this one, even though more are certainly needed from our too heavenly-spiritually preoccupied churches, mosques, and synagogues. 

One sign of hope has been the Occupy-Move On Movements.  Yet I have heard so much criticism from clergy and other leaders regarding these movements.  I would challenge those critics, put up or shut up.  It is black people and then brown people in America who are disproportionately losing their homes, unable to send qualified children to college, and lacking the funds and resources to keep our children out of the “cradle to the grave prison pipeline.”  The prison industrial complex is growing rapidly.  Many young lawyers are eager to become ADAs so that they can incarcerate more black and brown, men women and children by any means necessary, using this as a stepping-stone to corporate and political careers.  


A sizable number of this army of attorneys are busy working with banks and mortgage companies, helping them to find legal loopholes whereby they can further exploit and suck dollars away from we who are still managing to hold on to our businesses, jobs and homes.

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Poverty and Faith

Over the past few years, mega-churches have become more popular in black communities, just as they have in white communities. These mega-churches have amassed influence and wealth partly because of their sheer number of parishioners. Some have created satellite churches and broadcast their gospel on television.

On April 3, 1968, in his famous “Promised Land” sermon, Dr. King said, “It's all right to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here.  It's all right to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the New Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the New Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, and the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.”

This having been said, I would challenge us to adhere to, trust in, reverence, and rely on God.  We need to turn to the pages of the Bible in order to get ourselves back into focus.  We need to recommit ourselves to our first love.  I have no problem in proclaiming that Jesus Christ is both Lord and Deliverer, the savior, the one that God has chosen to bring light and love and truth and hope to the world.  In one of his 1934 readings, the late Prophet Edgar Cayce spoke of the Christ, "Not as only one, but the only one."


We need people who are unapologetically Christian, instead of this wishy-washy “everything is everything” rhetoric that is driving our children elsewhere.  It is God who advocates for us, who has already commissioned Jesus to lead the hosts of heaven in winning every political and economic battle for us, and who is outraged at the state of our planet, but especially at the state of ease, comfort, entertainment, lazy thinking and the absence of thinking and doing and loving in the church. 

One of the hard lessons I have learned is that those who ignore and minimize the sacred texts do so, not because they consider the words archaic or anachronistic or erroneous, but rather because they would rather not be confronted with the expectations God places on us in the scriptures.  It is easy to criticize fundamentalists and evangelicals for having otherworldly views, but I frankly see no strong commitment to economic justice coming from much of the liberal wing of the church.  Our seminaries are in full retreat, having students focus on something nebulous that the majority culture calls “spirituality.”  I grew up in a church where spirituality meant, “Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a flowing stream.” 

In fact people like Jim Wallace of Sojourners and Dr. Herbert Daughtry of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., are some of the strongest advocates for economic justice for the poor in America.  Rev. Daughtry is no stranger to us, having worked closely with Rev, Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton and having founded in 1982, the African People's Christian Organization. 

The liberal church of which Dr. King was certainly representative and which nurtured him in his ideological understanding of what God requires, is now marching in lock-step with the rich and powerful under the banner of “neo-liberalism.” The name of its game is accommodation-ism, and it will bend over backwards and bow down to Hell rather than offend its rich classist, heterosexist, racist donors and benefactors and its upper middle class and upper class constituencies.

Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the father of American sociology, was often criticized for being a tad bit elitist and detached.  In 1899, while he was working on his great study, The Philadelphia Negro as a faculty member of Atlanta University, the Wilmington Massacre occurred.  As many as a hundred lives were lost.  Much of the black community in Wilmington, North Carolina known as Brooklyn, had been burned to the ground, and thousands of black residents fled for their lives.

The city had been a bastion of the black middle and upper classes in the south, with a population of 11,324 African Americans and 8,731 whites.   All this was to change overnight.  The Democrats were determined to remove all of the black political appointees that President McKinley had made, in gratitude for the role that African Americans had played in the Spanish-American war.  The Democrats recruited farmers in the outlying areas, whites whose wives were forced to find jobs and work for blacks in the state’s cotton mills in the city. 


Their strategy was to shame whites, just as the Republicans are now doing, into voting for "white economic interests" using racial code language.  With the help of right-wing fringe groups and respectable church liberals like Rebecca Felton of the WCTU, they enflamed the white people of the city and surrounding communities.  Felton quoted her mentor, the vitriolic white supremacist WCTU founder Frances Willard, who had stated publicly that "white women needed to be protected from marauding, inebriated black men," who Williard had also characterized as "fierce beasts." This led to the lynching and mutilation of Samuel Wilkes, which was the catalyst to the massacre.  He was cut, mutilated and parts of his charred remains sold all over the south.  

Du Bois, who was startled by the gruesome murder, had written a sober anti-lynching editorial that he was going to give to Atlanta Constitution’s editor Joel Chandler Harris.  With his walking cane and gloves, Du Bois made his way to the newspaper office, but was stopped short when he passed by a shop on Mitchell Street, where Wilke’s charred knuckles were on display.  It was then that Du Bois realized as he wrote later: “One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.

I would challenge all who hear and read these words to consider the state of our race, of our nation, and really ask whether or not we can continue to delay or ignore Dr. King’s challenge of economic justice for America.  I would ask us to consider whether or not the time for detachment and sensible responses is over. Perhaps the Occupy Movement is a cue for us to develop a serious program that continues Dr. King’s work for economic justice in America.  I would challenge us to consider those who are starved, excluded, incarcerated, exploited, and have their dreams dashed by those who are interested in quick profits that leave the people hopeless and powerless.  We cannot keep men, women and children out of the criminal justice system with just good intentions.

I know that the Lord secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy (Psalm 140:12).

Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain, to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin!  You have plotted the ruin of many peoples, shaming your own house and forfeiting your life (Habakkuk 2:9).

So I will come near to you for judgment.  I will be quick to testify against . . . those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me (Malachi 3:5).

What will we do with Dr. King’s call for economic justice in 2012?

Don Guest