Monday, March 4, 2019

King Economics


 “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” -MLK

The most revolutionary thing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did in his lifetime was connect the dots between poverty and racism, and began a plan to eradicate the twin evils via the Poor People’s Movement. It took many years to get to that point, and for what the media and schools have miseducated us of the greatest man of Alpha Phi Alpha (founders excluded), he was way more than a dreamer. Integration was the first step of a long game that still has not finished its course; what good would it do to a man for him to gain the whole world in profit only to lose his soul? Or in real time, what good is being able to sit in a restaurant for a meal if you couldn’t afford to eat there?  What we don’t see is something that becomes an exercise in faith that we don’t always heed to. For example, King envisioned an America that saw its citizens not by skin color but by the content of their character; unfortunately, those few words have been reduced to the only talking points our nationalist associates invoke when they are chided for their own prejudices. They want to whitewash him as merely a dreamer with a palatable platform instead of a reformer that identified the ways to break the chains that held down black America.

How was his economic policy shaped, and how was it pursued? Matter of fact, how does that chase impact us today in 2019? Keep reading the four points below to get an idea.

A.      Be persistent and never give up.
Too often, we give up after a few “noes” and that includes the writer penning these few words. Many great things were not accomplished at the first shot, or even overnight.
B.      Make your message clear.
You cannot grow your organization/idea/ministry without a clear definition and purpose. Anything worth doing must have a meaning and a purpose – and it is not always to make money. If any part of the message is muddy, getting people to believe and/or endorse your movement/product/service just became infinitely more difficult.
C.      Don’t be afraid of a challenge.
The Civil Rights Movement initially didn’t have the full backing of the community due to not only the obvious bigots who wanted someone (colored) to shit on but also the white moderates who tepidly agreed with King yet were unwilling to cede their privileged existences of a lily-white world. There is also something to be said of the Negro who benefited from white supremacy through tokenism which I won’t use this space for. Even as the laws of the land were (and to some extent, still) slanted against us which led to many nights in jail, bombings, cross burnings, and anonymous hate letters calling for his suicide, King continually engaged in Christian nonviolence to further articulate his point of American injustice.
D.      Engage the community.
Over the course of time and how politically and tech-savvy King was, the American population eventually came around to the impact of the black dollar most notably in Montgomery, Alabama. Everyone is familiar with the bus boycott that lasted 385 days; less is told of the economic damage made to the smaller businesses that were the recipients of those same segregated dollars. One takeaway is to always be ready to evolve as a business or get left behind. 

If all we know about MLK and economics are the sit-ins and the Montgomery Bus boycotts, then we’ve fully whitewashed the man and his mission. 


In a capitalist society which nothing is too sacred for profit - and last year’s Ram truck ad during the Super Bowl serves as proof, King lays down the groundwork for a universal basic income and perhaps could have been considered an early proponent for work requirements to receive federal aid. Imagine that:  Had the Poor People’s March occurred before the assassin’s bullet that took him to eternity, who knows what the power structure of this nation would have looked like today. Before Bernie Sanders, AOC, or any of the rising stars within the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley began championing this idea, it was presented in Where Do We Go from Here:  Chaos or Community? way back in 1967 as a viable option; believe it or not, even conservative thinkers such as Charles Murray once advocated eliminating the entire welfare state by handing every grown American a full $10,000 – but I don’t think he had anyone in mind beyond those of a paler hue.

Here is the controversial MLK Super Bowl ad from 2018.

One long view of how King’s economic policy would have been sustainable is by taking the time to invest not only in the material things and what can make us a boatload of money quickly but also in the people at large through formal education, on-the-job-training, certifications, etc. Give people a viable skill that they can utilize to provide for their families and in addition pool those same funds into the communities in which they reside to create a viable future and continuous growth. Sounds idealistic? In the grand history of America, the quickest way to accelerate such change has been for small towns and cities, suburbs, and bedroom communities to offer land giveaways and low taxes to entice a populace weary of ‘forced’ equality through the tail end of the interstate highway system originally created during the Eisenhower Administration and accelerated through the end of King’s lifetime. Case in point:  Whole highways destroyed burgeoning black communities, and those who were able to sell only received pennies on the dollar. See Interstate 630 in Little Rock as proof.
In addition, when businesses dried up in the cities and closed only to reopen to the suburbs and smaller towns in the name of lower taxes, we all know there was also a racial component to this – it’s called white flight. Explain how else every city in the Greater Little Rock area has grown at the expense of the Rock, and the explosion of northwest Arkansas as the population of southern and eastern cities such as Pine Bluff, Camden, and Forrest City contracts annually with each community hamstrung by past economic drivers transitioning from industry towns to ones more service-oriented – a set of end users providing a service for another set of end-users.

Truly, is this reinvestment in the community which people are employed, or is it a place to (temporarily) set up shop to milk a native population’s educational background, work experiences, etc. down to the last remaining drop from its udder and cut loose as if it had never existed, as we’ve seen in so many textile towns throughout the South and more recently, across the Rust Belt when auto manufacturers chunk up the deuces to communities in favor of cheaper labor costs and the subsequent profits elsewhere?
During the twenty-eight days of Black History Month, our leaders have a tendency of using empty words of all boats rising to make us feel better of our situations without delving into policies that become real solutions all of us can see daily. I come here with these words:  THAT AIN’T GONNA WORK. This generation is going to have to be the one that breaks the chains of self-pity and begging for table scraps that the dog doesn’t even want; what will we have to say to our children in defense of our stilted position in the next twenty years if we’re hellbent on keeping up with the Joneses – or Kardashians? Even so, why do politicians feel that to get us on their sides that one token appearance in the churches (and selected ones, at that) are all that is deemed necessary for our satisfaction? Why do our pastors (not all, but some) sense their platforms are more for their own prominence leaving their own congregations broken and hopeless as the taillights of any real progressive movements that collectively raises us beyond one or two prayers of elevation, a la materialistically winning season? Defined, what King’s economic vision globally was engaging the people where we really were to rise and become the leaders we were always destined to metamorphize into instead of a society of many disgruntled employees and a few success stories at the top.








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