“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.
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.
