422 ChaPter^8
futility of violence, just in terms of strength.” To take arms against the forces
of order in America was “more suicidal than militant.” King had no illusion
about the will and ability of the military and police to crush black dissent,
having witnessed violence against blacks personally too many times.
Despite such distinctions between King and the Black Power advocates,
many African American leaders were beginning similarly to focus on the
structural economic causes of racial inequality. The Vietnam War had high-
lighted the shortcomings of liberalism, daily taking away more attention, and
funds, from needs at home. America had not just a race problem, Black lead-
ers pointed out, but a significant class problem as well, and after 1965 such
issues dominated African American discussions. Americans had paid little
notice to the masses of Blacks who did not require legal desegregation. They
lived in ghettos, sent their kids to inferior schools, had higher crime and mor-
tality rates, and disproportionately experienced violence. Black Panthers, in
their party program, included class-based demands for jobs, housing, educa-
tion, and “an end to robbery by the CAPITALIST of our black community”
as well as racial justice. King, less militantly, agreed. He called on Americans
to “honestly admit that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous
wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be
taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encouraged small
hearted men to become conscience-less.”The Death of a Dream
King, however, was talking about class and poverty in 1968 and thus began
to organize the Poor People’s Campaign. By this point, he was sounding like
an activist of the New Left, offering a comprehensive analysis of race, pov-
erty, and the Vietnam War and attacking corporate liberalism in the process.
Thus King sent out a call to the poor and ethnic minorities to join him in
a march on Washington D.C. to demand fair employment practices and jobs,
housing, health care, justice for immigrants, union rights, and higher wages
for the working poor–namely, class issues. Migrant farmers, dirt poor
Appalachian whites, Native Americans, women, and Chicanos were among
the groups that joined the cause. Linking racism, poverty and the war, King
was trying to create a mass movement based on class to restructure American
society. Widely praised as a “Negro” leader in the early 1960s, he was