KING SAW
VIOLENCE AS
NOT COMING
JUST FROM THE
BARREL OF A
GUN. POVERTY
IS VIOLENCE;
UNEMPLOYMENT
IS VIOLENCE;
LACK OF
EDUCATION
AND HOPE ARE
VIOLENCE
VIEWPOINT
Michael K. Honey
ECONOMIC INEQUALITY THROUGH KINGÕS EYES
When MeMphis sanitation Workers Went on strike in
1968, Martin Luther King Jr. knew they had a lesson to teach
America. “You are reminding the nation,” he told attendees at
a March 1968 rally there, “that it is a crime for people to live in
this rich nation and receive starvation wages... working on a
full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.”
Economic justice was not new to his agenda. Today, many
people identify King with his soaring “I Have a Dream” rheto-
ric at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But what was his dream?
The March on Washington sought equality before the law, but
also an economic bill of rights for poor white, black and brown
workers. He had constantly linked civil rights and labor and
poor people’s movements; as far back as 1957, he condemned
“the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes
necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”
He would be killed by an assassin less than three weeks
after that Memphis speech. And what has happened to King’s
dream? Trump Administration tax cuts have allowed the
wealthiest Americans to pay a lower tax rate than the poorest,
and multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon are often able
to effectively avoid paying federal taxes. Worker and union
rights established in the New Deal era are fading, and Census
Bureau figures released last fall show that income inequality in
the U.S. is at its highest level on record.
Today, nearly 40 million Americans remain poor, and a
majority of students in many schools do not have enough to eat.
A huge swath of working people of all incomes and occupations
live paycheck to paycheck, aware that their jobs, their homes,
their health care, their education and their families remain
vulnerable to an economy that treats them as expenses to be
eliminated rather than people to be cared for.
MeMphis—the place King helped win union rights for
sanitation workers, the place he died—is no exception. One-
third of African Americans there lived in poverty in 2018, the
year for which the most recent data is available. Most of the
city’s public- school students need subsidized lunches, and
black child-poverty rates are above 50%. Workers in expand-
ing health care and service fields are stuck with low wages.
Black political power has surged since King’s times, but black
mayors won a “hollow prize,” as large Memphis employers like
International Harvester, Firestone Tire and others closed their
doors, undermining the largest group of the black middle class:
unionized workers. Tax and budget cuts in the 1980s and again
after the 2007–2008 financial meltdown destroyed budgets
and crippled education. And though the police department
is now “integrated,” police-
community relations remain
tense and often explosive.
This all sounds too familiar
to a country that spends twice
as much on health care as any
other advanced nation, where
“right to work” laws subvert
unions, where gun violence
is at epidemic levels, where
greed overpowers concern for
the earth, where the top 1% of
earners own more wealth than
90% of the rest of us combined.
Alas, it is all too familiar to
most Middle Americans. Eco-
nomic inequality is not a prob-
lem just for poor people and
those historically oppressed
by racial, class and gender
inequality.
To address interrelated
evils, King called for a revo-
lution of values. He saw vio-
lence as not coming just from
the barrel of a gun. Poverty
is violence; unemployment
is violence; lack of education
and hope are violence. Non-
violence, in contrast, seeks to
appreciate and value the hu-
manity and work of every per-
son, and to build coalitions
with all who seek a better life.
To his dying day, King saw a
new dispensation of economic
justice as attainable. On April 3,
1968, he told a mass meeting
of sanitation strikers and their
supporters to remember that
“either we go up together or we
go down together.” The next
day he was killed, lending a
retrospectively prescient aura
to his most famous words that
night: “I may not get there with
you, but I want you to know to-
night, that we as a people will
get to the Promised Land!”
More than a half-century later,
that promised land of economic
justice remains out of reach.Honey, a professor at the Uni-
versity of Washington Tacoma,
is author of To the Promised
Land: Martin Luther King and
the Fight for Economic Justice