Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Economic Dream Still Unfulfilled, 42 Years Later
[Bill Moyers, a broadcast journalist and former host of the PBS program "Now With Bill Moyers," is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. Michael Winship writes for Salon.com]
Forty-two years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, gunned down in Memphis, Tenn. To those of us who were alive then, the images are etched in painful memory: One day, King is standing with colleagues, including Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel; the next, he's lying there mortally wounded, his aides pointing in the direction of the rifle shot....
We sanctify his memory now, name streets and schools after him, made his birthday a national holiday. But in April 1968, as King walked out on that motel balcony, his reputation was under assault. The glory days of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and the 1963 March on Washington were behind him, his Nobel Peace Prize already in the past.
A year before, at Riverside Church in New York, he had spoken out -- eloquently -- against the war in Vietnam. King said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," a position that angered President Lyndon Johnson, many of King's fellow civil rights leaders and influential newspapers. The Washington Post charged that King had, "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people."...
Unemployment among African-Americans is nearly double that of whites, according to the National Urban League's latest State of Black America report. Black men and women in this country make 62 cents on the dollar earned by whites. Less than half of black and Hispanic families own homes and they are three times more likely to live below the poverty line....
This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted out system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity - its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist..
It is hard to overstate the consequences of choosing more of the same -- the very policies that have sundered our social contract. But hear the judgment of Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and martyrdom. "The vast inequalities of income weaken a society's sense of mutual concern," Arrow said. "... The sense that we are all members of the social order is vital to the meaning of civilization."
Read entire article at Salon.com
Forty-two years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, gunned down in Memphis, Tenn. To those of us who were alive then, the images are etched in painful memory: One day, King is standing with colleagues, including Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel; the next, he's lying there mortally wounded, his aides pointing in the direction of the rifle shot....
We sanctify his memory now, name streets and schools after him, made his birthday a national holiday. But in April 1968, as King walked out on that motel balcony, his reputation was under assault. The glory days of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and the 1963 March on Washington were behind him, his Nobel Peace Prize already in the past.
A year before, at Riverside Church in New York, he had spoken out -- eloquently -- against the war in Vietnam. King said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," a position that angered President Lyndon Johnson, many of King's fellow civil rights leaders and influential newspapers. The Washington Post charged that King had, "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people."...
Unemployment among African-Americans is nearly double that of whites, according to the National Urban League's latest State of Black America report. Black men and women in this country make 62 cents on the dollar earned by whites. Less than half of black and Hispanic families own homes and they are three times more likely to live below the poverty line....
This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted out system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity - its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist..
It is hard to overstate the consequences of choosing more of the same -- the very policies that have sundered our social contract. But hear the judgment of Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and martyrdom. "The vast inequalities of income weaken a society's sense of mutual concern," Arrow said. "... The sense that we are all members of the social order is vital to the meaning of civilization."