King's Goal for a Just Society Remains Unrealized

by Gary Phillips

As we marked the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr. this past January, it behooves us to reflect not only on his legacy but also on what is yet to be accomplished 74 years after his birth and 35 years after his violent death.

To many of generations X and Y who have no firsthand experience of the civil rights era, King is merely an image on a T-shirt or a poster resurrected once a year. For others, he's remembered fondly as someone who integrated lunch counters and made stirring speeches.

But as syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff observed, "It is long past time for King to be rescued from this present, rather misty image." In April 1967, Life Magazine attacked King both for "demagogic slander" and for reciting a "script for Radio Hanoi" after his anti-Vietnam War speech. One of the key aims of COINTELPRO, the FBI's counterintelligence program, was to "silence" King. The struggles he led were not warm and fuzzy; they were protracted and hard-fought, with the prices paid in blood.

This disconnect between King as icon and King as one of the focal points for the equal rights movement even has been hijacked by the right. Conservatives have argued that King would have opposed any sort of diversity programs. Yes, King advocated for a colorblind society based on merit, but he also saw that America was not yet at that stage and that methods had to be applied to achieve parity.

"Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic," he wrote in Why We Can't Wait in 1964.

When King was head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he initiated the first national affirmative action campaign, "Operation Breadbasket." Conference staff gathered data on the hiring patterns of corporations doing business in the black communities of Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities. He called on those companies to rectify disparities.

And King pushed for more than just the rights due black people. Over the course of his and the movement's arc, King's vision of equality encompassed poor people in general. King contended with the power structure for social and economic change.

King's adherence to his grass-roots goals caused him to break with the orthodoxy of many civil rights groups, particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League. These were organizations whose leaders repeatedly ducked public pronouncements about Vietnam lest they be branded unpatriotic militants or offend their establishment financial backers, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

Dr. King came out squarely against U.S. involvement in the war in his famous "Beyond Vietnam" speech of 1967. And he also delivered sharp critiques of the American government and system of values with such salvos as "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death" and "[w]hen machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Shortly before his death in 1968, King had been part of an organizing effort to bring about a poor people's campaign, including a poor people's march on Washington, D.C. The campaign advocated affordable housing, a guaranteed annual income and full employment. This was an effort seeking economic inclusion that would have united thousands of people across the color spectrum.

Were Dr. King alive today, he surely would decry the fact that 18 percent of all Los Angeles County residents live below the poverty level and that 46 percent of poor families with children in California have a full-time worker in the household. He would have been dismayed that, in California, only 30 percent of households can afford to purchase a home at the median price of $269,000 while 22 percent of renters pay more than half their income on rent and less than half of 11th-graders statewide have passed the high-school exit exam.

King is gone, but his goals for a just society have yet to be fully achieved. We all can't be leaders of a movement, but we can do our part. It falls on us as college alumni to support programs of diversity. It also falls on us as voters to pass school bonds over prison measures, volunteer, demand accountability of our politicians and be informed and aware. It is the price of admission to participate in this bold and unfinished experiment of ours in democracy.

Gary Phillips is the communications director of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

This commentary originally ran in the January 27, 2003 edition of the Daily Journal.

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