Martin Luther King on the "Freedom Budget" [inequality]

Matthew Yglesias, Martin Luther King called for radical redistribution of material resources, Slow Boring, July 8, 2021.

The Freedom Budget

I think it’s reasonably well known that after the Civil Rights Act in ’64 and the Voting Rights Act in ’65, King went on to speak out against the Vietnam War and to launch something he called the Poor People’s Campaign.

But I belabor some of those points of the I Have A Dream speech just to underscore that the themes of economic justice and substantive equality were there from the beginning. King was from the south, most of the Black population lived in the south, the most egregious acts of racism were in the south, and the most intransigent politicians were from the south, so the south was a big focus of his work. But he’s saying in Cotton’s favorite speech that the situation in “the slums and ghettos of our northern cities” is unacceptable.

In 1966, King writes an introduction to a proposal that Bayard Rustin calls the “Freedom Budget.”

It’s a plan, essentially, for massive government-led investment to eradicate poverty and generate full employment. You could think of it potentially as what the US government could have tried to do in the mid-1960s instead of the big military buildup in Vietnam. And while I think you could take issue with some of the technical elements of Rustin’s program, his basic vision — improved public services, an enhanced welfare state, a robust commitment to full employment — is exactly what I think a sound political vision looks like.

And here’s a bit of King’s introduction:

After many years of intense struggle in the courts, in legislative halls, and on the streets, we have achieved a number of important victories. We have come far in our quest for respect and dignity. But we have far to go.

The long journey ahead requires that we emphasize the needs of all America’s poor, for there is no way merely to find work, or adequate housing, or quality-integrated schools for Negroes alone. We shall eliminate slums for Negroes when we destroy ghettos and build new cities for all. We shall eliminate unemployment for Negroes when we demand full and fair employment for all. We shall produce an educated and skilled Negro mass when we achieve a twentieth century educational system for all.

Now obviously, conservatives don’t agree with those ideas and that’s fine.

But if you want to understand why racial justice advocates aren’t satisfied with the “judge by the content of character” nostrum, it’s because King’s version of that dream was the endpoint of a program of massive material redistribution to build a radically more egalitarian society.

Class struggle, not DEI initiatives

Right before King was murdered, my grandfather interviewed him for a magazine article about the Poor People’s Campaign. It was a really big moment for grandpa and he spoke about this stuff with me when I was a kid. King was saying at the end that the moral fervor of the civil rights movement needed to go in the direction of “class struggle” and “redistribution of economic power,” and that America risked damnation over its indifference to the fate of the poor.

Here’s Jose Yglesias in 1968:

A few minutes later, in Dr. King’s office on the other side of a thin partition, an office no larger than Young’s and much more cluttered, I asked King also if he hadn’t abandoned moral issues for the class struggle. He was in shirt sleeves and had leaned back in his chair, one arm raised, tapping his head lightly with his hand, a favorite position with him. Now he leaned forward and spoke directly, a manner I was to find customary with him, so that interviewers seldom have to rephrase questions; he responds to the tone and level of the question but also, as if fulfilling a personal need, to implications that at first do not seem implicit in the question: an intellectual curiosity that gives the effect of total sincerity.

“In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle, yes,” he said. He explained that the gains for which the civil-rights movement had fought had not cost anyone a penny, whereas now — “It will be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power. Yet this isn’t a purely materialistic or class concern. I feel that this movement in behalf of the poor is the most moral thing — it is saying that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth.”

Although we went on to talk of other things, this question remained with him, and I heard him the next night, at a church in Birmingham, expand on it. There he continued with a discussion of the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. Lazarus had not gone to heaven simply because he was poor, King argued, nor was the rich man to hell because he was rich. “No, the rich man was punished because he passed Lazarus every day and did not see him … and I tell you if this country does not see its poor — if it lets them remain in their poverty and misery — it will surely go to hell!”

Looking back at this from the vantage point of 2021, I’m struck by a few things:

• We have made some progress on these issues since 1968, but honestly not all that much — though the full impact of changes that were adopted earlier in the Johnson administration was maybe not yet known.
• We are actually on the verge of a massive breakthrough in reducing child poverty if we can extend and improve the American Rescue Plan’s Child Tax Credit provisions.
• There’s nothing here about microaggressions or diversity training or the difference between equity and equality.

All in all, it’s a very populist, straightforward vibe.

It’s also self-consciously radical — King doesn’t talk like a politician who’s trying to be seen as moderate — and King was an unpopular figure in his day. Today we tend to telescope the Civil Rights Era. But there were constant bouts of racial progress in mid-century America from the appointment of the first Black general in 1940, to Jackie Robinson in 1947, to Truman ordering military integration in 1948, and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The ’64 Civil Rights Act is preceded by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and then the Civil Rights Act of 1960. White America wanted to be congratulated on all this rather than told the current trajectory of the country was leading to deserved damnation. King was not running for office, so he did not really cater to that desire for congratulation.

There's much more at the link.

For an oblique comment, see my post, TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche, where I note:

Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.