In 1966, Dr. King moved into a $90-a-month, four-room apartment in a tenement on the West Side of Chicago. He sought to challenge the slumlords who were exploiting the poor. The city was ignoring them, the national government had abandoned them.
Today that lot is empty. The tenement is gone, but nothing has been put in its place. King’s last mission has yet to be realized.
King’s last campaigns were about basic economic justice. He believed that every person should have the right to a job, to a good education, to affordable health care, to professional training. Government had to step in, put rules around the marketplace, empower workers to gain a living wage.
Today, the U.S. economy is in trouble. Foreclosures, bankruptcies, unemployment and poverty are up. Jobs are going out; drugs and guns coming in. The New York Times reports that the “swift deterioration in the job market” hit “teenagers, blacks and Hispanics” the hardest, with unemployment increasing at “triple the increase for whites.” Over one-third of all African Americans between 16 and 19 are now unemployed. People of color have been the most likely to be victimized in the mortgage scams.
Structurally, the economic ruins are everywhere apparent. Across the country, basic investment in areas vital to our economy — from bridges, to mass transit, to the electric grid, to broadband, to affordable college — has been starved, even as the Bush Administration has lavished hundreds of billions on tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans (like the hedge-fund billionaires who pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries) and nearly a trillion dollars on the catastrophic war in Iraq.
Now the president and Congress are negotiating about a short term “stimulus” package to kick-start a slowing economy. The current consensus is for temporary, small-bore tax cuts — essentially, Wal-Mart gift certificates. There is no relationship between stimulus and real needs: Nothing for those about to lose their homes; nothing for the collapsing infrastructure; no help for the cities or states. The lot in Chicago, and the stores on the Martin Luther King Boulevards across the country, will remain vacant.
Questioning a rare bipartisan consensus isn’t popular. Raising the matter of the crisis facing the poor and our urban areas isn’t politic. But Dr. King understood that he had a different charge: “Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?'”
Let us celebrate Dr. King’s dream by adopting once more his final mission.