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It’s that time of year when Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s uplifting speech permeates the air. It’s
also a time when undeserving people and killers of the dream are
allowed to pontificate their own version of “I Have a Dream.” It’s
a time when the drum majors for greed, racism and injustices are
paraded out to receive awards in the name and spirit of Dr.
King.
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I have
attempted to lift up the brilliance and complexity of Dr. King’s
work and his enduring analysis of this country’s three evils:
racism, war and poverty. Over four decades since his death, these
three evils are alive and well. Dreaming won’t rid us of them
either.
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Black people
are still being lynched in the 21st century. Billions of
tax dollars are spent each year in military aggression. One in six
Americans now lives below the poverty line. The unemployment rate
for black people has been double that of whites since 1972 so when
white unemployment dips, black folks are under water. Currently,
unemployment for African Americans is the highest in nearly 30
years. Poverty and economic injustice are twins that still
dominate.
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Dr. King had
many profound insights about life in the U.S. and it has taken
years to uncover his many speeches and writings that expose the
barriers to peace and prosperity for all American
citizens.
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One book that
recently came to my attention is written by Michael Honey, a
professor of labor studies and American history at University of
Washington in Tacoma. While doing research at the King Center in
Atlanta some years ago, Honey discovered a folder of King’s
speeches to labor unions and workers’ rights organizations. Most
had never been published, and so Honey put several of them together
in his book, All Labor Has Dignity. King rightfully saw
the labor movement as an indispensable ally of the civil rights
movement.
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I was
particularly struck by a speech delivered to a group of New York
Teamsters in 1967. It was given in the middle of King’s unrelenting
work around workers’ issues and their connection to poverty. A few
months labor, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
launched the Poor People’s Campaign. It is during this period where
he felt compelled to go to Memphis at a crucial time of the
sanitation workers’ struggle.
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Dr. King
challenged the Teamsters in his most eloquent but penetrating
words. He started off by acknowledging the limited accomplishments
of civil rights movements on segregation.
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“It will not be
easy to accomplish this program because white America has had cheap
victories up to this point,” he said. “The limited reforms we won
have been obtained at bargain rates for the power structure. There
are no expenses involved, no taxes required for Negroes to share
lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels, and other facilities. For
even the more substantial reform, such as voting rights required
neither large monetary or psychological sacrifice.”
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What Dr. King
was saying was that the privileges of white people in an inherently
racist society must be scrutinized in the quest for economic
equity. White people marching arm-in-arm with blacks for voting
rights or to desegregate a lunch counter was a picnic compared to
what it would take to deconstruct an economic system that used race
and gender to exploit workers at the bottom. King believed that
labor unions had a unique role in this phase of the
struggle.
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We have been
stuck in this phase for much too long. Dr. King understood that it
was a class war long before the Occupy protests drew a line in the
sand between the 99 percenters and the contemporary robber barons
who head up global finance capital. He understood the need for
wealth redistribution long before the Republicans tried to make it
a dirty word.
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As we celebrate
Dr. King’s birthday, let justice-seeking people declare that “cheap
victories” of the past must be the stepping stones to real equality
now. This is a fight for decent-paying jobs that guarantee a
deserving quality of life for all citizens. It must be directly
connected to the willingness of whites to make the necessary
“monetary” and”psychological”sacrifices. Full civil and human
rights cannot be bought at “bargain rates.”
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