King’s Legacy: Fighting for Economic Justice
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In his latest book, All Labor Has Dignity, historian Michael Honey brings together 16 of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches on economic justice, many of them unpublished until now. Honey, a professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, edited the speeches and wrote an introduction for the book. AFL-CIO Now senior writer James Parks interviewed Honey about King and his legacy of economic justice.
Q: In All Labor Has Dignity, you say King’s dream called for “economic equality.” What does that mean and how do we achieve it?
Honey: At various times he says he is not opposed to people having wealth, he’s opposed to people having wealth at the expense of other people not having wealth…and ignoring the poor. His “Poor People’s Campaign” was really about economic restructuring. His plan was to put pressure on Congress to shift its priorities from war and military spending to housing, health care, jobs and education, focusing especially on the people who were losing jobs because of automation of industry and outsourcing.
It was a two-pronged approach—one was that there were these people who were being thrown out of the economy to starve and something had to be done about that. But secondly, the priorities of the country are all wrong.
SCLC Launches 21st Century Poor People’s Campaign
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) today announced the rebirth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Poor People’s Campaign” to fight poverty in some of the poorest regions of America. Launched in 1968, the campaign’s first major initiative sought to win economic justice for sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. It was there on a motel balcony where King was assassinated April 4,1968.
In a press conference at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., SCLC General Counsel Dexter Wimbush said the campaign’s goal is to
finish the unfinished business of Dr. King.
