As one of his final acts, Martin Luther King fought for a basic income for all
With the ‘Poor People’s Campaign,’ King invited all people of color to join the movement
“We are moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in an address in May of 1967. In the subsequent year — the last of his life — King began work on what he called the “Poor People’s Campaign,” a large-scale effort to raise the standard of living for the nation’s poor.
The initiative, organized by King in cooperation with the Southern Christian Leadership, served as an indictment of the federal War on Poverty, which had been going on for three years by then but had yet to produce many demonstrable gains. It also reflected a reckoning with some of the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement. Even following legislative and other victories, material conditions for people of color were not improving. In a sense, King sought to broaden the scope of the movement by inviting the participation of other people of color and focusing on economic justice — ensuring that all Americans have their basic necessities met.
To advance the campaign, King traveled across the United States, meeting with activists, labor groups, and other social justice and community groups. The Poor People’s Campaign asked the federal government to pass a $30 billion anti-poverty bill, which would have guaranteed a basic income for all Americans.
At the center of the Poor People’s Movement was a march on Washington, which was carried out in the wake of King’s assassination. On May 12, 1968, Mother’s Day, Coretta Scott King led demonstrators to protest in Washington, D.C., where they camped for two weeks, demanding an Economic Bill of Rights.
By late May, caravans of protesters had converged on the capital, and set up a tent shantytown which even had its own zip code. It was called Resurrection City.
Less than a month before he was assassinated, King addressed supporters at a “Salute to Freedom” celebration, organized by the Local 1199 in New York City, “…there are literally two Americas. One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality. That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits….But…there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.”
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