(1) He was, of course, referring to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Bevel, who was a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and had helped initiate and organize the Jobs and Freedom March on Washington, envisioned a grassroots demonstration consisting of the working poor and oppressed, or people who had sacrificed and gone to jail for the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, the Jobs and Freedom March included mostly middle-class blacks and liberal whites dressed in Sunday suits, the majority of whom had been reluctant in their support of earlier struggles.
(2) Five years later, Dr. King had again witnessed economic repression when two black sanitation workers were crushed to death. The two men were barred by segregation customs from taking refuge from a driving rain. Therefore, they huddled in the back of their truck and were crushed to death by machinery. Their deaths, along with low pay, unsafe working conditions, and continued racial subjugation, prodded black sanitation workers to strike in Memphis, Tennessee. Still, other blacks across America had found themselves unemployed and over-taxed in low-rent neighborhoods. They had repeatedly experienced displacement, overcrowding, increased crime and poverty, psychological and social marginalization, poor health, and inadequate schools.
In truth, federal laws had not necessarily trickled down to local and segregated communities, nor had they confronted economic barriers that kept blacks and the poor hemmed in. This is a major reason Dr. King had planned a Poor People's Campaign against Washington and the Pentagon. He recognized that these centers of wealth, power, and violence, especially in relation to the senseless killings in Vietnam at the expense of jobs and economic opportunities, had to be challenged. Dr. King had planned to lead 1,500 trained activists to Washington to live in temporary housing and to petition the government for an Economic Bill of Rights. A second wave of activists, 20,000, would combine with 50,000 local demonstrators to bring an end to funding the Vietnam War.
With an Economic Bill of Rights, Dr. King hoped to divert monies away from war and to start funding equal opportunity programs for the poor working classes. The 1968 Poor People's March on Washington and the Pentagon would bring economically oppressed peoples of all races to force government leaders to change their values. It would fulfill the unfinished 1963 Jobs and Freedom March on Washington. As he had mentioned in his "Bad Check" speech (often misnamed "I Have a Dream"), Dr. King hoped to dramatize the shameful condition still existing in America, and to collect a promissory not to which every American was to fall heir. He understood America had defaulted on its promissory note. Instead of honoring its sacred obligation, it had given its poor and oppressed a bad check: a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.
(3) Tragically, Dr. King's dream of an Economic Bill of Rights was never realized, for he was assassinated, his voice silenced, in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Exactly one year earlier at Riverside Church in New York City and courageously speaking out against the Vietnam War, he said America must "rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society," and, "When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
(4) Dr. King concluded by saying, "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."
(5) He then warned: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
(6) If Dr. King would have lived and had succeeded in shutting down the Pentagon and Congress until an American Economic Bill of Rights was enacted, perhaps the right to full-employment and full-educational opportunities would have been accomplished. Maybe everyone in America would now have adequate food, clothing and shelter, equal access to health care, and be experiencing an egalitarian society built on peace with justice.
A sufficient Economic Bill of Rights would have also divested future military conflicts and wars. There would have been no more "business of burning human beings with napalm or white phosphorous, of filling the nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged."
(7) And remember: It is no picnic when we realize we can "never again raise our voices against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today-our government."
Dallas Darling
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