"Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" –MLK and OWS

On Monday, the nation will celebrate Martin Luther King Day, honoring the birth of the slain civil rights leader on January 15, 1929.  The obligatory snippets of the "I Have a Dream" speech will air on television. But Dr. King's life was about more than one speech — or one issue.

In a previous post I wrote about Coxey's Army, an 1894 protest march, and its connection to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement. That got me to thinking about where Occupy Wall Street would fit into Dr. King's worldview. One of the last sermons he delivered offers more than a clue.

On March  31, 1968, a few days before his death on April 4, 1968, Dr. King spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington about the plans for the Poor People's Campaign, an ambitious program to end poverty with jobs, improve housing and raise incomes for poor Americans of all races. Another march on Washington was  scheduled to begin in May 1968.

In this speech, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," King addressed the two evils he was working to overcome besides racial injustice: poverty, which knows no color in America, and war, then specifically the war in Vietnam. The text of the entire speech can be found online at Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.

Most people associate Dr. King exclusively with the civil rights struggle. But he understood that social justice could not happen without economic justice. And that war was not the answer.

Would Dr. King be on the streets with OWS?  I'll leave that to others to say for certain. But on Monday, read one of his last sermons and you may get the answer.