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April 5, 2019
This book must be read in the urgent context of King’s difficult experiences in Watts and Chicago, which seemed more representative of the nation’s deeper racial dilemma than were the Southern battlegrounds of Selma and Montgomery.
At the same time he insisted that “we must not be oblivious to the fact that the larger economic problems confronting the Negro community will only be solved by federal programs involving billions of dollars.”
Thomas Paine, one of the few really radical, grassroots-oriented “founding fathers,” who dared to proclaim, “We have the power to begin the world over again.”
“To guard ourselves from bitterness we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society.”
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King took the opportunity to speak to white allies whose support for the freedom movement had already diminished as the campaign moved on to address the harsh realities and structural challenges of the North.
“disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro’s freedom.”
With increasing regularity, that theme of black disappointment (that he surely shared) was also applied to the Johnson administratio...
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And Where Do We Go from Here provided another opportunity to contrast the comparative timidity and lack of creativity of Johnson’s cut-rate War on Poverty to the robust energy, imagination and billons of dollars dedicated to the Southeast Asian disaster.
He knew that there were many black and white allies and supporters of his organization and of the larger freedom and justice movement who considered it unwise, unpatriotic, and unnecessarily provocative to combine the call for legal and economic rights at home with a profound questioning of the foreign policy of a federal government whose assistance was considered essential in the achievement of civil rights.
“We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.”
it is morally right to insist that every person have a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.” Here again he urged exploration of a “guaranteed annual income” for all who needed it. For the many persons—whatever their color—who originally signed onto the freedom movement to assist in the quest for the Southern black right to vote, for equal access to public accommodations, and for minimally integrated schools, this King was out beyond their vision and their reach—and their control. For me, as I revisit this King and remember his last
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Throughout this book, King continues to combine his various roles—as spirit-based, pro-democracy activist; thoughtful social analyst; loving, encouraging pastor who calls us to our best possibilities; and as justice-obsessed, biblically shaped, prophetic spokesperson for the poor.
“It is time for the Negro middle class
to rise up from its stool of indifference, to retreat from its flight into unreality and to bring its full resources—its heart, its mind and its checkbook—to the aid of the less fortunate brother [and sister].”
Instead, he urged, “Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”
“What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don’t want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that’ll raise me and the white man up … raise America up.”
So he was free to pay even deeper attention, free to continue to wrestle with the amazingly complex systems of devastation and constraint that were faced by poor people in America.
He was also free to speak with loving candor and seething anger to his “white brothers and sisters” who refused to recognize their own deep personal and structural involvement in the causes of the urban rebellions and the call for Black Power.
“Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the han...
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The plans were to bring thousands of poor Americans to the nation’s capital to demand that the War on Poverty receive the energy, funding, and attention that should be withdrawn from the war in Southeast Asia. Significantly, the Poor People of the campaign were meant to include not only African Americans, but whites, Latinos, and Native Americans as well.
When the late Coretta King wrote her brief and thoughtful preface to the original, post-assassination Beacon paperback she closed with these words: “The glowing spirit and the sharp insights of Martin Luther King, Jr., are embodied in this book. The solutions he
offered can still save our society from self-destruction. I hope that it will be seen as a testament, and that the grief that followed his death will be transmitted to a universal determination to realize the economic and social justice for which he so willingly gave his life.”
He not only took the responsibility for leadership, he toiled vigorously to offer discerning leadership.
In this book he piercingly revealed the cause of our national discord, placing it squarely on the ingrained white racism of American society. He made discrimination and poverty the central focus of his attacks.
He spoke out sharply for all the poor in all their hues, for he knew if color made them different, misery and oppression made them the same.
The author here discusses poverty as a source of world instability and the arrogance of wealthy nations toward the deprived world. It is our common tragedy that we have lost his prophetic voice but it would compound the tragedy if the lessons he did articulate are now ignored.
The solutions he offered can still save our society from self-destruction. I hope that it will be seen as a testament, and that the grief that followed his death will be transmuted to a universal determination to realize the economic and social justice for which he so willingly gave his life.
The legislation was designed to put the ballot effectively into Negro hands in the South after a century of denial by terror and evasion.
In several Southern states men long regarded as political clowns had become governors or only narrowly missed election, their magic achieved with a “witches’” brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths and whole lies.
Moreover, the white backlash had always existed underneath and sometimes on the surface of American life. No,
With Selma and the Voting Rights Act one phase of development in the civil rights revolution came to an end. A new phase opened, but few observers realized it or were prepared for its implications.
White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to
helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. The outraged white citizen had been sincere when he snatched the whips from the Southern sheriffs and forbade them more cruelties. But when this was to a degree accomplished, the emotions that had momentarily inflamed him melted away. White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro.
But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice.
Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform.
Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls.
The assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Hyman Bookbinder, in a frank statement on December 29, 1966, declared that the long-range costs of adequately implementing programs to fight poverty, ignorance and slums will reach one trillion dollars.
It is, he said, as simple as this: “The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.”
He asserted that people are not informed enough to give adequate support to antipoverty programs, and he leveled a share of the blame at the government because it “must do more to get people to understand the size of the problem.”
The rate of infant mortality (widely accepted as an accurate index of general health) among Negroes is double that of whites.
The lower scale in the South is directly a consequence of cheap Negro labor (which ironically not only deprives the Negro but by its presence drives down the wages of the white worker).
There is not even a common language when the term “equality” is used. Negro and white have a fundamentally different definition.
Every civil rights law is still substantially more dishonored than honored.
These are the deepest causes for contemporary abrasions between the races. Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook.
The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism.
The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.
The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in North and South.
Cries of Black Power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are consequences of
The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place.
A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters.
