Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.
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When Martin Luther King Jr. died, he did not think that the civil rights struggle was over. He and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was about to embark on a new, major phase of activism called the Poor People’s Campaign. During this time of year when we celebrate King’s birthday and think about black history, no one talks about the Poor People’s Campaign; but we should.
People forget the Poor People’s Campaign for a good reason. If King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was the highpoint of the civil rights movement, the Poor People’s Campaign was the low. The consensus is that the Campaign was largely a failure.
While there were many factors behind the Poor People’s Campaign’s lack of success, an important one was that the Campaign was simply way ahead of its time. The Campaign was based on the insight by SCLC that blacks could not be full, equal participants in American society while burdened by high rates of poverty. SCLC when further and argued that no Americans—of any race—could realize their full potential while living in poverty. The Campaign was committed to all poor people and to multiculturalism decades before “multiculturalism” entered the popular lexicon.
Poor whites involved in the Campaign issued demands for “adequate medical and dental care for all Americans.” Forty years later, our elected officials are finally realizing that this is a good and feasible idea. We haven’t realized these demands yet, but at least we are talking about it seriously.
The number one goal of the Poor People’s Campaign was full employment. In a full-employment economy everyone who wants a job has one. For anyone concerned about reducing black poverty, full employment is a silver bullet. From 1959 to 1970, the black poverty rate declined from 55 percent to 33 percent. Over the 1970s and 1980s, there were no sustained reductions in black poverty. Between 1990 and 2000, the black poverty rate declined from 32 percent to 23 percent.
Why did we see big declines in black poverty over the 1960s and 1990s, but not over the 1970s and 1980s? The answer is full employment. When the nation is at full employment many poor blacks are able to find jobs and obtain wages that allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. Employers who might usually prefer not to hire blacks are so in need of workers that they put aside their prejudices to keep their businesses thriving. Nothing in American history has been as effective at reducing black poverty as full employment. Nothing.
Full employment is probably even more effective at reducing black poverty than the statistics above convey. The unemployment rate for blacks is typically more than twice that of whites, so when all whites have jobs, many blacks are still looking for work. If America ever achieves full employment for blacks, the black poverty rate would drop dramatically. The black-white poverty gap would also be substantially reduced.
In making a demand for “a meaningful job at a living wage for every employable citizen,” the SCLC showed that it understood the fundamental facts of poverty: people without work or who work at poverty wages are poor.
As we face the likelihood of the second recession of the decade and the likelihood of increased black poverty, we need to remember SCLC’s poverty fundamentals: full employment at good wages fights poverty. Our elected officials have to power to tell the Federal Reserve to make full employment a national goal. But as SCLC knew, only a movement of the people can make sure that our elected officials do so.
Reference
Robert T. Chase, “Class Resurrection: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 and Resurrection City,” Essays in History 40, 1998.
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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