Martin Luther King, Jr. was perhaps the most prominent figure of the Civil Rights Movement. While his beliefs on social and racial justice are well known, King’s dogma of economic justice are not acknowledged as much. 

 

King understood that full racial justice could not be achieved without economic justice. Not only did Black people need to have full legal rights, but they needed to have the economic means to fully exercise them. Lunch counters and neighborhoods needed to be desegregated, but Black people also needed to be able to afford to purchase a meal at a lunch counter and a decent house in a decent neighborhood.

 

To these ends, he pushed for a job guarantee where a job would be provided to everyone who was willing to work. So that no one would have to suffer the indignity of unemployment or the financial strain of underemployment. He also pushed for a living minimum wage, above bare subsistence, so that no one who worked in America could be poor.

 

Furthermore, he believed in a strong and united labor movement. He observed that poor white and Black people faced the same economic exploitation and that their interests were the same. The racism that occupied the labor movement had to be flushed out. All workers had to recognize their common interests and band together to exercise their power by demanding better working conditions for all.

 

He carried on his work despite the threats of violence directed towards him and his family; despite the fact that he was deeply unpopular in most of America and that his unpopularity rose in the last few years of his life. 

 

The creed that sums up the heart of the demands of America’s oppressed can be expressed by King’s eloquent statement: “All we ask of America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’”