Thread by @KeriLeighMerrit

#Thread on #MLKDay2023 #MLK & The Poor People's Campaign:

The memory of King as an impassioned economic justice-warrior is continually threatened today by the oligarchs who remain in power. They instead take great pains to erase that part of King’s life from his legacy.

They attempt to silence his cries for a more monetarily equitable society. They deliberately obscure the final few years of his life. This sanitized, “white-washed” version of King purges the intense radicalism of the strike-leading preacher.

By his late-30s, King fully realized that social and political justice would always be predicated upon economics. Poverty, he understood, had to be eradicated. His speeches increasingly became threatening to the established American economic hierarchy.

He very naturally turned his attention to the benefits of “Christian” socialism – and the historical reasons why a redistribution of wealth was both necessary and just.

By 1967, King was repeatedly condemning the “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and poverty.

He began defining true integration as a society in which all people – regardless of race or background – would “share equally” not only power, but also wealth.

Poverty could be abolished completely given that America was one of the richest nations in the world, he held.

By reallocating money spent on the Vietnam War to poor people, every citizen finally could afford decent housing and good educations, economic assurances that would literally transform their lives. #MLK #MLKDay2023 #MartinLutherKing

“The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power, both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness,” King thundered, and “power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose.”

In addition to standard social safety nets such as universal health care, King further advocated for a universal jobs guarantee and a basic income for all Americans. “We must create full employment, or we must create incomes…New forms of work that enhance the social good..."

In Nov 1967 #MartinLutherKing announced the Poor People’s Campaign. The movement organized a temporary city – Resurrection City – on the National Mall. It was populated by 3,000-5,000 impoverished Americans: Black, white, Native American, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican.

Against the wishes of more conservative Civil Rights leaders, King and several other advisors met with government officials to demand more jobs, a living minimum wage, affordable housing, reasonably-priced food, a better system of education, and even unemployment insurance.

In one of his final speeches, “Remaining Awake for a Great Revolution,” delivered just days before his death, King passionately called for an intensified and racially unified movement.

He wanted to continue the fight against such incredible poverty in a country filled w so much concentrated opulence.
“Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation,” #MLK preached, yet “America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.”
#MLKDay2023

These points, made so eloquently by King half a century ago, are still essential to understanding the tragedies of America today.

Rampant, systemic racism, the persistence of poverty, and a deep division between poor and working-class people of different races have kept us the most backward, unequal developed countries in the world.

It’s time-once again-to propose real solutions to end impoverishment once and for all.

As King said just a few short days before his assassination, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty...

“The real question is whether we have the will."
#MLK #MLKDay2023 #MartinLutherKingJrDay #MartinLutherKing #MartinLutherKingJr