– Martin Luther King Jr.
Marvin Jones is 45 years old and lives in Milwaukee. He works at McDonald’s as a maintenance man. Marvin says, “When my grandbabies come over on the weekend, I spend on them making sure they eat and are comfortable. I eat McDonald’s the last two weeks of the month because I have no food left.”
Ashley Sanders is 20 and lives in St. Louis. She works at Hardee’s and says, “I have bills to pay and I need to provide necessities for my son; he’s 6 months old. I get food stamps. They help feed the other five adults in my household too. I want to move out of my mom’s house but it’s difficult to put pennies aside. I plan to return to cosmetology school but I need to find a better job.”
Without the march, there would have been no speech. We remember the speech, but we forget why the crowd marched from the Washington Monument to gather at the Lincoln Memorial. The march was a symbolic journey from the Founding Father who presided over a nation whose constitution defined the enslaved African as three-fifths of a person to the martyred president who led the nation into a war made inevitable by that very constitution. “Our massive March from the Washington Monument to [the] Lincoln Memorial, our enormous rally at the Memorial, will speak out to Congress and the nation with a single voice – for jobs and freedom, NOW.”
The official title of the event that was the occasion for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Four of the six demands of the march were:
- A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers – Negro and white – in meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.
- A national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. (Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.)
- A broadened Fair Labor Standards Act to include all areas of employment which are presently excluded.
- A federal Fair Employment Practices Act barring discrimination by federal, state and municipal governments, and by employers, contractors, employment agencies and trade unions.
We cannot fully appreciate the beauty and power of King’s speech if we do not remember the critical context in which it was delivered. To divorce the speech from the demands of its historical moment is to memorialize a wonderful speech cut off from the dreadful material conditions of the people King loved so much and for whose freedom he would later give his life.
We should also remember that while the concerns of the march were surely centered on African Americans, the organizers had in their view the suffering of poor whites and “… Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and other minorities helpless in our mechanized, industrial society. Lacking specialized training, they are the first victims of automation. Thus the rate of Negro unemployment is nearly three times that of whites. Their livelihoods destroyed, the Negro unemployed are thrown into the streets, driven to despair, to hatred, to crime, to violence. All America is robbed of their potential contribution.”
We remember King as the polished and powerful orator with advanced theological training and as a solidly middle-class member of society. We don’t remember that as a teenager, King spent one summer “… on a Connecticut tobacco farm and saw the damage that poverty and racial hatred did to poor whites as well as to blacks.”
Even more broadly, King “… sought an Economic Bill of Rights for Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poorer whites … He sought to create a nonviolent army of poor people in jobless inner cities and barrios and in reservations and rural areas. He challenged the country to create an economy of full employment, or lacking that, a tax system that ensured a decent level of income for every American.”
The national unemployment rate on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1963, was 5 percent; for blacks it was 10 percent. Today the national rate is 7.7 percent, while for African-Americans it is nearly 16 percent and almost 10 for Hispanics. There is no pending legislation to create jobs for the millions of our unemployed citizens of every race and ethnicity. The dream suffers today as it did then. In 1963 the federal minimum wage was raised to $1.25 under the terms of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Today it is $7.25, and that represents a 30 percent loss in value over the last 40 years. The dream suffers today, as it did then.
If the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, now wallowing in Congress, were to become the law,30 million Americans would see their wages raised – and nearly half of them would be African Americans. King spoke of his dream that his children and all children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. If that dream was a reality today, it would mean little if it were not accompanied by lifting the crushing poverty into which children of color are born every day.
Dr. King once described Congress as “… single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of war” but “emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.” The wars have changed; we need only substitute the “war on terror” for the Vietnam War, but the hostility of Congress, our government, to the poor has not changed.
Roxanne Mimms lives in Washington and works “… for a food service contractor at the National Zoo. I work full-time but make barely minimum wage. I’m here because workers can’t live off what contractors pay us. I’m here because I don’t want my two children to grow up on public assistance. I’m here because I have dreams. My American dream is a good job with fair wages to provide for my children, being able to pay my bills on time and save for the future.”
Lucila Ramirez has cleaned “… this building for 21 years. My company … contracts with Union Station, which is owned by the U.S. government. Even after two decades, I only make $8.75 an hour with no benefits. On such a small salary, my husband and I have trouble paying the mortgage. We were forced to rent out our bedrooms to strangers to keep a roof over our heads. I’m 55 and I’m worried about being able to retire.”
King’s “I have A Dream” speech belongs to the ages among the greatest orations in history. I have no doubt that were he to survey the prevailing conditions in our society for millions of poor people of every color, he would say again, “But there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you, too, ought to be maladjusted … I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes … I call upon you to be maladjusted.”
Let’s continue to celebrate King’s “Dream” speech. Fully awake, let us be maladjusted to the injustices that keep millions of African Americans and others in our society from the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is our common heritage.
MICHAEL E. LIVINGSTON is the national public policy director of Interfaith Worker Justice and former president of the National Council of Churches USA.
