50 Years Later, Continuing Dr.King's Dream

FIFTY YEARS AGO, on April 4, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Just a year earlier, King had announced it was time for the next phase of the justice movement: the Poor People’s Campaign.

According to a 2017 study from the Urban Institute, the wealth of the average white family in 1963 was $121,000 greater than the wealth of families of color (adjusted for inflation). It was becoming apparent to civil rights leaders that their initial goal of integration would do little to address the systemic economic legacy of racism.

“Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality,” King said just days before his murder. “For we know now that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”

Reflecting on the 10 years of protest activity he’d led, even with all of its victories, King admitted the plight of minorities had not drastically changed.

So, he envisioned millions of people of all races camping out at the capital to demand economic reform. They’d stay encamped there until the government responded to their demands. It was called the Poor People’s Campaign. But King was killed just as the campaign was to launch.

Today, experts suggest that the economic disparities King set his sights on ending have still not changed greatly. The wealth gap between white and nonwhite people has actually grown since the 1960s. The wealth of the average white family is now seven times greater than that of the average black family (a $700,000 difference). This is why many racial justice advocates still hold that economic reform is one of the most meaningful steps to be taken to make King’s dream of racial equality a reality.

The Rev. Dr. Willie Barber and other activists are taking the baton from King as they launch a new Poor People’s Campaign. Barber rose to prominence as a justice advocate in North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement, a group that protests injustices they perceive in local politics.

Barber has been touring churches to enlist participants in a march on Washington that resembles the effort King envisioned. A multi-ethnic coalition for racial justice, the new Poor People’s Campaign aims to move King’s dream forward.

“Some of us have decided that this 50th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign can’t be a commemoration,” Barber says. “We’re not willing to just remember the crucifixion [of Dr. King].”