Union Solidarity: Dr. Martin L. King: 'On Labor, Wealth & Inequality'

Source:Union Solidarity with Dr. Martin L. King's last ever speech.

Source:The Daily Journal

. “Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Labor, Wealth and Justice”  

From Union Solidarity 

Economic policy, is the part of Dr. Martin L. King’s message that I disagree with. And where he was lacking, because he sort of took this social democratic view that came out of the New Deal, or Great Society that judged what we were doing to help the middle class and low-income people based on how much we spent on them. The theory being: “That if we spend a lot of money to reduce poverty, that poverty will go away, because we’ll have all of these government programs to take care of people.”

I mean, if you listen to this video, you’ll see clip from one of his speeches where he says: “We now have the resources that we need to wipeout poverty”. You could spend a trillion dollars a year in America, or anywhere else to reduce poverty and right now the United States is not that far from that and you’ll still have poverty in this country, if that money is not being spent to empower people to get themselves out of poverty. Because government no mater what it spends, or any private organization for that matter, can’t get people out of poverty by themselves. The people in poverty have to do that for themselves. What government and the private sector can do is empower people to get themselves out of poverty.

I love both men (you know, platonically) but where I give Malcolm X an advantage over Dr. King is when it came to economics. Minister X’s message was about education and self-reliance when it came to economic policy. Economically, Minister X was closer to Barry Goldwater than Lyndon Johnson, or Franklin Roosevelt. He wanted to empower the African-American community to get themselves the tools that they needed to be economically independent, self-reliant in life, making it on their own.

I give Reverend King the edge when it came to the civil rights movement. Because without the message of non-violence, the civil rights movement would’ve never have gotten as far as it did, not even come close. Because this movement would’ve been seen as a bunch of thugs, criminals, terrorists by the so-called mainstream media. But taking it a next step forward post-civil rights laws of the 1960s, I give the edge to Malcolm X as far as what African-Americans should now do with the freedom they finally have under law.