The Forgotten Economic Vision of Martin Luther King

From Naked Capitalism:

In the last years of his life, King was boldly forging a radical, multi-racial movement for economic justice.

First, King’s late vision connected his famous rhetoric of shimmering dreams and the filmy contents of universal human character to the immediate need for a radical restructuring of material interests and living conditions across the U.S. In May of 1967, at the Penn Center in Frogmore, South Carolina, King addressed the staff retreat of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which had been formed in January 1957 in the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The economic dimensions of his message were foundational and clearly stated: “We can’t solve our problems unless there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” In a riff he’d repeat throughout the final year of his life, he continued: “Our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.” But, King also knew such economic visions carried along complex and volatile cultural histories and contemporary energies that were, even within the movement, often enough in conflict with each other as well as with the national, racial status quo.

The vital brilliance of King’s late vision is grounded in how he sifted together economics with cultural, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological vocabularies, ones too often separated from each other and absent from conversations about material conditions by economists and sociologists...

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/04/forgotten-economic-vision-martin-luther-king.html