I invited Jerald Podair, an Associate Professor of History here at Lawrence,  to speak to volunteers on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day about King’s quest for economic justice.  I hoped Prof. Podair might help unite King’s legacy with my work as an AmeriCorps*VISTA, leveraging the capacities of Lawrence toward redressing poverty.  His speech answered my request unbelievably well.

Prof. Podair delivered the following to volunteers on Monday:

“I want to introduce you to a Martin Luther King, Jr. most of you do not know about. When we think of King, what comes to mind most immediately? Most likely, it is his speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, in which he told an interracial audience of some 250,000 gathered before the Lincoln Memorial of his “dream” of an America without racial barriers or distinctions, in which men and women, in his famous words, would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

What these words say to us is that our goal as Americans should be to create a society in which race does not matter – and this is as it should be. Martin Luther King, Jr. fought all his life, and ultimately gave his life, for that vision of an America without “race.”

Now this King of the “I Have a Dream” speech, the color-blind King, the “judge me by the content of my character” King, is the “King” that is remembered and celebrated today. And you can’t go near a television today without seeing and hearing that speech and those words. But there was another King, one whose goal was not just racial justice but economic justice and I want to take a little time to introduce you to this “Martin Luther King” today.

What we rarely hear, at least from the mainstream media and the establishment political class who largely control his image, especially on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, is that King avoided some very important questions at his “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963 – questions he was reluctant to raise at the time, because he feared it could jeopardize the unity of the March on Washington. King knew that most of the demonstrators had come to Washington to support the passage of a landmark civil rights bill that President John F. Kennedy had introduced that summer of 1963, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations – restaurants, hotels, railroad stations, schools. The bill faced an uphill fight in Congress and King knew that the question the civil rights bill avoided, and to a great extent the March on Washington avoided, was an economic one: Assuming African-Americans were allowed to use restaurants, hotels, railroad stations….Would they have the money to buy a meal, pay for a room, purchase a ticket?

King did not address those questions in his “I Have a Dream” speech because he felt he did not have the luxury to do so. But this does not mean they were not paramount in his thoughts. And after 1964 with the Civil Rights Act passed, and after 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act securing the franchise for African Americans, with political justice secured, King was now free to address issues of economic justice and poverty. And he would spend the last three years of his life, 1966, 1967, and 1968, on this crusade, a longer, harder one than his political crusade, to be sure, because it has been said of Americans that they integrate by class as reluctantly as they do by race.

It was relatively easy for the white members of King’s March on Washington audience in 1963 to cheer him when he spoke of judging men and women on “the content of their character” – that cost them nothing. But when, beginning in 1966, King began to talk about poverty as the most important issue in America, one that crossed racial lines, that affected not just African Americans but all Americans…When he began to demand that all Americans be afforded a guaranteed minimum income…When he began to define a job as a right, guaranteed to every American…When he began to call for a national health insurance program under which no American would be unable to afford a doctor…When he began to advocate a housing program that would offer every American a safe, adequate place to live…When he began to talk about a massive infusion of funds into our nation’s public education system…

All of this would cost something. All of this would mean more privileged Americans would have to give up something. All of this would bring into play what is probably the most controversial single word in American political, economic, and social life: “Redistribution.” But in the last three years of his life, that is exactly what King dared talk about: Redistribution of economic resources so that those who had little or nothing could live lives of security and dignity.

This is not what many Americans – and what many white Americans who had given King a rousing ovation at the March on Washington – wanted to hear. And it is not what many in the media and the political establishment want you to hear today. Because this is a more dangerous King, one with a message that threatens to work fundamental changes in America’s traditional way of doing business, in free enterprise capitalism. By the end of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. was nothing short of a democratic socialist. And King knew what the redistributionist implications of his socialism were. This is why he said, in November 1966, at Howard University:

“Freedom in public accommodations did not cost the nation anything, the right to vote did not cost the nation anything. In order to solve our problems, not only will it mean the restructuring of American society, but it will cost the nation something.”

It is why, that same year, speaking to his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he also said:

“I am talking about spending billions of dollars…something is wrong…with capitalism…maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

And it is why, in the last months of his life, in late 1967 and early 1968, King planned and organized the “Poor People’s Campaign,” which would stage another “March on Washington.” This one, unlike the 1963 march for political and legal equality, would be for economic equality. It would be for an America in which no one, black or white would go without an income, a job, a doctor, a home, or an education.

This interracial movement of the poor, which King never lived to see – he was assassinated in April 1968, just before the Poor People’s Campaign was scheduled to begin – represented King’s final crusade for economic justice in America, for what King called a “redistribution of economic power”…A controversial crusade, then and now…An unpopular one in many quarters of American society, then and now…An unsuccessful one, at least in 1968, as the Poor People’s Campaign, robbed prematurely of King’s leadership, failed to achieve its objectives. But it is one that links King to much of the ferment in this country today, and to the movements for economic justice that have emerged recently. Whether the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters realize it or not, they are heirs to Martin Luther King’s legacy. They walk in his footsteps.

This thought is no doubt disturbing to many Americans, probably the majority of Americans, whose image of King is a more benign, comforting, even conservative one that does not challenge their beliefs about economic structures in America and the causes of – and remedies for – poverty, want, and joblessness. But King – the King they don’t tell you about on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – did not intend to be benign, or comforting, or conservative when it came to confronting what he considered to be the unfair and unjust economic structures of this nation. This “other” Martin Luther King, Jr. was, in fact, an American Revolutionary. As such, King was a dangerous man, which explains the efforts to control and contain his image today.

But dangerous men are often necessary men, in King’s time and ours. As we celebrate his life today, let us remember the dangerous work he embraced…and embrace it as our own.”