Happy MLK Day

With my blogging partner Old Fogey cruising along the eastern coast of South America, it comes down to me to highlight the importance of today's national holiday--Martin Luther King Day. (And I hope I can do the discussion some justice, as Old Fogey's got some background as a retired African American Studies professor from NCState.) First, here's a reminder of perhaps the piece of MLK's legacy that's most remembered--voting rights--from this WaPo commentary by Nick Kotz (author of Judgment Days : Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America), which also adds a bit of current events flavor:

After a brilliant political campaign orchestrated by the president and the preacher, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law swept away the most brazen tactics used to keep minorities from the polls. Millions of black citizens surged onto voter registration rolls throughout the South. The ballot power of those new voters -- combined with the 1964 Civil Rights Act's prohibition against segregation and employment discrimination -- ushered in the hopeful beginnings of the kind of New South that King and Johnson had envisioned.

Civility replaced official repression and terrorism. Hundreds of blacks won public office at all levels, including in Congress, where Artur Davis, a Harvard-educated lawyer, now represents the Alabama district that includes Selma. A growing black and Hispanic middle class has prospered in the South and Southwest.

But despite the enormous gains, old problems persist. The winds of Hurricane Katrina blew away the veil shielding complacent eyes from the desperate poverty of the blacks in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward. And a Texas congressional redistricting dispute now before the Supreme Court has cast a spotlight on the lengths to which politicians will go for narrow partisan advantage -- even disenfranchising minority voters.

Masterminding the controversial redistricting plan approved in 2003, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay shuffled thousands of African American and Hispanic voters between Texas congressional districts like pawns on a chessboard. With mathematical efficiency, DeLay redrew voting district boundaries to ensure that Republicans would gain five additional House seats. His goal: to further cement his own power and Republican control of the House of Representatives.

[...]

The Supreme Court has the opportunity to reaffirm and clarify the central purposes of the Voting Rights Act. And Congress can and should honor King's memory by renewing important parts of the voting rights law that otherwise will expire next year, thus advancing his ideal of a more representative democracy.

But an equally important aspect of Dr. King's legacy (and most often overlooked, as noted by this commentary at TomPaine.com) was his call for economic as well as social justice for all. Here's a reminder of a speech he gave in 1956 to a conference of the American Baptist Assembly and American Home Mission Agencies in Green Lake, Wisconsin, from John Nichols at The Nation, which uses the kind of Biblical rhetoric that liberals/progressives could learn from to combat the rhetoric of today's Right Wing Christianists:

"I understand that you have an economic system in America known as Capitalism," said King, as he read an imaginary letter from the apostle. "Through this economic system you have been able to do wonders. You have become the richest nation in the world, and you have built up the greatest system of production that history has ever known. All of this is marvelous. But Americans, there is the danger that you will misuse your Capitalism. I still contend that money can be the root of all evil. It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism. I am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life. You are prone to judge the success of your profession by the index of your salary and the size of the wheel base on your automobile, rather than the quality of your service to humanity."

"The misuse of Capitalism can also lead to tragic exploitation," the letter continued. "This has so often happened in your nation. They tell me that one tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. If you are to be a truly Christian nation you must solve this problem. You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. You can work within the framework of democracy to bring about a better distribution of wealth. You can use your powerful economic resources to wipe poverty from the face of the earth. God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. God intends for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and he has left in this universe "enough and to spare" for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth."

Then, still channeling the words of the apostle, King turned to the question of race.

"I understand that there are Christians among you who try to justify segregation on the basis of the Bible," King's exposition of "Paul's Letter to American Christians" continued. "They argue that the Negro is inferior by nature because of Noah's curse upon the children of Ham. Oh my friends, this is blasphemy. This is against everything that the Christian religion stands for. I must say to you as I have said to so many Christians before, that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus." Moreover, I must reiterate the words that I uttered on Mars Hill: 'God that made the world and all things therein . . . hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.'

"So Americans I must urge you to get rid of every aspect of segregation," the letter continued. "The broad universalism standing at the center of the gospel makes both the theory and practice of segregation morally unjustifiable. Segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we all have in Christ. It substitutes an "I-it" relationship for the "I-thou" relationship. The segregator relegates the segregated to the status of a thing rather than elevate him to the status of a person. The underlying philosophy of Christianity is diametrically opposed to the underlying philosophy of segregation, and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot make them lie down together."

With Hurricane Katrina exposing the wide cracks in economic and racial equality, Dr. King's words still ring very true today. But his thoughts on segregation can also be ably applied to today's civil rights discussion on gay rights.

Also from The Nation, editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel notes that Dr. King's call for economic equality is still alive and well in today's campaign for a living wage (which was also written about in this weekend's NYTimes magazine):

As the nation celebrates Dr. King's life this weekend, Sen. Edward Kennedy and a broad alliance of religious and community groups are honoring King's dream of social and economic justice with a bold new vision for a national living wage. The Let Justice Roll Campaign--a unique coalition of more than fifty groups including ACORN, The Center for Community Change, the United Methodist Church, and the Union of Reform Judaism, among others-- kicks off its "Living Wage Days" this weekend.

[...]

The timing of this effort couldn't be more appropriate. While the states are pushing ahead on the minimum wage (and the New York Times and other media have just begun to notice!) the federal minimum wage has been at a standstill for more than eight years. If we don't see an increase by September, it will be the longest the country has ever gone without one.

Holly Sklar (author of Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work For All Of Us) adds more about Dr. King and living wage over at TomPaine.com:

On March 18, 1968, days before his murder, King told striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., "It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis…getting part-time income." King said, "We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life."

[...]

King did not dream that in the year 2006, he would be remembered with a national holiday, but the value of the minimum wage would be lower than it was in the 1950s and 60s. At $5.15 an hour, today's minimum wage is nearly $4 less than it was in 1968, when it reached its historic high of $9.09, adjusted for inflation.

The minimum wage has become a poverty wage instead of an anti-poverty wage. A full-time worker at minimum wage makes just $10,712 a year—less than $900 a month—to cover housing, food, health care, transportation and other expenses.

[...]

A low minimum wage is a green light for miserly employers to pay poverty wages to a growing share of the workforce—not just workers at the minimum, but above it. In its 2005 Hunger and Homelessness Survey, the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 40 percent of the adults requesting emergency food assistance were employed, as were 15 percent of the homeless.

A low minimum wage is a green light for greed. Between 1968 and 2004, domestic corporate profits rose 85 percent, while the minimum wage fell 41 percent and the average hourly wage fell 4 percent, adjusted for inflation. In the retail sector, which employs large numbers of workers at or near minimum wage, profits skyrocketed 159 percent.

With the federal minimum wage stuck in quicksand, a growing number of states have raised their state minimums above $5.15—Oregon and Washington are highest at $7.50 and $7.63, respectively. Studies by the Fiscal Policy Institute and others have shown that states with minimum wages above the federal level have had better employment trends than the other states, including for retail businesses and small businesses.

Finally, WWMLKS (what would MLK say) about the Iraq War? Juan Cole has some thoughts:

We do not have Martin among us to guide us with his wisdom. But it is not hard to extrapolate from his "Beyond Vietnam" address of 1967 to what he would think about the Iraq morass.

He would say we have to treat with the Sunni Arabs and the Shiite Sadrists. We have to treat with the enemy. Not only for their sakes, for the sake of ruined cities like Fallujah and Tal Afar, and those to come-- but for our own sakes.
[...]
5. Martin supported a timetable for withdrawing US troops.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]

Iraqi Sunni parties, as well as the Shiite fundamentalist bloc of Muqtada al-Sadr, have demanded that the US set a timetable for withdrawal. Some 120 Iraqi parliamentarians out of 275 called for it last year. The new parliament may well have a majority that supports it.
[...]
7. Concern to save US troops from creeping cynicism must be paramount:

' I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor. '

In Iraq, too, virtually "none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved." Not weapons of mass destruction, not international terrorism, not Swedish style democracy, not social justice, are actually on the agenda of the present administration.
[...]
Note that Martin recognized love as the principle that all the great religions saw as the "supreme unifying principle of life," including Islam. His religious universalism might be a starting point for Americans to rethink the Islamophobia that has become so widespread.