Banner at the 2012 Republican National Convention depicts Martin Luther King, Jr., and the quotation: “Today Capitalism has outlived its usefulness,” in this August 28, 2012 photo. (Photo/Liz MC via Wikimedia Commons)
There is a hard truth that lies beneath the surface of American society.
It can be seen in Clarksdale, Miss. In this iconic section of the American South — where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads to play the guitar like no one alive, and where W.C. Handy lived and Bessie Smith died — dilapidated, small, amenities-deprived homes are surrounded by antebellum townhouses, which claim several governors and where Tennessee Williams famously wrote of his childhood with his grandparents. In the suburbs, the nouveau riche are building massive, palatial mansions not far from the cotton-swept plantations many of the region’s poor work on for minimum wage.
It can be seen in Detroit, Mich. In this Midwestern, one-time personification of the American Dream — where the city moved to a heartbeat of heavy industry and the Motown Sound — a soft domestic automotive market, poor city management decisions and a hard recession that eroded the nation’s industrial center, has left behind a city with half of its peak population, with 36 percent of its residents living below the federal poverty level and with more than a quarter of its residents functionally illiterate.
The former mayor — Kwame Kilpatrick — was found guilty of federal racketeering and corruption charges, and the current mayor is no more than a figurehead due to the state takeover of the city and the people — already desperate — find themselves voiceless.
Regardless of where one looks, poverty is everywhere. Frustrations about the government’s refusal to address the issue have drawn millions to protest misplaced governmental priorities — particularly in light of the sequestration and massive cuts to social services.
The Poor People’s Campaign
Forty-five years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign — organized by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) — sought to push forward the call for economic equality and the eradication of poverty: issues overlooked by the federal government. On Sunday, in Baltimore, Md., the Baltimore City Chapter of the SCLC, along with representatives of local labor unions, postal workers, former steelworkers, Walmart employees, Occupy members and activists from Maryland, Alabama, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, attempted to make a call in defense of the poor in America.
The Poor People’s Campaign and March for Jobs — which took place last weekend and constituted a 41-mile march from inner Baltimore to Capitol Hill — was organized in the spirit of Dr. King and was intended to call attention to the injustices and societal ills facing poor citizens, including a lack of access to the political system, police brutality, the lack of quality jobs available and reductions in social spending.
“The sequestration cuts will only increase the misery of poor people in major cities and in small towns across this country,” said the Rev. C.D. Witherspoon, president of the Baltimore City Chapter of the SCLC. “This region, Baltimore, Md. and Washington, D.C., will be hit very hard causing layoffs and harming both workers and those needing their services. These developments, along with the recent attacks by Supreme Court justices on voting rights, give our national march in May a renewed sense of urgency.”
“Our 41-mile march to the nation’s Capitol will unite families fighting police terror from Baltimore to Oakland with low wage workers fighting for justice and against sweatshop conditions like Walmart and McDonald’s,” Witherspoon continued. “They will march alongside the growing jobless who will be the victims of cuts in unemployment benefits, students who will be losing their ability to go to school because of sequestration cuts, trade unionists whose rights are under attack from Michigan to South Carolina, and all those fighting for justice whether it’s for immigrant rights, LGTBQ and women’s rights, or voting rights.”
“What’s really disgusting is that after 50 years, we have the same issues,” said Don Cash, vice chairman of the national board of the SCLC. “In fact, the gap between rich and poor is widening.”
Not everyone in attendance made the 40-mile march from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., but many did. “I’ve run a marathon this year but I think this is going to be harder,” said Jayson Bozek, who works as a public defender in the Baltimore area. “Virtually all of my clients are poor. If they weren’t poor, they wouldn’t be involved with the justice system.”
Poverty in America
The U.S. Census estimated the national poverty rate in 2011 to be 15.8 percent, representing more than 46.2 million people living in poverty. This, however, does not accurately reflect the nation’s poor.
Poverty is a politically-defined threshold developed in 1963 that considers neither a person’s geographical location nor the increase in food and housing cost outside of inflationary increases.
At $22,113 for a family of four, it is commonly held that it will take an income at least twice the poverty threshold for a family to meet the minimum requirements for everyday life (transportation, food, housing, clothing and health care).
Using this formula, more than one in three Americans are materially deprived. Of these, 44.3 percent are severely materially-deprived, with an income below $11,057 in 2010 for a family of four. One in five households in 2011 included an adult that is not the homeowner or the homeowner’s spouse.
In 2010, 17.2 million households experienced food insecurity — the state of not being sure where one will find and secure the food they need. It is now estimated that most Americans — 58.5 percent — will spend at least one year in poverty between the ages of 25 and 75.
For the minority communities, the numbers are much worse. As of 2010, one in four African-Americans and one in three African-American children live in poverty. One quarter of all African-Americans struggle to put food on their tables, with nearly one-third of all African-American households (compared with 20.2 percent among the entire U.S. population) being food-insecure.
The rates are worse yet among the American Indian population. Cuts to social safety net programs — such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and the federal school lunch program — will drive a larger percentage of minorities to hunger.
This will create an environment that encourages desperate people to turn to crime, lessens academic achievement — as a hungry child cannot easily learn — and furthers the economic gap between races.
Dr. King’s last crusade
In 1967, King embarked on what would be his last crusade. Encouraged by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and the “Great Society” legislative package — which brought into fruition the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the resulting Office of Economic Opportunity (which is responsible for Head Start, Job Corps, Community Action Program and VISTA — Volunteers In Service To America), Medicare, Medicaid, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, among others — and disheartened by the administration’s willingness to push all that aside to focus on Vietnam, King and the SCLC sought to persuade the government to allocate $30 billion in an anti-poverty package.
The crusade, called the Poor People’s Campaign, sought to highlight the needs of poor people — universally, race notwithstanding — by seeking the government’s commitment to full employment for all American adults, a guaranteed annual income and more low-income housing.
This was meant to be the beginning of the transition of the civil rights movement from a campaign for equal rights to a campaign for equal opportunities. The campaign was met with hostility from the start. The administration read the campaign as a potential siege on Washington, requiring military action if needed.
Congressmen openly called for the censure of any other congressmen who proposed meeting with the campaign’s officials. The media aggravated the protesters and chose only to cover the violent outbreaks and not the non-violent strikes. Dr. King’s assassination during a solidarity visit for a sanitation strike in Memphis severely complicated things. A power vacuum formed within the SCLC, which to this day has not been filled.
After two weeks of protests in Washington and a six-week sleep-in in a makeshift shanty town called “Resurrection City” — in many ways, anticipating the Occupy Wall Street encampments — which ultimately was torn down following calls from the House of Representatives, nothing happened. The SCLC was held responsible for what was seen as a failure and Dr. King’s economic bill of rights was never considered.