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“Dr. King’s
Final Quest:
Addressing
the Connection
Between
Economic
and Social Justice!”
INTRODUCTION:
When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., died from an assassin’s bullet on
April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the most penetrating
questions that should have been asked is: “What in the world was he
doing in Memphis in 1968?” The Civil Rights Act had already been passed
in 1964. And the Voting Rights Act passed the following year. In Memphis
of that year, there were no swimming pools to be desegregated, no
restaurant discrimination to be protested, and no schools to be
integrated. So, why Memphis? Why in 1968?
Therein hangs a tale that is so incredibly timely for today, Labor Day
Sunday, 2011. And it starts this way:
Dr. King was in Memphis because he was invited by a local group
supporting sanitation workers called: Community on the Move for
Equality. But what has been lost in translation is they were not
specifically focused on racial equality per se.
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They had been formed out of a community crisis revolving
around mostly Black workers, who were enormously upset by the fact that
two of their co-workers had been horribly killed by one of the city’s
trash compacters, and the City was acting as if nothing had happened.
For all intents and purposes, it seemed as though it was business as
usual.
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The workers were also upset because their wages and
benefits were unconscionably low, resulting in many of them being on
welfare, and their families dependent upon food stamps.
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But more than that, they were fighting to have a voice…to
have recognition…that their union would be empowered to speak for them
As many, or most of you know, I came to Ft. Myers from Oklahoma City via
Minneapolis. The metropolitan newspaper in OKC, The Daily Oklahoman,
had been in a bitter fight that went on for years, as it fought
tooth and nail to keep its workers from organizing. One of the paper’s
reactions was to intensely promote legislative candidates and a
governor, who would support a right to work law. The newspapers won and
the workers lost. It was a pattern repeated in 22 states. In fact, at
the same time as Dr. King was working for union rights in Memphis in
1968, Florida voted in its own right to work law.
But don’t ever let anyone get by with telling you that such a law is
about the “right to work.” To the contrary, the purpose of “right to
work laws” is to emasculate unions so that their voice is weaker, and
their numbers smaller. Its purpose is to prevent the workers all
speaking with one voice. And despite how much bad press they have
gotten, unions, despite whatever flaws they may have or have had in
their leadership, their primary purpose for being is about workers, the
rights of workers and the benefits of workers.
So in one very real sense: Dr. King was murdered while in town to stand
on the side of oppressed garbage collectors and to rally supporters on
their behalf. He died for the right of sanitation workers to have their
union recognized.
Just one year earlier he had spoken out against the Vietnam War. It
wasn’t because he was not a patriot, as the New York Times and
Washington Post implied. Even the head of the NAACP came out against
him. It was because he recognized that among the ½ million troops we had
on the ground in Vietnam, and the 50,000+ troops who died in battle, it
was the poor and the poor Blacks who disproportionately provided most of
the cannon fodder for that trumped up war, not the daughters and sons of
the affluent. The affluent and mostly White went to college and obtained
deferments, like the four deferments former vice-president and war
advocate Dick Cheney did. (I would like to read his book which just came
out; but, I’m afraid my blood pressure couldn’t take it – and I don’t
have blood pressure problems.). But Cheney was not alone. It was a
grossly unfair system, which King bravely spoke against.
One year later, by being in Memphis, Dr.
King was also physically and verbally making a statement: the compelling
social issue of race was more than skin color; rather, it was also job
opportunity, education, housing, income, healthcare, and a whole raft of
economic issues that particularly affected the poor, especially poor
Blacks.
At the very time he was in Memphis, he
was also in the midst of planning a Poor People’s March on Washington,
which would coincide with the 5th anniversary of his now
famous, “I have a dream,” sermon. Again, Memphis was all about
economics.
I don’t have to make the point that our
issue today is also economics. The NYTimes reported yesterday that the
median – or average – household net worth for Blacks in America is
$5,677 but for Whites, it’s $113,992. That’s a differential of 20 times
more for Whites.
While Rome is burning, our legislators
are playing the fiddle. Perhaps the most incredible example of that
occurred last month in Washington. I’m sure most of us were totally
taken aback, when Congress and the Administration proved so incredibly
inept and conflict ridden in keeping our nation from defaulting on its
debts. The world had to sit helplessly by as Standard & Poor, the giant
ratings firm in part responsible for the mess we’re in, struck back at
the government in one of the cheekiest moments of all. It had the
unmitigated gall to downgrade the credit worthiness of the United
States, hurting us all.
Add to that the specter of the Tea
Party’s take-no-prisoners-ideologues, who now have an undeserved power
base in the House of Representatives. So much so, that last month in the
debate, they were mindlessly threatening to bring this nation to its
economic knees, if they didn’t get their way. They gave new meaning to
the phrase, “My way or the highway.” That approach, when combined with a
President whose DNA is to find a middle ground, and you have the recipe
for disaster that we are now facing. The bright promise of 2008, of a
nation working together for the common good, fell instead to those whose
first mission is regaining power; once returned, their second mission is
to restructure this nation’s governance so that the social safety net
prized by much of the nation since the Great Depression of the 1930s,
will die the death of a thousand wounds. The radical right is saying
those things are not really the responsibility of the government. They
should strictly be the domain of the church, the synagogue and
mosque…the Salvation Army and the Red Cross…that the government should
totally get out of the business of providing care for the poor, the sick
and the aged.
We can only await with anxiety and the
deepest concern as they play with matches and gasoline.
This is happening at the very time that
America’s social structure is being radically reformed and few of us are
fully aware it is happening. As recounted in the current issue of the
Atlantic Monthly,
the true center of American society, its middle class, has always been
its nonprofessionals – high school graduates who didn’t go on to get a
bachelor’s degree, but who worked in such fields as manufacturing and
construction. In the residue and fallout of the Great Recession,
especially the housing crisis, they are the ones hit the hardest.
Now we’re told that the probability of
their finding jobs that paid as well as the ones they had before the
Recession, are slim to none. What we are moving towards is a nation in
which the many are paid less, and the few are paid more.
A not too long ago report from analysts
at Citigroup stated that America has become two distinct groups: “the
rich and the rest.” This richest 1 percent of households earn as
much as the bottom 60% put together; further, they possess as
much wealth as the bottom 90%.
A New Hampshire colleague, Steve
Edington, suggests we fall back on our nation’s “mission statement,”
namely, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United
States of America.
Now for certain the
framers of the Constitution had their faults: slavery being the worst,
and discrimination against women being next. But the Constitution makes
clear: the welfare of its citizens is the task of the government. What
that has meant since the 1930s is progressive taxation: Those that make
the most, pay the most; and those who make the least, pay the least. And
for the poorest of the poor, government help, a safety net in the form
of things like food stamps and free school lunches. Except that our
legislatures have over time, given such exceptions and exclusions to the
point that Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, pays a
tax rate lower than the receptionist in his office. The estate tax has
been gutted. And since 1960, the top income tax rate for the elite has
been cut by more than half.
At the same time, we’ve wasted billions
in an illegal war in Iraq, and a war we can never win in Afghanistan.
And in the last election, the electorate was fed up with a dithering
Democratic Congress and an indecisive president and turned around and
voted in politicians who give dumb and dumber a bad name.
The
people who pay are the homes where lack of employment means lack of
clothing, food, meds, you name it. Pressures mount and domestic violence
is many times the outcome.
If tens of thousands of our fellow
Americans have lost their homes through foreclosure…more than 30,000 in
Lee County alone…if the unemployment rate is at an all time high and Lee
County is among the leaders in the nation in lack of job
opportunities…and if our hospital system is having to provide more and
more free care to desperately ill people showing up at the emergency
room…then, Hello! It’s the greed inherent in the capitalist system that
Marx predicted would be its ruination.
Strangely, it reminds me of the
Liberation theology I studied in the 60s. It grew out of South American
priests facing the gross disparity in incomes in most of their nations:
There were the very rich and the very poor, just like we’re becoming.
In response, the priests used the image
of Jesus to provide a critique of society and of faith through the eyes
of the poor, rather than the church or the wealthy. It’s a poetic
statement of faith that is trenchant. It went so far as to say that in
the eyes of God there was “a preferential option for the poor” and that
the poor are a privileged channel of God’s grace.
When hunger, homelessness, and
diminishing availability of health care are on the increase, we don’t
have the prerogative of saying, let’s wait until next year after the
next elections. There’s every indication that it will only get worse. We
don’t have the prerogative of saying my way or no way.
Liberation theology would say that Jesus
doesn’t have an office in the White House, nor is he resident in the
halls of Congress. He’s certainly not on Wall Street nor the boards of
the giant banks whose greed so contributed to the mess we are in.
One
place to look though might be in the Emergency Rooms of the local
hospitals where he’s waiting for care without a dime of insurance or a
dollar of money. He might be found with one of 800 or so Lee County
families huddling for the night in their automobiles, because they’ve
lost their home in foreclosure.
He very likely could be in line at the
Soup Kitchen. There are even reports that he’s an AIDS patient choosing
from our throw away clothes at McGregor Clinic. Some think he’s a child
at Hope House awaiting foster parents. There was a sighting reported
that he’s on a bicycle going from Immokalee to Lakeland, Florida, to try
and persuade the CEO of Publix to add a penny a pound to the Coalition
Workers for their tomatoes and thereby alleviating some of the poverty
among the workers, as well as to join in to insure that workers are
treated fairly. Mother Teresa said if we don’t find him there, look
among sick, the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the imprisoned
and the oppressed.
CONCLUSION.
On this Labor Day
Sunday, as I speak, firefighter and police officer unions are fighting
to be heard in Cape Coral. Deputies are constantly on the defensive in
the Lee County Sheriff’s office. In Wisconsin, “a new law stripped
teachers of collective bargaining rights and forced them to pay more for
benefits.” Across America, teachers are working longer for less; and
more and more are leaving the profession within their first five years.
And in Florida, as our Labor Day Prayer states, the take home pay of
teachers is now less, thanks to Governor Scott and a Republican majority
in the state legislature.
Though it’s not much talked about, in
addition to all he did to change the racist nature of America, Dr. King
died while fighting for a Union to be recognized…a Union of sanitation
workers…a union of mostly poor Black sanitation workers in Memphis,
Tennessee.
And on this Labor Day Sunday, 2011, 43 years after Dr. King
gave his life in the cause of economic justice:
Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.
Amen. Blessed be.
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