Here are excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches outlining what his dream would look like economically.
It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good, solid job.
It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions.
It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine quality integrated education a reality. But it does not stop there.
In 1875, the nation passed a civil rights bill and refused to enforce it. In 1964, the nation passed a weaker civil rights bill, and even to this day that bill has not been totally enforced in all of its dimensions.
The nation heralded a new day of concern for the poor, for the poverty-stricken, for the disadvantaged, and brought into being a poverty bill. But at the same time, it put such little money into the program that it was hardly and still remains hardly of good skirmish against poverty.
White politicians in suburbs talk eloquently against open housing, and in the same breath contend that they are not racist.
Now, all of this and all of these things tell us that America has been backlashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negroes and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years.
And there is a great deal that this society can and must do if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs. Now one of the answers it seems to me, is a guaranteed annual income, a guaranteed minimum income for all people and for all families of our country.
It seems to me that the civil rights movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income, begin to organize people all over our country and mobilize forces so that we can bring to the attention of our nation this need, which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negroes economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation.
Now, I said I wasn’t gonna talk about Vietnam, but I can’t make a speech without mentioning some of the problems that we face there. Because I think this war has diverted attention from civil rights. It has strengthened the forces of reaction in our country and it’s brought to the forefront the military-industrial complex that even President Eisenhower warned us against at one time.
And above all, it is destroying human lives. It’s destroying the lives of thousands of the young promising men of our nation. Destroying the lives of little boys and little girls in Vietnam. Well one of the greatest things that this war is doing to us in civil rights is that it is allowing the great society to be shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam every day.
And I submit this afternoon, that we can end poverty in the United States. Our nation has the resources to do it. The National Gross Product of America will rise to astounding figure of s ome 780 billion dollars this year.
We have the resources. The question is, whether the nation has a will. And I submit that if we can provide 35 billion dollars a year to fight an ill-considered war in Vietnam and 20 billion dollars to put a man on the moon, our nation can spend billions of dollars on their own two feet, right here on Earth.