MLK JR. DAY 2021: FROM DECENCY TO ECONOMIC EQUALITY by Suzanne Hanney
IN
the last year of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, his dream of people judged by their character, not their color, had “at many points turned into a nightmare,” he said in an NBC News interview televised June 11, 19 67. Exactly four years earlier, President John F. Kennedy had announced legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racial segregation in schools and public accommodations as well as racial employment discrimination became illegal. The Voting Rights Act followed in 1965. The Civil Rights Movement had gone from a struggle for decency to one for genuine equality, and his “superficial optimism” was dosed with reality, Dr. King said. “I think that the biggest problem now is that we got our gains over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak. It didn’t cost the nation anything,” Dr. King told NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur. “In fact, it helped the economic side of the nation to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations. It didn’t cost the nation anything to get the right to vote established.” But the right to eat at a lunch counter was meaningless if Black people couldn’t afford it, so economic equality was always on Dr. King’s mind. Simultaneously, in 1967, Dr. King saw that the Vietnam War limited the federal government’s capacity to create the full-labor economy he thought was necessary. “People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted.” What made Blacks different from European immigrants who also struggled, Vanocur asked King rhetorically. Was it color alone? Color had become stigmatized, King responded. “But at the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest. Which meant that there was a willingness to give the white peasants from Europe an economic base, and yet it refused to give its Black peasants from Africa, who came here involuntarily in chains and had worked free for 244 years, any kind of economic base. “It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate and therefore was freedom and famine at the same time,” King said of the Emancipation Proclamation. “I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
The Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead Act both took effect on Jan. 1, 1863. The former freed the slaves while the latter granted 160-acre plots of public land for a small filing fee and a pledge to live on it for five years. Before it was repealed in 1976, the Homestead Act resulted in the settlement of 10 percent of U.S. land: 270 million acres, according to History. com. Out of four million claims, 1.6 million deeds were officially obtained. Native Americans, meanwhile, were forced onto reservations to make way for the homesteaders. The land was open to any citizen, intended citizen or even freed slaves, although few laborers had access to livestock, tools and crops in order to build a farm, according to History.com. In the late 1870s, however, African American “exodusters” who took their name from the biblical book, moved from the South to Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas; they accounted for about 25,000 more people in the 1880 Kansas census. Robert Johnson, chief economic inclusion officer and general counsel at YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, sees the Homestead Act as one more government method that contributed to today’s “racial wealth gap.” The typical white family has a net worth of $171,000, compared to $17,150 for the typical Black family, according to the Brookings Institution. “The government was complicit in the segregation that followed slavery; you were relegated into a sharecropper existence, another form of slavery where you could never own anything, but you were enriching the land of the people for whom you were working,” Johnson said. “From Jim Crow to redlining, where Black folks were forced to live in certain areas where there was no access to financing, whereas others were financing the American Dream, government played an active role. When you say there is no systematic racism, you ignore the history of this country. From its inception, there were choices to benefit some groups and not others, and that’s why you have a wealth gap, why white families have 10 times the net worth.” The racial wealth gap has grown over the last 30 years and persists at every age and income level. Inheritances are the biggest socioeconomic factor behind this historic inequity, according to the Brookings Institution. Only 8 percent of Black families, for example, receive in-
