what would martin do

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Martin Luther King Jr. was working hard to get people to Washington, DC. But when he told an audience, "We are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect.... We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago," the year was not 1963, and his issue was not segregation. Instead, it was 1968, five years after his "I Have a Dream" speech, and now the issue was joblessness and economic deprivation. King was publicizing a new mass mobilization led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a drive known as the Poor People's Campaign.

Nearly forty years later, on January 21, 2008, Democratic presidential candidates John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama participated in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day debate sponsored by CNN and the Congressional Black Caucus. Each candidate was asked whether Dr. King would endorse his or her campaign if he were alive.

Barack Obama gave the right answer. "I don't think Dr. King would endorse any of us," he said. "I think what he would call upon the American people to do is to hold us accountable.... I believe change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. Dr. King understood that. It was those women who were willing to walk instead of ride the bus, union workers who are willing to take on violence and intimidation to get the right to organize.... Them arguing, mobilizing, agitating, and ultimately forcing elected officials to be accountable, I think that's the key."

A year into the administration, it has become a cliché to say that President Obama needs pressure from an enlivened popular movement if there is to be progressive change in Washington. Yet it would be a disservice to Dr. King to argue otherwise. To those who believed that it was not politically feasible for the Poor People's Campaign to score a legislative victory, King explained, "Two years before we went into Selma, the Civil Rights Commission recommended that something be done in a very strong manner to eradicate [discrimination].... And yet nothing was done about it until we went to Selma, mounted a movement and really engaged in action geared toward moving the nation away from the course that it was following."

For King, there was no path to just economic policy except for organizing "to bring pressure to bear on Congress, and to appeal to the conscience and the self-interest of the nation."

Without people taking action in the spirit of Martin Luther King's vision, a few Americans may continue to gather inordinate wealth, but many others, thrust against their will into idleness, insecurity or foreclosure by today's crisis, will have little recourse but to wait for relief from a capricious and uncertain economy.