Tonight, I watched a PBS documentary, Road to Memphis, that followed the parallel paths that lead James Earl Ray and Martin Luther King to the night of the assassination in 1968. Those of us who were in Memphis in those days were forever branded by what happened, but that’s another story. The program reminded me that King came to Memphis as an aside – 
the plight of the garbage workers was just too compelling for him to ignore. But his main focus at that time in his life was poverty, and he was gearing up for a poor people’s march on Washington. He had realized that we needed more than racial equality, we needed an end to the desperate fiscal conditions that were symbolized by the garbage workers being paid something like 80¢/hour. He was literally aiming for a redistribution of wealth in America at the time he was killed.
Coincidentally, I read something about that earlier today. The
Institute on Assets and Social Policy at
Brandeis University just published a
report on the racial wealth gap, and it’s pretty damning.
It documents a four-fold increase in the wealth gap since 1984 between white and black families.
The differences are most striking for the upper income families in each group.
Meanwhile, the lowest 10% of African American families are actually living deeper in the red.
I suppose we mostly think of Dr. King as a champion of Black America, and that was certainly true, but he saw something bigger at the end of his life. I recall at the time that people accused him of being a Communist or a Socialist because of his focusing on poverty. That was simply a slur, much as the "N" word. We’re still hearing that kind of epithet today when anyone points out the levels of wealth inequity in our country. And the situation is much worse now than it was in Dr. King’s day. And while Black Americans remain the biggest victims, they’re by no means alone. Starting with the Reagan Presidency, wealth inequity in America has skyrocketed [shown here as the GINI Coefficient]:
[or as the Share of the total pretax income held by the top 1%]:
In fact, as this graph shows, it’s the upper 0.1% of our population who are accumulating the wealth:
This version of the data makes it clear that the share of the lower 90% of our people has continued to fall since the Reagan "Revolution":
This Business Insider web site has a collection of 16 graphs that document the concentration of wealth to the detriment of the common man in this country, including how other countries avoid this state of affairs. So King was right. Our problem is not just racial inequality. It’s a society currently constructed for the "haves" whose wealth allows them to maintain political power, perpetuating this sorry state of affairs. Our problem isn’t incipient Communism or Socialism. It’s not just racism and prejudice. Our problem is greed at the top, just like it was in 1968 when Dr. King was killed – only it’s worse…
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