In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • King and the Other America: The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality by Sylvie Laurent
  • Gavin Wright
King and the Other America: The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality. By Sylvie Laurent (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2018) 318 pp. $85.00 cloth $29.95 paper

Every year around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we hear that the revered civil-rights leader came to understand late in his life that sweeping economic reform was essential for racial progress, but that this "radical" King has been obscured by the antiseptic apostle of brotherhood favored by the media. Since we hear this theme every year, we may ask just how deeply suppressed it can be. King as economic thinker and activist is nonetheless an undeniably neglected topic. Laurent addresses it in this new book, focusing particularly on the Poor People's Campaign of 1967/8, King's ambitious last political initiative.

Laurent first shows, following the lead of Jackson and Birt, that King had a deep background in social-democratic thought, having stressed inequality and economic justice for decades.1 She thus firmly rejects the "radicalization" thesis, arguing instead that the Poor People's Campaign was "the culmination of King's lifelong thinking on the nature of justice" (13). Laurent portrays the campaign as a link in a "long chain" of black progressive intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and King contemporaries A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

The next major section tells the story of the Campaign, though Laurent acknowledges that she "does not describe in depth the fine details," instead using the history to illustrate King's "understanding that racial inequality was embedded in class" (98). An important turning point was King's traumatic experience with the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965–1967. Exposure to entrenched segregation and powerlessness in a northern city "left an indelible impression on King" (123). Worse yet, he found that his message of nonviolence and interracialism was no match for Stokely Carmichael's "black power" slogan in its appeal to urban black youth. King may not have been "radicalized" by his Chicago experience, but his interest in sweeping economic reform also responded to political competition on his left flank. Support for the sanitation workers of Memphis in 1968 reflected King's plans for a new [End Page 467] phase of the movement, more oriented toward progressive economic goals.

The account of the rise and fall of Resurrection City, the six-week poor people's live-in on the National Mall in 1968, is one of the most interesting parts of the book, but it conveys the sinking feeling that failure was preordained. Amid intense planning for the event, King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4. The organizers carried on, but the project was beset with media skepticism, fbi hostility, political fragmentation, and the absence of well-defined achievable goals. Bayard Rustin, who was recruited as national coordinator on May 24, counseled pragmatism. He published an updated version of the Economic Bill of Rights on June 5, advancing a specific legislative agenda. His reward was dismissal for insubordination by Ralph Abernathy on June 7. Robert Kennedy, by then a presidential candidate and a strong supporter of the Campaign, was himself assassinated on June 6. Resurrection City was razed by district police on June 24.

In the last section, Laurent attempts to salvage a legacy from this fiasco by maintaining that King and the Campaign "echoed and anticipated many academic works on urban poverty and structural inequalities" (219), highlighting the work of Wilson (who contributes a brief foreword) and other scholars.2 This attempt is a stretch. King tried to make sense of the turbulent world in which he lived, while remaining true to his own deepest values, including a willingness to advance radical economic proposals. In doing so, he drew from, and worked with, many of the leading thinkers of the times. But neither King nor the experts could have foreseen the economic world in which we now find ourselves, and none of them truly cracked the code of race—class interaction in American society. Laurent deserves credit for elucidating...

pdf

Share