King and the Other America: The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality by Sylvie Laurent (review)

Sylvie Laurent seeks to rehabilitate and highlight the significance of the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) and Martin Luther King Jr.'s work on behalf of economic justice in the late 1960s, which she sees as the culmination of a radical black tradition dating back to the end of slavery. Whereas some accounts of the PPC portray it as a futile and failed effort to force policy makers to direct more resources to solving poverty in an era when urban riots, white backlash politics, and the growing influence of conservatives in Congress undermined support for the black freedom movement, Laurent argues that its participants' analysis of the structural defects of capitalism were both accurate and prescient. Excavating King's writings along with works by other Americans who examined the sources of racial and economic inequality in the United States, Laurent challenges the notion that civil rights activists were "radicalized" after 1965, demonstrating that critiques of the economic system and perceptive analyses of the ways that race and class intersected had long been part of the struggle for social justice.

Although three chapters on the PPC itself make up the heart of the book, they are preceded and followed by lengthy discussions of writings, speeches, and organizing by black intellectuals and grassroots activists both before and after the campaign. Freed people seeking economic independence understood the need for redistributive justice after the Civil War, a call that was taken up by Frederick Douglass in essays examining the "labor question" and proposals for land reform in the late nineteenth century. W. E. B. Du Bois also highlighted the interplay of race and class, noting how racism was used to justify the exploitation of African Americans, divide the working class along racial lines, and keep white as well as black working people powerless and poor. Working-class black Americans also recognized the centrality of economic exploitation to their experience and joined with white socialists, communists, and labor organizers to challenge corporate capitalism in the twentieth century.

Although racism and disagreements over the relative importance of attacking racial discrimination or class inequality often weakened these interracial movements, Laurent sees them as important precursors to the multiracial coalition that King was attempting to build with the PPC. Tracing the intellectual influences on King's thinking and the evolution of his ideas about race and class, Laurent argues that the PPC was the culmination of a black radical tradition that viewed these two forms of oppression as mutually formative and inextricable in the context of American (and global) capitalism. Its goal was not simply the inclusion of African Americans within the existing economic and political systems but a complete restructuring of those systems to ensure a fair distribution of wealth and power among all the nation's people. As King recognized, this revolutionary approach required reaching out to all disenfranchised groups, including poor white Americans as well as other people of color, to forge a movement strong enough to force political leaders to enact policies that would be expensive and likely to encounter strong resistance from wealthier citizens.

In assessing the PPC itself, Laurent acknowledges the challenges its participants faced and the reluctance of most other Americans to support their agenda. In addition to losing their principal leader when King was assassinated in April 1968, organizers faced indifference or outright hostility from federal officials, law enforcement agencies, and citizens who thought that civil rights legislation passed in the mid-1960s had solved racism, so that any remaining problems in African American communities were the fault of black people themselves. Distracted by the Vietnam War, which redirected billions of dollars toward the military and away from antipoverty programs, President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers were in no mood to accede to the PPC's demands for massive public investments to create jobs, strengthen the...