From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Politics and Culture in Modern America) by Thomas F. Jackson

Author:Thomas F. Jackson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780812200003
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

Poverty Politics and the Urban Crisis

During the summer of 1965, King scouted northern cities, searching for a key to the ghetto, an entry point into a multicelled prison of institutional and economic oppression. King reasoned back in March that street demonstrations that had revealed the “crude fascism” of the Southern social order would not work in the North. “However, rent strikes, school boycotts, electoral alliances summon substantial support from Negroes” and successfully dramatize local grievances, he wrote in the Nation. But failing to find effective levers of local and national power, King returned to strategies of street protest in August 1966. King’s leadership and SCLC’s movement culture and income depended on nonviolent demonstrations and national media exposure. For over a year they searched through cells of what Kenneth Clark called the “Dark Ghetto” before marching on white neighborhoods in Chicago. In the end, “marching feet” remained essential political weapons in the black poor’s own war against poverty.37

King went on “people to people” tours of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia that summer. Most of his advisors—Jones, Williams, Blackwell, and Rustin—opposed the move north, but King forged ahead with enthusiastic support from Andrew Young and James Bevel. The NAACP regarded King’s northern expedition as a threat. Gloster Current warned local branches that the King “Juggernaut” might undermine the NAACP’s working relationships with city and state officials. The “white heat of publicity” worked fine where southern activists confronted “an inflexible white power structure, a hostile local press, stupid police officials, and little or no Negro power.” Not so the North, he argued. With resistance mounting, King searched for an appropriate urban stage. In August on Face the Nation, King threatened a “massive march on Washington” for D.C. home rule. He considered joining a Pittsburgh coalition challenging discriminatory building trades unions as part of an “economic freedom” campaign of picketing and protest. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell made it crystal clear that King was not welcome in Harlem. As Powell maintained an iron grip on Harlem’s antipoverty program, his House Committee on Education and Labor exposed how political elites subverted “maximum feasible participation” across the country. Powell’s committee and King converged in Los Angeles, where a battle was breaking out within the war against poverty.38

King in fact briefly considered Los Angeles as a site for a campaign supporting neighborhood activists in their fight for control of the local CAP. Mayor Sam Yorty had appointed a nineteen-member Youth Opportunities Board, which had not yet spent two-thirds of $29 million OEO had awarded a full year earlier. The independent Community Antipoverty Committee, a coalition of labor, African American, and Mexican American community groups, demanded a more democratic thirty-two-person board. Half must come from twelve designated poverty areas, they demanded, and the other half could represent the city, school board, and voluntary agencies. Democratic congressman Augustus Hawkins from south Los Angeles and OEO supported the coalition. Local people read the law and insisted on involvement, Hawkins recalled, then “public officials began to wake up” and decided community action was dangerous.

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