By Dr. Valerie Wardlaw | La Sentinel
It was his final march, standing shoulder to shoulder with the striking sanitation workers of Memphis, TN, in April 1968. According to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., their concerns were our concerns.
This concern extended to all who lived in poverty in America. It was the richness and vast resources of the wealth of our nation that was not used to “school the unschooled and feed the unfed” that drew his ire.
King said that America signed a promissory note to help “bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.” The Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Martin Luther King Jr., Marches with Memphis Sanitation Workers (Jack Thornell / Associated Press)
King would ask how humankind could pursue happiness if they do not have a job, an income, or a place to sleep. He would ask how one could avoid being depressed when he sees millions going to bed hungry with his own eyes or “God’s children sleeping on the sidewalks at night?”
For King, poverty was an evil that plagued the modern world. It was seeing our neighbors suffer in plain sight, a failure of a nation’s long-ago promise to its citizen.
In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech, King addressed this plight, lamenting the ills of poverty:
“They are undernourished, ill-housed, and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of cities and the dusty roads of the villages.”