Visiting MLK
Hello, I hope that you’re having a wonderful holiday weekend! It was my birthday on Friday so I had a nice dinner with family and friends.
This weekend we also celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday and legacy. In 2020 I had the privilege of visiting the King Center in Atlanta with Dr. King’s son, Martin Luther King III. Martin and I became friends during my presidential campaign; his father had been a champion of universal basic income before he was assassinated in 1968.
Dr. King’s childhood home is located a couple blocks from the King Center in Atlanta on a pleasant residential street. Martin brought me and Evelyn around the house – it is preserved so that one gets a sense of family life in that time. “Dad used to say that the view from the front stoop – the poor houses on the left and the rich houses on the right – gave him a sense early on that change was needed.”
Like most Americans, I grew up watching the black and white videos of Martin Luther King’s historic “I have a dream” speech, and watched it again in a US History course I took in college. I also remember when MLK Day became a federal holiday in 1986 – I was eleven years old and it was a big deal. To hear Martin relate his own childhood memories of his father in their family home was something I will never forget.
We walked down the street to visit the King Center directly afterwards. There’s a beautiful pool of water where Dr. King and his wife are interred. “This Center is really Mom’s vision come to life more than anyone else,” Martin said. Quotes from Dr. King’s speeches are included along the sides, including his call to address the 3 great Evils: Racism, Poverty and War.
If you ask most people what Dr. King stood for, they would likely say “a land where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” But Dr. King had taken to campaigning against not just racism but poverty in his later years – he even explicitly said that poor blacks and poor whites should make common cause to improve their circumstances in his final book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” In that book, he wrote,
“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: ‘This is not just.’ . . . Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”
Dr. King was assassinated 55 years ago, yet his words read as if they could have been written today. Is America any closer to becoming the “beloved community” today?
This year on Dr. King’s birthday, let’s think bigger about what building a beloved community would mean in our own time, and consider how to address poverty in the age of AI. And if you ever have the chance to visit MLK’s resting place in Atlanta, take the opportunity – you’ll be glad you did.
Want to help America head down a better path? Check out Forward today.
