Forty years on King's plan for Black Reconstruction

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Forty years on

King's plan for Black Reconstruction in America uncovered ­ but who's to 
pay, and why? ­ by Thom Blaire


Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington 
1963 led us all astray. America was not full of Black and white kids all 
yearning to live together in racial harmony. Rather, it was the true 
King that cried out "we can't wait" and planned to relieve the pain of 
Black people.

Years before his assassination in 1968, King had the most extraordinary 
vision of a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged. This little known side 
of the civil rights leader escaped widespread notice in America.

Uncovered in a few pages tucked away in the back of his book Why We 
Can't Wait, published in the year of his "dream" speech, King outlined a 
bill to counter the effects of centuries of slavery and social 
oppression.

A bold programme of primarily Black reconstruction was needed on the 
scale of the Marshall Plan that rejuvenated post war Europe, he said. 
Funded by a bold governmental policy, King's Bill of Rights would combat 
the "misery that haunts Black people" and place them ahead in the 
competition for individual and collective betterment

Black families, emerging from their blighted neighbourhoods, would be 
eligible for subsidised quality homes and education. Budding 
entrepreneurs could negotiate government-backed loans. Health care and 
insurance would be available at no-cost at special medical centres.

To his detractors, King said, Americans deceive themselves that positive 
action against shameful conditions is a "black thing", unfairly 
affecting "white rights". However, he knew full well that special 
measures for the worthy and deprived have always been an accepted 
principle in the United States.

Historic examples were plain to see, he said. Ancient common law granted 
restitution when the labour of one human being was appropriated by 
another. A fledging American government granted land to farmers who 
fought in the Revolutionary Army.

Blacks were promised "forty acres and a mule" to help them start their 
lives as free men during the Reconstruction Period following the Civil 
War (though this was never really honoured). Government money funded the 
'Americanisation' of European immigrants in the early 19th century.

Later, in the 1930s and 1940s government-sponsored reforms brought a 
ÒNew DealÓ to penniless Americans through poor relief, child labour 
protection, social security, unemployment compensation and manpower 
retraining programs.

King chided his critics, saying they had obviously forgotten that the 
World War II GI Bill of Rights gave fighting men and women educational, 
housing and financial benefits to ease their re-entry into civilian life.

Now the time has come for Black people - "our veterans of denial" - to 
be compensated, said King in his book. One hundred years after President 
Abraham Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves, African Americans were 
"still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of 
discrimination.

Forty years on, the case for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged 
remains. Sure the civil rights and voting acts brought modest gains; and 
the Black middle class has been strengthened. But the daily cup of 
bitterness that King spoke of is no less potent today, say civil rights 
advocates.

Rosa Parks, whose resistance to segregated seating made her a heroine 
with King in the Montgomery bus boycott, summarised the views of many 
advocates. Speaking in the August 2003 issue of Ebony magazine, the 
foremost African American magazine, Parks, now a frail ninety-year-old, 
said: "While I appreciate the advances we have made as a people, I 
realise that we still face some of the same challenges, such as 
employment, reduction in services, police brutality and economic 
disparity," she says. 

Elijah E Cummings, Maryland Democratic representative and chairman of 
the Congressional Black Caucus, fears that the crises facing Black 
people will be bypassed once again. "Minority schoolchildren are far 
less likely to receive an empowering education· [and] the unemployment 
rate for African Americans is still more than twice that of whites, " he 
says.

Coretta Scott King, King's wife, told Ebony: "Despite the impressive 
gains of the last four decades, African Americans are underrepresented 
in the US Congress, state legislatures, county commissions and city 
councils. Nor have we achieved parity of economic opportunity."

The tragedy is that millions of Black people are less well off today 
than when King marched on Washington for jobs and freedom in1963. The 
findings of the US Census 2001 support this dire conclusion. The 
National Urban League, a leading civil rights organisation, agrees, 
according to reports in its journal, Opportunity, August 2003. 

So what can be done to reverse the trend? Ronald Ross, distinguished 
fellow of the league, says: "The notion that we should be a colour-blind 
society, warmly wrapped in a mosaic blanket and somehow melted into a 
rainbow of colours, is a faraway reality. Until it draws significantly 
closer, Blacks need to support their own ­ economically, politically, 
spiritually and mentally."

Ross's words mirror a growing feeling that it is time for Black 
Americans to follow King's lead and orchestrate a drive for a Bill of 
Rights for the Disadvantaged. Furthermore, many believe that the costs 
should be paid for by slavery reparations.

Lalanji Olesegun, founding member of the National Coalition of Blacks 
for Reparations says: "The case for reparations is one of repair·it is a 
repairing of people for the injustices done to them over an extended 
period of time".

But who must pay, and why?
"All Americans owe a debt to the millions of Black slaves," says Prof. 
David Brion Davis, researcher on Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, at 
Yale University.


The US government has responsibility for payment of reparations, 
humanitarian Randall Robinson persuasively argues in his book The Debt ­ 
What America owes to Blacks.

(Black people remember that war-time reparations were awarded to 
Japanese families held in internment camps; and an international court 
awarded reparations to descendants of Jewish slave labourers who worked 
in Germany and Austria.)

Reparations activists have therefore called for a range of actions by 
government. Among them, cash payments, governmental benefits, a verbal 
apology, land grants, and educational benefits to the descendants of 
Africans brought to America as slaves.

Major institutions and corporations cannot escape their guilty 
participation in the nefarious slavery system, say activists. Venerable 
universities, among them the prestigious Ivy League colleges, Yale and 
Harvard, are accused of benefiting from slavery. Corporations will have 
to pay billions of dollars in reparations to the descendants of slaves 
in America, if a federal law suit is successful, says Deadria 
Farmer-Paellmann, the main plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Matching reparations claims to King's plan will not be easy however. 
Every year for over a decade, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, 
an African American, has called on Congress to legislate for slavery 
reparations. But, all he gets is a derisive laugh from colleagues, says 
Derrick Z. Jackson a columnist for the Boston Globe.

Meanwhile, Jackson has observed, the US Congress has been considering 
special measures to re-populate the western states, the white heartland 
America. The new homesteaders would get tax credits, college loan 
repayments, and guarantees against losses.

This shows the roots of this hypocrisy in America run deep, says 
Jackson. "When black folks want it [special assistance], we're beggars. 
When white folks want it, they're hard workers. This is, he says, "an 
example of how white privilege has remained alive from the time America 
stole the land [from Native Americans] for the first Homestead Act to 
today's proposal for a new one".

Against this background of ill-disguised hostility to Blacks, Martin 
Luther King's case for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged is as 
valid today as in past decades. The causes of disadvantage are clearly 
evident. Civil rights advocates are mobilising for change. Reparations 
advocates have identified a potential funding source. Moreover, as King 
has said himself, there are good reasons why Blacks can't wait: they 
will no longer accept "the tranquilising drug of gradualism".