Watch King's historic speech below.
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"Who, then, is greedy? -- The one who does not remain content with self sufficiency. Who is the one who deprives others? The one who hoards what belongs to everyone. Are you not greedy? Are you not one who deprives others? You have received these things for stewardship, and have turned them into your own property! Is not the one who tears off what another is wearing called a clothes-robber? But the one who does not clothe the naked, when he was able to do so -- what other name does he deserve? The bread that you hold on to belongs to the hungry; the cloak you keep locked in your storeroom belongs to the naked; the shoe that is moldering in your possession belongs to the person with no shoes; the silver that you have buried belongs to the person in need. You do an injury to as many people as you might have helped with all these things!"
Martin Luther King Day memorials tend to celebrate King the Civil Rights leader, stressing his activism on behalf of interracial equality and reconciliation. We slight his emphasis on the link between racism and poverty and so neglect King the advocate of the poor. At the time of his assassination King was participating in the Memphis Sanitation Workers' struggle to achieve a decent wage while simultaneously planning the Poor People's Campaign. King's sermons, speeches and writings echo ancient Christian teachings on poverty and wealth, which may still serve as a resource for the contemporary struggle to overcome economic inequality. He was a 20th century exemplar of a very old tradition.
Princeton Historian Peter Brown argues convincingly that "a revolution in the social imagination occurred between 300 and 600 C.E. closely associated with the rise to power of the Christian bishop. For the Christian bishop was held by contemporaries to owe his position in no small part to his role as the guardian of the poor. He was the 'lover of the poor' par excellence." The 4th century bishops, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus elucidated this novel virtue and its centrality to the community life of Christians. In 369 a severe drought followed by famine prompted Basil to preach a sermon on the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16-18), the man who decides to tear down his barns and build new ones to hold his surplus grain. "But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." Basil elaborates:
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2011: Nation Ponders King In Wake Of Arizona Shooting...
The federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. has taken on added meaning for most Americans this year, as they try to make sense of the violence in Arizona that left six people dead and a member of Congress fighting for her life.
A state that once resisted the notion of a federal King holiday – and last year was the setting for a sharp-tongued debate on immigration – now finds itself in search of solace after the Jan. 8 attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the throng of people around her outside a grocery store in Tucson. The balm of choice is King, a pacifist Southern preacher whose own life was cut short by gun violence. "Dr. King's message was about inclusion and the recognition of human dignity, of human rights and making sure that all of our voices are heard," said Imani Perry, an African-American studies professor at Princeton University. "I hope people in Arizona, in particular, embrace that part of his message. The politics in Arizona recently have often seemed to revolve around excluding people."
Monday marks the 25th federal observance of the birth of King, whose words were often met with hate and resistance during one of the nation's most turbulent and transformative eras. Today, King is one of the country's most celebrated citizens and the only one to be honored with a national holiday who did not serve as a U.S. president.
"So little of his real politics show up in these annual commemorations," said Morgan State University professor Jared Ball. "Instead of actually reading what he wrote or listening to what he said, we pick catchphrases and throw his name around. We all feel for the tragic incident that took place in Arizona, but this is happening to people all over the world every day in one form or another."
Many use the King holiday to celebrate King's life and struggle for human rights. Some choose to honor King by following the Baptist preacher's example of service to their fellow man. For others, the holiday is equal to Presidents' or Columbus Day: Just an excuse for a long weekend, to take a short vacation or do nothing.
Martin Luther King III, head of The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, said the Arizona tragedy is a grim reminder that the country has not yet achieved his father's dream of a peaceful society.
"When incidents occur like what we saw in Arizona, it shows us how much work we must do to create the kind of nation where nonviolence is embraced," King said.
A national remembrance of the civil rights icon is an opportunity for the country to renew its commitment to King's cause. Absent that, it's unclear how his legacy would be remembered, said Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley.
"The holiday brought the freedom struggle into the main narrative," Brinkley said. "The day is meant to be a moment of reflection against racism, poverty and war. It's not just an African-American holiday. The idea of that day is to try to understand the experience of people who had to overcome racism but in the end are part and parcel of the American quilt."
An AP-GfK poll shows that Barack Obama's term as the nation's first black president has not shifted views on the nation's progress toward King's dream of racial equality. According to the poll, 77 percent feel there has been significant progress toward King's dream – about the same percentage as found by a 2006 AP-Ipsos poll (75 percent).
Overall, 30 percent interviewed for the AP-GfK poll say they will do something to commemorate the King holiday this year, up from 23 percent in 2006. About three in four respondents said King is deserving of a national holiday.
King, who was born Jan. 15, 1929, was killed at age 39. He has now been dead longer than he lived, and each commemoration adds more distance between his generation and those who came after and directly benefited from his life's work.
"The struggle that the holiday itself has is to not just be a day off," Brinkley said. "We have trouble with that. We have to constantly be vigilant not to let that happen."
Legislation calling for a federal King holiday was introduced in Congress by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan just four days after King's April 4, 1968, assassination. Later that same year, Coretta Scott King, his widow, started The Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in the basement of the couple's Atlanta home.
She was also committed early on to Conyers' proposal – an ironic tribute to a man who usually didn't make much of his birthday. It would be another 15 years before Congress warmed to the idea and passed it into law.
President Ronald Reagan signed the bill establishing the third Monday in January as the Martin Luther King National Holiday on Nov. 3, 1983, and the first observance was Jan. 20, 1986. That year, 17 states also had official King holidays, including Illinois, which recognized King with a holiday in 1973, the first state to do so.
Arizona established, then rescinded, a King holiday in the 1980s, but finally joined the federal observance in 1992. New Hampshire was the last state to honor King, in 1999.
Today, the King holiday also is observed in more than 100 countries, according to The King Center.
In 1994, the meaning of the holiday shifted as Coretta Scott King called for less of an emphasis on his life and more of a focus on his legacy. The mission was expanded to include volunteerism, interracial cooperation and youth anti-violence initiatives.
More than a million Americans are expected to participate in 13,000 projects around the country on the King Day of Service, said Patrick Corvington, head of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency charged with administering service projects on the King holiday. The focus on service makes the holiday more inclusive, Corvington said.
Corporate America has been slower to respond. A survey of 300 businesses by the Bureau of National Affairs showed three in 10 will give all or most of their workers a paid holiday on Monday. The legal and business publisher reports the figure is a significant increase over the first 11 years of the federal holiday observance.
According to the BNA survey, only 14 percent of surveyed businesses made the King Day a paid holiday in 1986, and figures stayed in the teens until a 1993, when the number rose to 24 percent. Since 2003, the number has hovered around 30 percent of employers.
"Who, then, is greedy? -- The one who does not remain content with self sufficiency. Who is the one who deprives others? The one who hoards what belongs to everyone. Are you not greedy? Are you not one who deprives others? You have received these things for stewardship, and have turned them into your own property! Is not the one who tears off what another is wearing called a clothes-robber? But the one who does not clothe the naked, when he was able to do so -- what other name does he deserve? The bread that you hold on to belongs to the hungry; the cloak you keep locked in your storeroom belongs to the naked; the shoe that is moldering in your possession belongs to the person with no shoes; the silver that you have buried belongs to the person in need. You do an injury to as many people as you might have helped with all these things!"
Basil enacted the Christian social vision he preached by establishing a hospice and soup kitchen for the famine victims and later developed a large complex to house the poor, tend the sick, and where the poor who could work were employed or trained in various trades. Around 369, St. Gregory of Nyssa preached on almsgiving: "Do not look down on those who lie at your feet, as if you judged them worthless. Consider who they are, and you will discover their dignity: they have put on the countenance of our Savior; for the one who loves humanity has lent them his own face, so that through it they might shame those who lack compassion and hate the poor." In a sermon on the Last Judgment scene in Matthew 25:31-46, in which care for the poor is the standard of judgment "for in as much as you did it [or did it not] to the least of these you did it to me." St. Gregory of Nazianzus warns that we should fear condemnation if we "have not ministered to Christ through those in need ... Let us take care of Christ, then, while there is still time: let us visit Christ in his sickness, let us give to Christ to eat, let us clothe Christ in his nakedness, let us do honor to Christ in his needy ones, in those who lie on the ground here before us this day." .
In 1956, King preached a sermon that echoed Basil's condemnation of greed: "God never intended for a group of people to live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty. God intends for all of His children to have the basic necessities of life, and He has left in this universe enough and to spare for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth." In 1962, King preached, "I see hungry boys and girls in this nation and other nations and think about the fact that we spend more than a million dollars a day storing surplus food. And I say to myself 'I know where we can store that food free of charge - in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of people in our nation and in this world who go to bed hungry at night.'"
In 1961, preaching on the same text from Luke as Basil, King linked racism and poverty, "You see this man was foolish because the richer he became materially the poorer he became spiritually.... This man was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on others... Now this text has a great deal of bearing on our struggle in race relations... For what is white supremacy but the foolish notion that God made a mistake and stamped an eternal stigma of inferiority on a certain race of people; what is white supremacy but the foolishness of believing that one race is good enough to dominate another race?...And there was a final reason why this man was foolish. He failed to realize his dependence on God...because he felt that he was the creator instead of the creature."
Like the ancient "Fathers of the Church" King emphasized that "the least of these" are children and "icons" of God, whose treatment is the measure of our "salvation or damnation" as persons and as a nation. Like them he argued that excess wealth is "robbed from the poor." Like them he cautioned us against the ineluctable tendency of consumption to addict us to status and power. Like them he exhorted us to "move from being a thing-oriented, to a person-oriented" society. This year, as economic crisis threatens severe cutbacks to social services for the needy, we would do well to celebrate Martin Luther King Day by remembering and resolving to emulate his advocacy of the poor in our personal and political actions.
