Kuttner on TAP: Connecting Civil Rights to Economic Rights

We celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a crusader for racial justice in all its forms. He is most vividly remembered for his struggle to secure voting rights, which is the key to all other rights and social reforms. And on the day of his assassination in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was marching in solidarity with striking sanitation workers, recognizing that civil rights and economic rights must go together.

In this respect, President Biden could learn from Dr. King.

Biden’s two kickoff campaign speeches, near Valley Forge on the subject of democracy, and at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on racial justice, got mixed reviews. The democracy speech was generally praised as finally and belatedly taking the campaign to Trump and Trump’s threats to democracy. But many commentators, myself included, were critical of Biden’s Charleston speech.

Stan Greenberg, writing last Friday for the Prospect, made a compelling case that Biden should be addressing Blacks and others in the Democratic base, not on the basis of identity but based on their common interest as workers who are being harmed by Republicans and helped by Biden, who could do more in a second term. Charles Blow, a New York Times columnist, was even more pointed:

“The president’s speech was a chance to offer a vision for his second term, but there was hardly any vision in it,” Blow wrote. “It was safe, conventional and uninspiring. It seemed at times to be stuck in a bygone era in which churches were the primary source of political power and messaging in Black communities.”

King’s life and work connected racial justice and economic justice, in a way that Biden has not quite managed yet. And when the Republican reaction set in, its first target was to eviscerate the gains and protections of the Voting Rights Act—first by failing to enforce it and then via a conservative Supreme Court declaring major sections of the act unconstitutional. The assault on trade unions and worker rights came in tandem.

Now, the Republicans have moved from undermining the right to vote and have every vote counted, not just by targeting Black voters but by using extreme gerrymandering, threats against voter registration, rigging vote counts, dark money, and in 2020 trying to use a coup to overturn the result.

As Pastor Martin Niemöller might have said, first they came for the Blacks, then they came for everyone else. Dr. King understood and taught that we are all in this together, as citizens of a democracy and as workers. President Biden gets major pieces of this right. Now he needs to connect the dots.