The Last Year

The most consequential year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s political life was the last one. The civil-rights movement he had led since 1955 had won, in the legislative session of 1964 and 1965, the principal federal statutes against the Jim Crow apparatus of the southern states — the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The legal architecture of segregation had been substantially dismantled at the federal level, and the enforcement infrastructure that would, across the next decade, end de jure segregation in the South was being assembled. By any measure conventional in the contemporary press of his time, King had won. The most prominent civil-rights leader in the country had achieved, in a decade of organizing, the legislative outcomes the movement had been demanding. He was thirty-eight years old. The conventional path open to him in 1967 was to consolidate the victory, accept the credit, and shift to a more managerial role in the long enforcement work.

He chose differently. Across 1966 and the early months of 1967, in speeches that drew increasingly less attention from the white liberal establishment that had been his principal political backing, he began articulating an argument that the civil-rights movement’s next phase had to be fundamentally different from its previous phase. The Jim Crow legal apparatus had been the principal target of the southern campaigns; the legal apparatus was largely defeated; the conditions that had produced the apparatus, in his analysis, were not principally legal. They were economic. They were technological. They were embedded in the structure of American capital and American foreign policy and American military deployment, and they would continue to produce the outcomes the legal victories had been intended to prevent unless the next phase of the movement engaged with them directly.

This was the argument he carried to the pulpit at the Riverside Church in Manhattan on the evening of April 4, 1967.

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The audience was about three thousand. The occasion was a meeting organized by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, a coalition that had been pressuring the public American religious leadership to take an explicit anti-war position. King was the principal speaker. He had been working on the address for several weeks; the text was forty-five pages typed; he delivered it for fifty-five minutes.

The speech, which was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” is sometimes remembered as an anti-war speech. It was. But the anti-war argument was the surface of a deeper structural argument that the political establishment of his time understood with greater clarity than the subsequent commemorative tradition has. King argued that the Vietnam War was not a foreign-policy mistake; it was the operational expression of a domestic economic order that produced the war as an inevitable byproduct. The same configuration of American capital that was investing in extractive operations across Asia, Africa, and South America was the configuration of capital that was producing the wage compression and the housing segregation and the urban poverty in American cities. The war was not a distraction from the civil-rights agenda. The war was being fought to maintain the international economic conditions under which the domestic civil-rights agenda would remain incompletely realized.

The single passage from the speech that has been most widely quoted on the technological question is this: When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The phrase the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism is King’s. He used it across his late speeches and writings as the analytical structure of his late-period political argument. He was claiming, with specificity, that the three were not separable problems addressed by separable movements; that they were three aspects of a single structural condition; and that the civil-rights movement had to expand its scope or accept that its earlier victories would not become substantive.

The reaction to the speech was not what King had anticipated. The white liberal establishment that had funded and supported the southern civil-rights campaigns turned against him sharply. The New York Times editorial board called the speech a strategic mistake. The editorial board of the Washington Post was harsher. The Johnson administration treated the speech as a personal betrayal — Lyndon Johnson, who had spent significant political capital pushing the 1964 and 1965 legislation through Congress, considered King’s anti-war stance a public abandonment of the political relationship that had produced the legislative victories. Substantial fractions of the existing civil-rights movement leadership distanced themselves from King — not because they disagreed with the substance, in most cases, but because they understood the political cost of agreeing with him publicly.

The reaction inside the FBI was different. The bureau had been monitoring King since the late 1950s, but the surveillance escalated substantially in the days after Riverside. J. Edgar Hoover, who had personally directed the bureau’s operations against King, moved the surveillance to a higher tier of operational priority. The bureau’s internal characterization of King as the most dangerous Black leader in America — the specific phrase appears in declassified bureau documents — was operationalized through an intensified campaign of surveillance, harassment, and discrediting. Hotel rooms were bugged; phone calls were recorded; personal materials were selectively leaked to the press. None of this was unprecedented in the bureau’s relationship to King. The intensification, after Riverside, was.

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In the same year, King published his last book.

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? came out from Harper & Row in 1967. It was about two hundred pages. It was the most thorough exposition King had ever published of his political program. It is the book in which he articulated, in plain prose, the policy proposal that has been the principal substantive inheritance the platform of The Intelligent Party draws from his late work.

The proposal was a guaranteed annual income.

He wrote it directly. The passage is in Chapter V, the chapter titled “Where We Are Going”:

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

The proposal had been in the policy literature for several years before King endorsed it. Robert Theobald had advanced it in two books in the early 1960s; Milton Friedman had proposed a variant in 1962 (the negative income tax); James Tobin had proposed a different variant in 1965 (the demogrant); the National Welfare Rights Organization had been organizing for a guaranteed income from below across the same period. King’s contribution was not to introduce the policy. His contribution was to bring it into the civil-rights movement’s program and to argue, in a book aimed at the general reader, for its centrality to the next phase of the movement’s work. The proposal that the welfare-rights organizers had been building from the bottom received, in 1967, the institutional endorsement of the most prominent civil-rights leader in the country.

The book also contains, in the same chapter, the passage that the contemporary AI labor-displacement literature has been rediscovering across the past decade. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. That sentence was written in 1966, published in 1967, by a man who had been working on the relationship between civil rights and economic structure for the better part of a decade and who had concluded that the technology then beginning to be deployed across American industry would, if deployed without political restructuring, produce specific outcomes incompatible with the conditions of free citizenship. He was extrapolating from where the technology was going to where it would arrive. He was substantially correct about where it would arrive.

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The proposal required a coalition that the civil-rights movement had not assembled.

King had concluded, by late 1967, that the legislative path to a guaranteed income would require political pressure of a kind that the civil-rights coalition could not generate on its own. The coalition would have to be cross-racial. It would have to include poor whites, who had not been part of the civil-rights movement’s principal constituency and whose political affiliation across the southern states had been substantially with the segregationist apparatus the movement had defeated. It would have to include Hispanic, Native American, and Asian-American populations whose poverty rates were comparable to or higher than the Black poverty rate but who had not been organized as part of the existing civil-rights infrastructure. It would have to be assembled, organized, trained, and mobilized to a specific political event — and the event would have to demonstrate the coalition’s existence in a form that could not be ignored by Congress.

He began the work in late 1967. The organizational form he selected was a sustained encampment on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., demanding economic legislation. He called it the Poor People’s Campaign. The specific demands, announced at organizing meetings in late 1967 and early 1968, included a thirty-billion-dollar annual federal anti-poverty program, full employment legislation, a guaranteed annual income, and the construction of approximately five hundred thousand units of low-income housing per year.

The demands were ambitious. The strategic logic was that ambitious demands were the appropriate response to the empirical scale of the problem. King traveled across the country in late 1967 and early 1968, speaking at organizing meetings, recruiting state and regional leaders, building the cross-racial coalition the campaign required. The organizing was harder than the southern civil-rights campaigns had been. The coalition was wider; the trust required across the racial and regional lines was less established; the political opposition included not only the explicit southern segregationist resistance the earlier campaigns had faced but the more diffuse opposition of the white northern working class that had not previously had to take a position on the civil-rights movement’s agenda.

He was simultaneously engaged in the SCLC’s ongoing work in Memphis, where Black sanitation workers had been on strike since February 1968 over working conditions and union recognition. The Memphis strike had drawn King into a campaign that the SCLC’s strategic leadership had not initially planned to engage. He had committed to it across March 1968. He was scheduled to lead a major march in Memphis on April 5, 1968.

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He was killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, at six o’clock in the evening. He was thirty-nine years old. The shot was fired by James Earl Ray from a rooming house across the street; Ray was apprehended in London two months later; he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder; he died in prison in 1998. The question of whether Ray acted alone or in coordination with other parties has remained the subject of subsequent investigation, including the 1976–1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations and the 1999 civil trial in Memphis, both of which produced findings inconsistent with the lone-gunman conclusion. The factual question is outside the scope of this essay. What is relevant is the temporal coincidence.

He was killed exactly one year and one day after the Riverside speech.

The Poor People’s Campaign proceeded after his death. Resurrection City, the encampment on the National Mall, was constructed in May 1968 and remained occupied for six weeks before the U.S. Park Police forcibly cleared it on June 24. The encampment did not produce the legislative outcomes King had projected. The thirty-billion-dollar anti-poverty program was not enacted. The full-employment legislation was not enacted. The guaranteed-income proposal did not advance. The five hundred thousand units of low-income housing per year were not built. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 — the Fair Housing Act — was passed in April 1968 in the immediate aftermath of his assassination and was the principal federal legislative response, but its scope was substantially narrower than the program the campaign had been organized to demand.

The next decade of American economic policy proceeded without the structural intervention King had argued was the necessary next phase of the civil-rights movement. The labor-share decline that had been masked through the early 1970s by the post-war social contract accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. The wealth concentration that King had identified as the structural condition his program was meant to address intensified. The cybernetic deployment that he had warned about in Where Do We Go From Here? proceeded across four waves of automation and computerization, on terms set by capital rather than by labor, in the absence of the redistributive mechanism he had proposed. The cross-racial economic-justice coalition he had been organizing remained, across the next half-century, a project that was repeatedly attempted and never substantially achieved at scale.

The pattern is consistent. He had identified, by 1967, the principal structural conditions that would produce the contemporary inequality crisis. He had proposed the principal institutional remedy that subsequent generations of policy economists have continued to advance under different names. He had attempted to assemble the political coalition required to enact the remedy. He was killed before the coalition could be assembled at scale. The remedy did not advance. The conditions intensified for fifty-eight years.

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The political party I am writing this for has built three instruments into its platform, and they are all the work he was doing when he was killed.

Country Profit Sharing is the guaranteed annual income he advocated in Where Do We Go from Here? The framework has been refined across the intervening decades — the modern UBI literature, the Alaska Permanent Fund, the Paine-derived property-rights framing essay 26 of this collection has discussed — but the institutional form is the form he endorsed. He did not invent it. He brought it into the civil-rights movement’s program and made the case for its centrality to the next phase of American politics. The platform of The Intelligent Party brings it into the contemporary political coalition required to enact it.

The Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax is the funding mechanism the program needed and lacked. He had identified, in his book, that any guaranteed-income program of sufficient scale would require revenue at a level that could not be raised through conventional federal tax instruments without substantial restructuring of the tax base. He did not propose a specific tax instrument; the policy literature of his time did not have the analytical framework to design one against the kind of capital concentration that would emerge across the subsequent fifty years. The Tiered tax is the contemporary instrument, designed against the contemporary concentration, funding the contemporary version of the program he advocated.

AI Tiering is the regulatory framework his “thing-oriented society” critique demanded and his political moment lacked. He had named, in 1967, the relationship between technology, profit motive, and human displacement that the contemporary AI transition has made the central political question of the present decade. He did not have, in 1967, the technical or regulatory vocabulary required to design a framework against the kind of cognitive technology now being deployed; the technology did not yet exist at the scale he anticipated. The AI Tiering framework is the contemporary regulatory architecture his analytical claim required.

The three instruments are the late-period King program rendered in the political and technological vocabulary of fifty-eight years later. The translation is direct. The political coalition required to enact the program — cross-racial, multi-class, organized against the specific concentration of capital and technology that the AI transition is now producing — is the coalition he was building when he was killed.

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The argument is sometimes made, by people sympathetic to the platform but cautious about its political prospects, that the program is too ambitious, that the coalition required to enact it is too large, that the institutional changes it proposes are too structural. The argument has historical precedent. It is the argument that was made against his late-period program in 1967 and 1968, by substantial fractions of the political coalition that had supported his earlier work, on the explicit ground that the program was too ambitious to be enacted under the political conditions of those years. The argument was, in its specific empirical form, correct. The program was too ambitious to be enacted in 1968. He was killed; the program did not advance; the structural conditions he had warned about intensified across the subsequent half-century to produce the inequality crisis the contemporary AI transition is now intensifying further.

The argument that the program is too ambitious because the program is too ambitious is not a structural objection. It is an observation about the political-organizational state of a particular moment. The state of the present moment is the question the platform exists to address.

He was killed fifty-eight years ago. He was thirty-nine. The work he was doing in his last year is the work that has been waiting, since six o’clock on the evening of April 4, 1968, in Memphis, to be resumed. The conditions he warned about have intensified across the half-century. The coalition he was building can be built now, against the contemporary version of the same problem, on the analytical foundation his late writing left us.

He saw it. He wrote it down. He organized for it. He was killed before the work could be carried out. We are fifty-eight years late.

The remaining work is ours.