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Where Rev. King Left Off
Address: Martin Luther King Memorial Service
Ed Schwartz, President
Institute for the Study of Civic Values
Delivered: Germantown Jewish Center
Philadelphia, Pa.
January 19, 1992
I am honored to speak here this afternoon, on this significant
weekend. I must confess that it has been a secret wish of mine to
be asked to speak somewhere at a Martin Luther King's Birthday
commemoration. That the fulfillment of this silent request comes
about here, at the Germantown Jewish Center, in an Ecumenical
Service among many friends and neighbors, adds special pleasure to
the occasion.
It has also struck me over the years that this holiday, more than
any other, attests to G.K. Chesterton's observation that, "the
idealism of America, we may safely say, still revolves around the
citizen and his romance...Citizenship is still the American ideal;
there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there is
no ideal opposed to that ideal."
Even in this era of "looking out for No. 1," we have not built any
monuments to Andrew Carnegie or John David Rockefeller. They live
today through the foundations that bear their names and in the
civic and political contributions of their descendants. Yet we meet
here in 1992 to celebrate the birth and the work of a minister--a
man who made little money in his life--a political activist who
never held public office--because of his words and deeds on behalf
of of those who themselves held little power within this society.
It is the "romance of the citizen" that we honor here today,
because the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was America's greatest
citizen--in this century certainly, and perhaps throughout our
entire history.
To see Martin Luther King merely as an advocate for specific
changes, or even as the leader of an entire group of people, misses
the point. The "dream" was that "one day this nation will rise up
and live out the true meaning of its creed." The mission was to
keep struggling until the dream became reality. Specific, immediate
campaigns were merely steps along the road on which he marched.
Each victory would bring new challenges, demanding even greater
effort in the future.
So to honor Martin Luther King, we must renew our understanding of
his basic principles and then apply them to the challenges that
face us now.
We must pick up where Martin Luther King left off.
Principle 1: Everyone has dignity. "Deeply rooted in our political
and religious heritage," Dr. King told a Nashville audience in
1962, "is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of
dignity and worth. Our Hebraic-Christian tradition refers to this
inherent dignity of man in the Biblical image of God. . .Every
human being has etched in his personality an indelible stamp of the
Creator.
"This idea of dignity and worth of human personality is expressed
eloquently and unequivocally in the Declaration of Independence,"
he continued. . . "Never has a sociopolitical document proclaimed
more profoundly and eloquently the sacredness of human personality.
. . Man is not a thing. He must be dealt with, not as an "animated
tool," but as a person sacred in himself."
Each of us has dignity; every one of us matters. Caucasians
matter, but so do African-Americans and Hispanics and Koreans and
Chinese and Vietnamese. People whose families have lived in
Philadelphia since before the American Revolution matter, but so do
those who came here thirty years ago from North Carolina and
Mississippi and Georgia looking for work and opportunity and so do
those who have moved into West Kensington and Hunting Park from
Puerto Rico and those Jews from the Soviet Union who have settled
in the Northeast and those Asians who have moved into West
Philadelphia from Cambodia and Vietnam over the last several years-
-we all matter. Men matter, but so do women. The chief executive
officers of our major businesses matter, but so do the people who
work for them and the people who want to work for them. Those hard-
working, row-house homeowners matter, but so do the people who are
now lying in the streets without a place to live. They matter too.
The young people of our City who make us proud of their
achievements in school and on the football field and on the stage
and in the concert halls matter, but so do the children who are
suffering from the neglect and abuse of broken homes and divided
families. These children matter too, and we care about them and
what happens to them. This is what it means to say that each of us
has dignity, that each of us matters.
The second principle is even more controversial than the first. It
says, simply, that we need one another, so we should support one
another. In the "every man and woman for him or herself" world that
we live in, there are a lot people who just don't want to hear
this, but Martin Luther King wanted us to hear it, to understand
it, and to live by it. "Through our scientific and technological
genius," he told us in the very last Sunday sermon that he
delivered--in National Cathedral in Washington in 1968--"we have
made of this world a neighborhood and yet...we not had the ethical
commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some
way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as
brothers. Or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied
together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all
indirectly. For some strategic reason I can never be what I ought
to be until you are what you ought to be."
We need one another, so we should support one another. All those
businesses that we helped attract to center city in the 1980's
needed tax breaks, and price breaks on the land, and special
services, and we gave it all to them as a city because we wanted to
rebuild our economy. But they also needed strong families in North
Philadelphia to raise children who could work in the offices and
shop in the stores, and these families needed the jobs and income
to support their children, and those business right there in North
Philadelphia--around Hunting Park West and the American Street
Corridor--needed extra help to protect them from foreign
competition and the lure of moving to the suburbs. "We are tied
together in the single garment of destiny," Martin Luther King
warned us 24 years ago, and everything that has happened since has
merely proven even more what he was saying to us. We need one
another, so we should support one another.
The third principle defined Martin Luther King the activist, Martin
Luther King the organizer and political leader. It was, if you
will, his theory of politics. Politics, he said, must unite power
with love. "One of the great problems of history," he observed in
his last speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Council, "is
that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as
opposites--polar opposites--so that love is identified with a
resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. . . Now,
we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization
that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without
power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love
implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is
power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is
what we must see," he said, "as we move on."
This is what we must see again--here in 1992--as we move on.
Thousands of people in our city and our country are now
volunteering in the food kitchens and homeless shelters and in
literacy programs and in block clubs and civic associations and
community development corporations as acts of love expressed
through service to those in need. Yet this army of volunteers has
turned its back on the quest for political power because politics,
many people say, is dirty and corrupt. So the prophesy becomes
self-fulfilling: politics reverts to those who seek power as an end
itself. We need to recall the words of Martin Luther King: that
while "power without love is reckless and abusive...love without
power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love
implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is
power correcting everything that stands against love."
Where, then, did Martin Luther King leave off, in pursuing these
basic principles of dignity, community, and love?
We would do well to remember at this moment in our history as a
City that Martin Luther King left off marching the streets of
Memphis on behalf of sanitation workers--of whom he said, "The
question is not 'if I stop to help this man in need, what will
happen to me?' "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers,
what will happen to them? That's the question."
We also ought to recall in this moment when the country prepares to
debate how we use our "Peace Dividend," so-called, that Martin
Luther King left off fighting the War in Indochina, where we were
spending--in his words--"five hundred thousand dollars to kill
every Vietcong soldier" while we spent "only fifty-three dollars a
year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-
called poverty program; which is not even a good skirmish against
poverty."
And where King left off was in preparing to wage his own War On
Poverty. "Like a monstrous octopus," he proclaimed in that last
Sunday Sermon in National Cathedral, "poverty spreads its nagging,
prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world.
They are ill-housed, they are ill-nourished, they are shabbily
clad." And, he warned, that in a few weeks he would bring
thousands of people to Washington, "to see if the will is still
alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington
in a poor peoples' campaign...We are coming to demand that the
government address itself to the problem of poverty."
And so, if we are to pick up where Dr. King left off, that is what
we now must do: We must demand that the government--all
governments, federal, state, and city--address itself to the
problem of poverty." Last September, the Census Bureau reported
that there were 33.6 million poor people in America--13.5%--as
opposed to only 31.5 million in 1989. There are over 1,000,000 poor
people in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania now--over 300,000 right
here in Philadelphia. 95,000 still cannot afford the housing in
which they live--and on any given night in this City, there are
2,000 in homeless shelters. This, twenty-four years after the Poor
People's Campaign launched by Martin Luther King came to
Washington, D.C., to "address itself to the problem of poverty."
Now I know that the poor are not fashionable this year. Even today,
in the New York Times, the headline in the Week in Review reads:
"Whose Welfare? The Poor, They are Different, and in '92, Ever More
Invisible." This is the year of the middle class. Yet as Dr. King
warned, "We are tied together in the single garment of destiny,
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." There will be no
relieving the tax burden and the economic burden facing the middle
class, unless we also find a way to provide opportunity and self-
sufficiency for the poor. The middle-class taxpayers of
Pennsylvania spend $1.4 Billion each year on welfare payments to
poor people in the County of Philadelphia alone. Want to reduce
taxes? Create genuine economic opportunity.
Poverty challenges our political system to use its power to
"correct everything that stands in the way of love."
Yet most of all, poverty stands as a fundamental affront to our
dignity as a people. The poor are denied the dignity that comes
from making an economic contribution through meaningful work, and
the rest of us are denied the dignity that comes from living in a
community in which everyone has an important role to play.
In the 1970's, the business leaders of our City demanded an
Economic Agenda to help the City recover from the collapse of
manufacturing. The Agenda demanded a new downtown shopping mall,
and a tunnel between the two rail lines, and a new Convention
Center. And while this agenda is not yet fulfilled, we are on the
way.
In the 1980's, the community leaders of our City demanded a
Neighborhood Agenda that called for the revitalization of housing
and retail corridors, and community crime prevention, and
recycling, and neighborhood service centers. And while this agenda
is also not fulfilled, it, too, is now on the way.
Now, in the 1990's, we must demand a Dignity Agenda--so that every
person in this City is given the opportunity and the support to
make the best contribution to this community that he or she can
make. The Dignity Agenda is where Dr. King left off. The Dignity
Agenda is what is needed now to make both the Economic Agenda and
the Neighborhood Agenda work for everyone who was supposed to
benefit from them.
We have heard a great deal this past year about how administrative
reform will correct the fiscal mismanagement of our government. We
need a Dignity Agenda to correct the moral mismanagement of this
society that has left our city and cities like it in economic and
fiscal disarray.
What are the basic elements around which we must build this Dignity
Agenda for the 1990's?
First, it must grow out of the effort that thousands of
disadvantaged residents of our City are making now to achieve
opportunity and self-sufficiency--efforts that are given little
attention by the press, and little honor in the community. Did you
know that the City's Private Industry Council found jobs for over
1,000 low income residents last year, despite the recession? Did
you know that there are now over 2,000 welfare recipients taking
courses at Community College in a program called Step-Up? Did you
know that the leading programs for the homeless in Philadelphia--
Dignity Housing, Project Rainbow, Peoples' Emergency Center, to
name just three--all are fighting for jobs and self-sufficiency for
the homeless as well as permanent housing? Did you know that the
City's homeless shelters now guarantee that its residents will
emerge "Clean and Sober," as a result of their experience there? If
you did not know, it is not surprising, these are not the stories
that appear daily in the press. It's the shootings, and AIDS, and
drugs that we read about in the paper. But the Dignity Agenda must
demand equal time and attention for those who are getting out of
poverty--as we now give to those who are down and out with no place
to go.
The Dignity Agenda must build programs of self-sufficiency into
every agency that houses in the poor in Philadelphia. The Office of
Housing and Community Development rehabbed over 4,000 houses and
apartments during my four year tenure, and I am proud of that
record. Yet I said throughout that period--and I say again--unless
there is family support and counselling, educational upgrading, and
job training for the people living in these houses, they will
become the housing projects of the 21st Century.
And we must all unite with the residents of the Philadelphia
Housing Authority who are fed up with being pawns in everybody
else's political game to demand what dignity requires: daily
maintenance, better housing conditions, and support for their own
efforts to help themselves and their children improve their quality
of life. The Philadelphia Housing Authority has received close to
$200 million over the past four years to make basic improvements in
many its most troubled projects and in its scattered sites. I can
tell you that much of that money is still sitting in Washington,
unspent. I can tell you that PHA is now sitting on top of close to
$30 million for rehabilitating scattered sites alone, and it has
yet to spend more than $3 million a year. I can tell you that the
federal government has demanded that PHA do an employment
assessment of over 5,500 households living in its major
developments, and it just recently fired the person who was to
conduct the survey. These are not issues for PHA residents alone,
but for all of us, tied by "mutuality" with one another. It is a
major piece of the Dignity Agenda for the 1990's.
Finally, the Dignity Agenda must demand a basic reconstruction of
the Welfare System itself. We hear today the contemptuous advice of
those for whom poverty is a statistic, not a condition affecting
human beings. "If women on public assistance have children, cut off
their funds." "Throw them off of general relief so that they'll
find jobs." Is this the way these opinion-makers handle problems in
their own families, when people get into trouble? Or is their
impulse to offer solace, support, encouragement, advice,
assistance, when relatives and friends face economic problems? Do
we owe any less dignity to those in greatest need whom we may not
know, than we offer to our friends and neighbors when we hear that
they're in trouble?
There need to be changes in the welfare system, all right, but
changes that respect human dignity. Recipients need strong,
neighborhood support groups to give them encouragement and guidance
and assistance. They need financial support when they go to job
training, and child care for their children. They need back-up
support when they find a job, so that they can hold on to it. This
is welfare reform that respects human dignity, as we would expect
it for ourselves.
This is where Martin Luther King left off. He left off talking
about a politics that put the power of love to work for the demands
of justice. He left off proclaiming the mutuality of all people on
the planet and demanding that we serve one another. He left off
demanding opportunity for the least advantaged among us so that all
of us can live in dignity.
The Dignity Agenda is upon us, if Dr. King's struggle is to
continue. The Agenda is there, waiting to be fulfilled.
As he would say, let us keep the faith.
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