Why Are 40 Million People Still Poor In America?

Carl Chancellor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been writing about social justice issues for decades, is a columnist for Change.org.

February is the perfect month to begin my regular column here on Poverty in America.

Why February?

Because it's Black History Month, the 28 days (when we're lucky, 29) set aside to recognize the many contributions of African-Americans to this nation of ours, although the month-long celebration tends to spotlight the Civil Rights Movement and the epic fight to end American apartheid. And that's alright, since focusing on the civil rights struggle and on the very embodiment of the movement,  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fluoresces the last great battle of his life -- ending poverty.

"Why are there forty million poor people in America?" he asked in his Southern Christian Leadership Conference presidential address of August 1967.

Shamefully, more than four decades later, Dr. King could ask the very same question.

According to Half in Ten, which is working to cut the poverty rate by 50 percent by 2020, nearly 40 million people, more than 13 percent of our fellow Americans, live in poverty. That number includes 13.3 million children. Another one in every three Americans struggles to make ends meet at twice the federal poverty level. Last year, 12.6 million households could not always afford enough food.

By the late 1960s, Dr. King was pivoting from the fight to end racial discrimination to the audacious goal of eradicating poverty in the United States. He recognized that just ending Jim Crow wouldn't usher in equality and understood that genuine equality was inextricably linked to economic security for all.

Dr. King also realized that poverty knows no racial boundaries -- it's not a black, white, red or brown problem, but an American problem.

While in sheer numbers there are significantly more whites who are poor in America than minorities, poverty does discriminate. Again, according to Half in Ten: 8.6 percent of whites; 24.7 percent of blacks; and 23.2 percent of Hispanics lived in poverty in 2008.

In the months prior to his death, Dr. King was working hard on his Poor People's Campaign and laying plans for a second March on Washington; this time, in the name of ending poverty.

However, Dr. King's anti-poverty effort was getting significant blowback, some of it coming from old allies. Calling for a major revamping of the economic system and a broader distribution of wealth was simply too much for many. Clearly, more than 40 years later, it still is.

Despite Dr. King's assassination in April 1968, the Poor People's march went off in May of that year with thousands of people of all races descending on Washington, D.C. They demanded that the federal government make the needs of the poor a priority and pass an "economic bill of rights" -- a $30 billion anti-poverty measure that included a commitment to full employment, health care, a guaranteed annual income and the expansion of affordable and low-income housing.

For weeks, sometimes enduring relentless rain, the demonstrators lived in a shanty town of tents erected on the National Mall dubbed Resurrection City. But much like the Poor People's movement, Resurrection City became literally mired in the mud of apathy. By mid-June the camp was shut down and the economic bill of rights was never passed.

Now is the time to finally pass an economic bill of rights, one that goes even further than President Obama's recent call to cut the U.S. poverty rate in half over the next decade.

As Dr. King concluded in his 1967 SCLC address: "Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security."

Photo credit: aflcio2008