Martin Luther King Jr. Day held special significance for many this year, as people across the country came out to volunteer, march and celebrate the civil rights leader's legacy on the first MLK Day since the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.
Activist groups called for the celebrations and demonstrations this year to be tied to recent efforts to draw attention to racial inequality and police brutality. Leaders from groups like Black Lives Matter and Ferguson Action helped organize events for the holiday through a campaign called #ReclaimMLK. Several other hashtags were associated with MLK Day events as well, including #DayOfAction, #WWMLKD, #PledgeOfResistance and #BeLikeKing.
With its #ReclaimMLK events, Ferguson Action, a grassroots civil rights organization birthed out of the heightened racial tension in Ferguson following Brown’s death, encouraged activists to resurface the “radical, principled and uncompromising" nonviolent protest tactics King used during the civil rights movement.
“Martin Luther King Jr’s life’s work was the elevation, honoring, and defense of Black Lives. His tools included non-violent civil disobedience and direct action,” reads a statement on FergusonAction.org. “From here on, MLK weekend will be known as a time of national resistance to injustice.”
On early Monday morning, protesters in California gathered outside the home of newly elected Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who spent her first day in office with Oakland police.
Protesters chanted “Wake up Libby!” “No sleeping on the job!” and “You chose to prioritize blue, but today you will hear black,” according to SFGate.com.
In a statement emailed to The Huffington Post, Schaaf wrote: "We live in the best and most diverse city in the greatest nation on earth with the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. As Oakland's Mayor I am committed to connecting our police and our communities to ensure public safety and the protection of our ideals."
And on Sunday night, about 150 people marched through the streets in the Bay Area to protest against racial injustice as part MLK weekend activities.
The cast of the Oscar-nominated film "Selma" also took to the streets Sunday evening to hold their own demonstration in Selma, Alabama, in tribute to King. The film's director, Ava Duvernay, and Oprah Winfrey, David Oyelowo and Common led a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Meanwhile, across the nation in New York City, hundreds gathered in Harlem and marched downtown as they chanted “No justice, no peace” and held signs saying “Black Lives Matter.”
In Philadelphia, thousands of people gathered to march through Center City, calling for police and criminal justice reform.
"[T]his year, King's legacy is being thought of in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement which has spread like wildfire throughout the United States and around the world. Ignited by the killings of Islan Nettles, Mike Brown, Rekia Boyd, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, Jordan Davis and too many more by police and vigilantes, Dr. King's legacy and his work take on a different meaning in today's world," #BlackLivesMatter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors-Brignac wrote in a blog post for HuffPost.
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MEANWHILE, Chuck Collins reports for Other Words in his article "Black Wealth Matters" that for generations, white households have enjoyed far greater access to wealth and security than their black counterparts:
As protesters march through our cities to remind us that black lives matter, grievances about our racially fractured society extend far beyond flashpoints over police violence.
What is the state of the dream that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about, particularly as it relates to economic opportunity?
Racial inequality in earnings remains persistent. African-American workers under 35 earn only 75 cents on the dollar compared to their white contemporaries. Latinos earn only 68 cents.
Examining income alone, however, is like tracking the weather. If you want to explore the true tectonic shifts of the earth, you have to look at wealth and net worth — that is, what people own minus what they owe.
There’s a high correlation between wealth and economic security. Wealth in the form of savings, investments, and homes provides a cushion to fall back on in the face of hardship. Homeownership in particular is a foundational asset, something to pass on to one’s children.
The racial wealth gap has persisted for decades. It widened following the Great Recession.
According to the Pew Research Center, the median wealth of white households in 2013 was a stunning 13 times greater than the median wealth of black households — up from eight times greater in 2010. White households had 10 times more wealth than Latino households.
While people of all races saw their net worth implode during the recession, recovery has come much more quickly to whites. The wealth divide is growing at an alarming rate today, with median wealth tumbling downward for people of color while ticking slightly upward for whites.
This is partially because whites tend to own more financial assets, such as stocks and bonds, which have rebounded since 2009. Home values, meanwhile — which represent the largest share of assets for households of color — haven’t recovered at the same rate.
Behind these statistics are stories of lives under stress, of people losing homes, jobs, savings, and stability. The collapse of middle class wealth has touched people of all races, but it has hit communities of color the hardest.
“It is time for all of us to tell each other the truth,” Dr. King wrote in 1967, “about who and what have brought the Negro to the condition of deprivation against which he struggles today.”
Such dramatic shifts in racial wealth disparities can’t be explained simply in terms of the latest recession. They’re part of a legacy of racial discrimination in asset building that dates back to the first great dispossession, when black people were treated as someone else’s property.
Even a century after the formal end of slavery, African Americans were largely excluded from programs that helped build middle-class wealth. That led historian Ira Katznelson to characterize such initiatives as “white affirmative action.”
In the decade following World War II, our nation made unprecedented public investments to subsidize debt-free college education and low-cost mortgages. These wealth-building measures benefited millions of mostly white households.
People of color, facing overt discrimination in mortgage lending and separate-and-unequal school systems throughout the United States, generally didn’t share these benefits. They were left standing at the railway station as the express train to the middle class left.
White homeownership rates eventually rose to as high as 75 percent, while black rates peaked at 46 percent. This 30-point gap, which remains intact today, means generations of white families have enjoyed access to wealth that has long eluded their black counterparts.
Black wealth matters. Until we tell each other the truth about the racial wealth divide, King’s dream will remain deferred.
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