When King led the Poor People's Campaign in 1968, Michael Harrington had recently written The Other America, a book which revealed that in what was then the richest country in the world, a quarter of the population was poor. Since 1973, the average real income of American working people has steadily gone down. We have experienced the de-industrialization of America, the rust belt, an epidemic of homelessness, Reaganomics, the Contract on America, and the crippling of labor unions. In 1999, it seems clear that we are part of a global economy where the worldwide majority is poor, and it seems clear that if in our own nation we do not already have a majority suffering from poverty and economic insecurity, we will soon. These are huge and complicated questions.
Great interests are at stake.
Millions of dollars are spent every year to create ideologies, academic departments and think tanks, and governmental and international agencies devoted to giving misleading, specious, and false answers to these questions. Yet I suspect that most of us know in our hearts that the true answers to these questions require what Dr. King called a revolution of values. I believe that most of us recognize, too, that the natural sciences have messages for our species that homo sapiens needs to hear. We need to contribute to empowering the poor, which is, at the same time, to contribute to empowering ourselves. Because community building is empowerment.