Four days after her husband’s murder on April 4, 1968, Scott King returned to Memphis to support the city’s striking sanitation workers. She marched with an estimated 50,000 people before concluding at a rally at the Memphis city hall. Amidst drizzling rain, she reminded her audience of the terrain they had traversed and the journey ahead: “We moved through . . . the period of desegregating public accommodations and on through voting rights, so that we could have political power. And now we are at the point where we must have economic power.” What did that mean to her in real terms? “Every man deserves a right to a job or an income,” she told the crowd of supporters.
Scott King saw economic precarity as not just a side effect of racial subjugation, but as central to its functioning. Political enfranchisement was just the first step. As she explained in 1976, “People couldn’t see the economics of the movement because of the drama. . . . [The] next step was parity in income distribution.” The solution Scott King promoted is an old one, but its time has come: legislation to provide federal governmental guarantees to employment, at living wages, where people are located, and in areas that serve social needs—rather than those of the market.
Such politics and values had been at the heart of black freedom movements since at least the late nineteenth century. Although many histories of welfare state development foreground the importance of Germany under Otto von Bismarck, there was also a contemporaneous black radical tradition of welfare state struggle during Reconstruction. W. E. B. Du Bois called this tradition “abolition democracy,” defined as a focus on creating new democratic institutions to provide safety and social provision while also seeking to eradicate institutions of racial violence.
For Scott King the struggle for the franchise was indissolubly tied to the struggle for economic well-being and material flourishing. In practice that meant targeting the dominance of Dixiecrats in Congress, whose power had systematically limited the advance of Keynesianism across the color line. Congress’s economic policies were tethered to the daily brutality of Jim Crow voter suppression, from which some of the most powerful members of Congress derived their authority.
For example, on Mother’s Day, 1968, Scott King and members of the Poor People’s Campaign planned to target Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills. The Washington Post had highlighted Mills as the “most powerful advocate” of policies that kicked mothers off of welfare and obligated them, when deemed “appropriate,” to be forced to work. Mills controlled the House’s Ways and Means Committee, and thus the details on major revenue bills. Widely understood as “the most important man on Capitol Hill,” he was a consistent roadblock to generating greater levels of social spending that might alleviate some of the economic violence that Scott King consistently decried.
By focusing protest on Mills and his fellow members of Congress, Scott King and the Mother’s Day marchers were highlighting how the powerful Dixiecrats did not simply pack up their weaponized briefcases after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. They retained their power on Congressional committees. Sessions’s 1980s prosecutions of voting rights activists was yet another tactic to maintain political power after the Voting Rights Act. But the Voting Rights Act did provide a means for advancing the political power of the black freedom movement. And in the decades after her husband’s assassination Scott King wholly dedicated herself to using the vote to this end.