In 1957, Black ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with King at its head, to co-ordinate protests against segregation throughout the South. But as state and local governments embarked on a path of ‘massive resistance’ to integration, the pace of progress slowed and the phrase ‘white backlash’ began to appear in the press. Resistance stiffened as the 1960s progressed. ‘King came under attack from all sides,’ Eig writes. After the 1966 march demanding open housing in Chicago was targeted by rioters, King said: ‘I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.’
The Chicago campaign and the Poor People’s Movement that followed are often seen as marking the shift in King’s priorities from racial to economic equality. But King had long recognised how closely these issues were intertwined and had often spoken of the need for ‘economic justice’. Despite racial discrimination by many unions, King saw the labour movement as Blacks’ greatest potential ally. In 1959, he lent his name to organising efforts by Local 1199, the Drug, Hospital and Health Care Employees’ Union in New York City, whose members at the time earned a meagre thirty dollars a week. ‘Whatever I can do, call on me,’ he told the union’s executive secretary, my uncle Moe Foner.
Sometimes King spoke of eliminating the ‘physical ghetto’ altogether. It is often forgotten that the March on Washington was a joint venture of the civil rights movement and liberal labour unions, and that its demands included a massive public works programme to provide the poor of all races with ‘Jobs and Freedom’ – the event’s official title. In the mid-1960s, King and the veteran activist Bayard Rustin proposed a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged that would eradicate poverty by guaranteeing full employment and a universal basic income. Portions of the left had been promoting such policies since FDR proposed a Bill of Economic Rights in 1944. When King delivered his Riverside Church speech of 1967, calling for an end to the war in Vietnam, he not only spoke in unusually heated language about the US government – the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world’ – but also warned that the conflict was draining resources from the struggle against what he elsewhere called the country’s ‘tragic inequalities’.