Economic Justice: The Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - Malveaux

Julianne Malveaux The conventional media image of Dr. Martin Luther King - Jr has him frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 - 1963 in his I Have a Dream speech. Little attention is paid to King's remarkable political and social evolution in the last five years of his life. He became a trenchant critic of the Vietnam War. In his classic sermon at the Riverside Church in New York - he denounced the war and the giant triplets of racism - materialism and militarism. King increasingly saw the link between economic justice and racial equality and insisted that one was impossible without the other. His final days were spent in Memphis - where he was actively supporting a strike by black sanitation workers. (audio cassette - 60 minutes - 1994) Julianne Malveaux holds a doctorate in economics from MIT. She teaches in the African American Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Malveaux serves on the Board of the San Francisco NAACP. Her articles appear in USA Today - Essence and other newspapers and magazines. She is a regular guest on PBS' To the Contrary.