On February 6, 1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (widely known as the SCLC) drafted a letter addressed to the president of the United States, the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court.Footnote 1 The SCLC’s draft letter demanded an economic and social bill of rights (as we refer to the document) and pushed against the narrow bounds of the U.S. constitution, asserting that the text of the U.S. constitution itself impeded racial justice because it protected only civil and political rights and did not capture economic and social rights as fundamental and necessary preconditions for the pursuit of happiness.Footnote 2 As Martin Luther King, Jr. and others in the civil rights movement had argued, given the racial history of the United States, these material preconditions were not fully granted to Black people, who were therefore not fully enfranchised. This poverty-centered approach, the authors of the draft letter argued, would benefit not only Blacks but also poor whites and other socioeconomically marginalized groups, moving the nation in the direction of a more beloved community.Footnote 3
The Economic and Social Bill of Rights proposed in the draft letter is a morally compelling call to recognize and protect positive fundamental rights under the U.S. constitution. The connections between the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s moral vision informed by the Black social gospel tradition, and the work of the SCLC for socioeconomic justice shape the vision of positive fundamental rights outlined in the letter, making it particularly compelling, for it pushes beyond other, well-known articulations of socioeconomic rights formulated during the civil rights movement.
While the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights is certainly consistent with King’s articulation of and commitment to the full spectrum of human rights principles, this document is more constitutionally significant than other human rights initiatives at the time. For example, the Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged and King’s endorsement of A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget for All Americans” were primarily legislative programs, not demands for a constitutional reconstruction.Footnote 4 The SCLC’s Economic Bill of Rights called only for the recognition of two fundamental rights: the right to a guaranteed income and the right to decent and full employment.Footnote 5
The proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights, in contrast, demands recognition of a more extensive and comprehensive list of fundamental rights: (1) the right to decent employment for those able to work, (2) the right to a guaranteed minimum income, (3) the right to decent and affordable housing in a neighborhood of one’s choosing, (4) the right to acceptable education, (5) the right to participate in the process of making decisions in areas that have a direct impact on one’s welfare, and (6) the right of access to the modern, scientific benefits of health care.Footnote 6 The proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights is prophetic: nothing short of the fulfillment of these demands is required for the complete integration of Black people within the U.S. democratic project.Footnote 7 The revolution of values for which King and the Black social gospel call should begin with the provocative vision of the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights as a theologically informed statement of positive fundamental rights. It is this vision embraced by the work of King and the SCLC, with its legal and theological elements, that provides grounds for beloved community.
The authorship of the document is unclear, and, to the best of our knowledge, the draft was never finalized and presented to its intended recipients or publicized. Given its legal precision and ethical vision, it is likely that SCLC lawyers and advisers participated in drafting the document, and we know that King lawyer Harry Wachtel circulated the draft to the SCLC’s New York Research Committee and King himself. Beyond this, however, little is currently known of the document’s provenance. While it is unclear who precisely in the SCLC drafted or endorsed the February 6, 1968, document, and the absence of a final version prevents us from taking the document as the established position of the SCLC or King, it is critical to note that the ethical content of the document’s approach to unenumerated rights accorded with King’s human rights vision. Thus, we read the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights not as the definitive statement of the SCLC or King’s positions but in conversation with other theological, political, and legal thinking from both King and the SCLC, as a prophetic program of economic and social justice through constitutional law.Footnote 8
King’s Christian Ethics and the Economic and Social Bill of Rights
Theological resources informed King’s ethics and public ministry and the necessarily political and legal contexts for his understanding of justice. Underscoring King’s Christian ethics shows why, in addition to seeking to change hearts and minds, he appealed to law to operationalize concerns for the poor.Footnote 9 This sets the stage for understanding how a commitment to King’s moral vision of a beloved community would require changes in constitutional law like those put forward in the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights.
The Importance of King’s Ethical Tradition
Though King laid claims to simply being a Black preacher deeply grounded in the Black church tradition, his status as a theological ethicist is difficult to deny. When considering King’s social vision and the work of the SCLC it is important to understand these efforts as part of a broader religious and ethical context of thought and practice, namely, the Black social gospel tradition.Footnote 10 Situating King in this tradition corrects a misconception of him as a lone, isolated prophetic figure crying in the wilderness of the American landscape who was eventually catapulted to the global stage. King was, rather, enmeshed in and a representative, albeit a unique representative, of the Black social gospel that formed him and the work of the SCLC.
The Black social gospel approach to Christian religion strives to embody both the spiritual and social implications of its faith by drawing from the resources of the broader Christian tradition. It affirms the humanity of all and the importance of the material conditions and the health of the environment in which people live. It is marked by love of God and neighbor and conditions of justice to forge a global human community, a beloved community. This ideal of a beloved community was a central theme of King’s social vision. It is a community where human relations are acknowledged to be interdependent and bear responsibilities to promote the welfare of others.
This theme of interdependence and interconnectedness appears throughout King’s work. In a well-known passage in his final Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” King said, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”Footnote 11
King saw the interconnection of racism, poverty, and militarism as a fundamental threat to flourishing life. Consequently, he realized that “any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of [people] and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried. It well has been said: ‘A religion that ends with the individual, ends.’”Footnote 12 Theology, for King and the Black social gospel tradition, had an inescapably political component both because a living religion had to attend to the conditions of material life and because the web of interdependence meant the material conditions of any one person or group were always bound up with those of the broader community. This theologically informed social vision informed the work of the SCLC.
The origins of King’s commitment to a program of social and economic rights began early in his career with denunciations of economic and social injustices as sinful. Two months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, well before King was an international figure, he criticized whites, Brahmans, and U.S. capitalists for failing to bridge the social and economic gaps between their groups and Blacks, lower caste Hindus, and the poor, respectively.Footnote 13 King’s public and utter disdain for economic and social inequality remained consistent throughout his career—literally from the earliest days of his pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to the speech he delivered on the night before his assassination. One biblical resource King drew from throughout his career was the parable of the Good Samaritan, and King’s understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan perhaps best illustrates the ways in which scripture shaped King’s ethics and approach toward building a beloved community.Footnote 14
For King, the parable of the Good Samaritan exemplified the praxis of the beloved community. First, King preached that Christians should have the Good Samaritan’s moral vision not to disregard the needs of others who were socially different. The priest and the Levite saw the wounded man on the road to Jericho, but their limited perspectives on human suffering caused them to distance themselves from the wounded man. The Samaritan, by contrast, perceived the wounded man’s plight, not their social differences. Second, King read the parable of the Good Samaritan as a call to compassion that compels better positioned persons to enter, rather than avoid, spaces of suffering and rejects self-interest as an organizing principle for human relationships. As King interpreted the parable, “the first question that the priest asked—the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”Footnote 15 Third, King preached that compassion required people to take concrete action and extend mercy. The Good Samaritan intervened, using his time, energy, attention, and money to interrupt another’s trajectory of hardship. King asserted that the Gospel required those who were privileged to use their positions and power to improve the immediate circumstances of those who were disinherited. Love compelled the Christian to go the extra mile for his neighbor. As Christopher Marshall has argued, “‘Having compassion’ designates the emotional reality and ‘doing mercy’ its practical outworking. It is the combination of [this inward emotional experience] and the ethical [actions] that signals the Samaritan’s exemplary character.”Footnote 16
In his Mountaintop Speech, King left his audience with a revolutionary challenge: “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness” like the Good Samaritan. This “dangerous unselfishness” would place believers at risk, but as King acknowledged, there would always be costs and discomfort when addressing the needs and conditions facing the victims of the Jericho Road. Various texts in the biblical tradition had shown King that such a “dangerous unselfishness” had characterized Jesus’ entire life, one that culminated with the ultimate sacrifice for unworthy people.Footnote 17
In Where Do We Go from Here, King invoked the parable to make an even more audacious claim. King declared that while all “are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside … the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life.”Footnote 18 King was adamant that the parable of the Good Samaritan was not merely a call for Christians to engage in individual acts of charity. King advocated major structural transformations in the country. He wrote, “A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.”Footnote 19 This was a profound interrogation of the social conditions that produced poverty, racism, and a priest and Levite-like indifference to suffering.
The Role of Law in Building a Beloved Community
Should law be a tool to pursue ethical ends? King was routinely questioned as to why he employed law, and not simply moral persuasion, to challenge structural inequality. In his essay “The Ethical Demands for Integration,” King offered a powerful rejoinder to his questioners:
Let us never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees play only minor roles in solving [the problem of integration]. Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love an employee, but it can prevent him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin. The habits, if not the hearts of people, have been and are being altered everyday by legislative acts, judicial decisions and executive orders. Let us not be misled by those who argue that segregation cannot be ended by the force of law.Footnote 20
King’s commitment to notions of social justice was grounded in the biblical tradition, which also recognized the importance of law. Broadly speaking, social justice “entails the exercise of legitimate power to ensure that benefits and penalties are distributed fairly and equitably in society, thus meeting the rights and enforcing the obligations of all parties.”Footnote 21 The priority or emphasis is that the basic needs for human flourishing or well-being of every member of the community be met before vast amounts of wealth be accumulated for a few. This sort of justice requires “special attention is given to the weak so that they can realize along with all other members the minimum requirements of participation in the community.”Footnote 22 The goal is to enable people to have the capacity to earn a living and have a reasonable chance of flourishing.Footnote 23 From this vantage point, social justice also entails the idea that there must be mechanisms to secure one’s ability to enjoy the resources needed to live a life beyond mere subordination, including property rights,Footnote 24 due process,Footnote 25 independence from subjugation, and the ability to participate in policy-making.Footnote 26 King understood that law had facilitated racial and socioeconomic injustices but that law could also be a tool to secure the positive fundamental rights necessary for human well-being for all people.
But King also highlighted the limits of relying solely on law to realize the beloved community:
A vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws will bring an end to segregated public facilities which are barriers to a truly desegregated society, but it cannot bring an end to fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society. Those dark and demonic responses will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible, inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation. True integration will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.Footnote 27
As King saw it, although law alone could not end all socioeconomic injustices, nevertheless law was indispensable in this struggle. For the robust version of social and distributive justice in the beloved community, King and the SCLC realized that law can set the conditions for equal access to opportunity as a foundation on which the grander theologically informed moral vision of a beloved community can be built. This is consistent with our argument that the constitutional rights advocated in the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights are grounded in the values of the Black social gospel tradition that informs King and the SCLC. Moreover, it is the most prophetic version of law’s role in the beloved community.
Those who urged civil rights activists to abandon legal reform did not fully appreciate how deeply the nation had committed itself to racial and economic subordination. King pressed all Americans to embrace a higher ethical obligation—a personal and internal commitment to neighborliness that extended beyond human codes and that fostered genuine societal unity.Footnote 28 But law could move America in the right direction. Specifically, King anticipated changes to U.S. constitutional law as necessary to build a beloved community. In a nation whose constitutional culture was rooted in Christian theological claims,Footnote 29 King was profoundly aware of how the nation’s founders had used the Declaration of Independence and the constitution to bridge sacred and secular concerns and advance their democratic visions. King attempted to do the same. He pressed Americans to understand that structural racism and systems of economic exploitation were sinful, and that the constitution’s neglect of economic and social rights impeded realization of a beloved community. A constitution consisting of simply civil and political rights was insufficient. King asserted that only a new and more robust constitutional order that recognized the dignity of all people could fulfill the ethical demands and spirit of integration.
Building a Beloved Community Requires Constitutional Reform
In crafting their proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights, the authors navigated a thorny path, carefully balancing constitutional veneration with serious constitutional critique. They asserted that despite the founding document’s high and noble ideals, the constitution had facilitated immoral and undemocratic outcomes for centuries: “Even as the founding fathers asserted the fundamental rights of all men, there were many among them who owned slaves and the black men and women, who had [been] kidnapped to America, were assigned a degraded status by a revolutionary constitution.”Footnote 30 The preamble’s invocation of “We the People” had referred only to some people, and the institution of slavery was the document’s original sin.Footnote 31
Even more explosively, the authors of the Economic and Social Bill Rights asserted that the constitution’s pro-slavery provisions were not the constitution’s only structural or spiritual defects. The constitution’s lack of economic and social rights also stained that document. The United States, despite holding itself out to the world as exceptional, had not ended second class economic and social citizenship. The letter’s authors demanded that the country repent for perpetuating the sins of systemic racism and classism. The country should then atone by enshrining an economic and social bill of rights in the constitution.Footnote 32
Such a proposal for radical constitutional reform would push the civil rights movement into new and uncharted territory, as King acknowledged about the shift from civil to human rights more broadly in Where Do We Go from Here. Footnote 33 “So far,” he explained, “we have had constitutional backing for most of our demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we could be sure of legal support from the federal courts. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear. We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.”Footnote 34 Movement activists had endured physical and economic reprisals in campaigns centered on textually guaranteed rights and where there were significant legal precedents in activists’ favor.Footnote 35 King acknowledged that activists would have to bear additional, personal costs due to fierce white resistance to economic and social demands from the Black community. Moreover, the country would have to pay significant financial costs to ensure that all Americans could fully enjoy the guarantees of economic and social rights. “Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls,” King noted. “The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.”Footnote 36 Furthermore, many Whites would also have to pay a significant psychological price, given their spiritual investments in the idols of racism and classism.Footnote 37 But, as the authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights maintained, a constitution without economic and social rights would be costlier still, for all involved.Footnote 38
The willingness of the authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights to elevate economic and social redress from the arena of ordinary legislation to that of fundamental rights was provocative and doctrinally significant for other reasons. Courts rely on the doctrine of strict scrutiny to provide a high level of protection for fundamental rights. If a fundamental rights analysis applies to economic rights, governmental actors cannot infringe upon such rights without a compelling governmental interest. Even if there is a compelling governmental interest, the government must take the least restrictive means to achieve that interest.Footnote 39 Thus, with an economic and social bill of rights, government actors would have to design many more laws and regulations with the poor in mind so as not to violate the constitution. The authors’ alternative vision of fundamental rights would force policy makers to confront the irrationality and illegitimacy of governmental burdens on the poor in both constitutional and sociological terms. When economic and social rights received strict scrutiny, policy makers and indeed all Americans would be forced to recognize that the poor were deserving of the highest forms of judicial protection.
The authors creatively used the fundamental rights doctrine to challenge other nefarious stigmas around poverty. As King discussed, programs to help the poor were often ridiculed as “welfare” even as benefits to wealthy people or corporations are called entitlements.Footnote 40 If the nation recognized an economic and social bill of rights, anti-poverty efforts would not be mere charity; these efforts would instead be part of the ensemble of inalienable rights. Poor Americans, like all other Americans, would then be entitled to rights that could improve their socioeconomic conditions. In this respect the authors sought to revolutionize Americans’ vocabulary around poverty, such that denial of poor people’s rights would be rendered sinful, un-American, and unconstitutional.Footnote 41
Fundamental rights would additionally guard against legislative backsliding. By 1968, the Great Society had crumbled, and the authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights were well aware of a problem about legislative reform: what Congress and the president might authorize for the poor, Congress and the president could easily take away.Footnote 42 Fundamental rights, on the other hand, created a constitutional baseline, or bulwark, that ordinary legislation could not revoke.Footnote 43
Positive fundamental rights, like those put forward in the Economic and Social Bill of Rights, would force the government to make an affirmative commitment to guaranteeing economic and social rights. Such a development was not only tied to material uplift, however; it was intimately connected to King’s Christian ethic of interdependence. “[T]he real reason that we must use our resources to outlaw poverty goes beyond material concerns to the quality of our mind and spirit,” King explained in Where Do We Go from Here. Footnote 44 “Deeply woven into the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God, and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value.”Footnote 45 He continued, “If we accept this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with ill-health, when we have the means to help them. In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied together.”Footnote 46 For King, the constitution should not only protect our God-given rights from government encroachment; the constitution should also protect and ensure that all Americans experienced the great abundance flowing from our God-given rights.Footnote 47
Like King, the authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights also realized a positive fundamental rights approach had other, collateral, redemptive values. When Americans are fully and decently employed, for instance, they have more income to spend on their housing, education, and health care.Footnote 48 Human rights are also interdependent. Improving a person’s quality of life in one area might boost that person’s ability to enjoy other rights. Thus, that person’s need for government services in that second area might decrease and eventually produce a long-term cost savings for the government. Furthermore, fully employed Americans could spend more money on other goods and services, which would boost the U.S. economy.Footnote 49
Finally, the authors hoped that the fundamental rights framing would invite support from new quarters for the SCLC’s anti-poverty efforts. Although Blacks and other people of color were disproportionately poor, whites comprised two-thirds of the nation’s poor numerically, and they would likely receive most of the financial assistance flowing from these new fundamental rights.Footnote 50 The Economic and Social Bill of Rights sought to unify the interests of poor and low-income Americans across the racial spectrum, proclaiming “neither the Black [or] White poor, and even some who are not poor, can really possess the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”Footnote 51
The New Contents of the Constitution
The demands in the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights were part of a massive rights revolution in the United States and abroad. Nationally, many states amended their constitutions during the mid-twentieth century at a pace only rivaled by the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.Footnote 52 A significant portion of these new U.S. state constitutions contained positive rights.Footnote 53 Internationally, countries throughout the postcolonial world were drafting new national constitutions as they gained their independence from the former colonial rulers.Footnote 54 Many of these countries were actively incorporating human rights into their constitutions.Footnote 55 Meanwhile, delegates at the United Nations were actively debating and drafting international human rights treaties, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).Footnote 56
The civil rights movement was a significant driving factor in this international legal reckoning. Civil rights leaders helped to redraft state constitutions,Footnote 57 spurred the adoption of the Twenty-Fourth amendment to the U.S. constitution,Footnote 58 shaped foreign constitutions,Footnote 59 and informed the development of international human rights treaties such as CERD.Footnote 60 The Economic and Social Bill of Rights emerged during a dynamic moment of vast legal possibility.
The Economic and Social Bill of Rights is best understood, then, as a theologically informed appeal within the global human rights revolution.Footnote 61 Each of the rights discussed below not only proposed to make the U.S. constitution more compassionate—embodying the Good Samaritan’s concern for basic human well-being—but doing so in dialogue with developments happening around the world. That such a constitutional remaking “towards redeeming the American dream” eschewed simple views on American exceptionalism was one more way in which the Economic and Social Bill of Rights reflected King’s Christian ethic of interdependence and the broader engagement of the SCLC with global developments.Footnote 62
In this way, Economic and Social Bill of Rights imagined both a sacred and secular revival in the United States. The document reflected King’s radical Christian ethics and the Black social gospel in constitutional form. The document aligned the SCLC with emerging international human rights norms and standards while carefully negotiating the political challenges of the Cold War. For the SCLC, the constitution’s shortcomings were, at minimum, sins of omission. Adopting an economic and social bill of rights such as that laid out in the draft would be a powerful and essential step toward saving the soul of the nation.Footnote 63
The Right of Every Employable Citizen to a Decent Job
The proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights notes that the Black unemployment rate was twice that of whites. But for the authors, even such “scandalous figures profoundly understate[d] the injustice” Blacks endured. The unemployment rate did not measure chronic Black under-employment, the number of Blacks driven out of the labor market, or how automation increasingly displaced blue-collar workers from their jobs.Footnote 64
King was convinced that the market alone could not ensure full and decent employment. According to King, the federal government had an obligation to make this ideal real.Footnote 65 Reflecting King’s argument, the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights demands that government produce more “creative, public service jobs” leading to many “new careers.”Footnote 66 At the same time, King was clear that not all people were called to work in specialized or professional jobs and maintained that “no work [was] insignificant.” King emphasized “[a]ll labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and worth.”Footnote 67
The Economic and Social Bill of Rights’ demand for the recognition of the right of every employable citizen to a decent job was clearly in conversation with a purportedly American value: the Protestant work ethic. During the late 1960s, many still argued that widespread Black unemployment and underemployment were due to Blacks’ personal failings rather than structural racism.Footnote 68 King and the SCLC had already offered a counter-narrative: when government ensured full and decent employment, Blacks, like other Americans, would then be able to pursue their vocational callings faithfully and dutifully.Footnote 69 King emphasized in his public ministry that many Blacks embrace a kind of Protestant work ethic. Yet the conditions to fulfill this faithfully and dutifully are hindered by social and economic injustices. This is why throughout the Poor People’s Campaign, King preached that the United States was a land where the harvest was plentiful and that such a wealthy government could easily aid in God’s call to work. In Memphis, as King fought for striking sanitation workers, he turned to Luke 10 again, insisting that laborers be adequately compensated for their work.Footnote 70 Moreover, King believed government should guarantee laborers time to rest. Even God himself had rested on the Sabbath.Footnote 71
The SCLC’s constitutional vision for full and decent employment drew on religious tenets while also according with international human rights standards and law. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that everyone has the right to work, free choice of employment, just and favorable conditions of work and remuneration, and protection against unemployment. Article 23 adds that such employment should ensure workers and their families the ability to enjoy “an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.” Article 24 of the UDHR provides for a “right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”Footnote 72 Articles 6, 7, 8, and 10 of ICESCR elaborate themes in Articles 23 and 24 of the UDHR. Article 10’s focus on the rights of working mothers, children, and young persons was especially important to this key population in the Poor People’s Campaign.Footnote 73
The Right of Every Citizen to a Minimum Income
The authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights lament that “[a]lmost half of the poor in America … [were] either too young, too old or too [disabled] to work.” U.S. policy makers often promoted their anti-poverty programs, but the authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights condemned these efforts as “a patchwork of utterly inadequate and discriminatory programs,” advocating instead what King was convinced would be “simplest” and “most effective” approach to ending poverty: the right to a minimum income.Footnote 74
King envisioned this guaranteed income as dynamic, livable, and pegged to the median income. This right, as a fundamental right, challenged core ideas of meritocracy and advanced the concept of grace, as all people under this vision could receive a minimum income whether one worked or not.Footnote 75 King routinely reminded his audiences that America was the most powerful and richest nation in the world. It held itself out as truly exceptional.Footnote 76 For King, a nation purportedly “flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity” should easily be able to fund a guaranteed income.Footnote 77
The UDHR, CERD, ICCPR, and ICESCR do not mention the right to a minimum income. The Economic and Social Bill of Right’s demand, nonetheless, follows the concerns enshrined in these international instruments with the provision of adequate living standards. Furthermore, King posited that recognition of this fundamental right would have foreign policy implications, attuned as he was to both domestic and Cold War international contexts. If the United States would guarantee all citizens a minimum income, King reasoned, this new commitment would show developing countries, in particular, that they did not need to turn to communism to end poverty; rather, a minimum income would show that democracies could end the “glaring contrast between poverty and wealth,” and King stressed that newly independent nations could follow the United States’ model of the right to a minimum income.Footnote 78
The Right of Decent Housing and the Free Choice of Neighborhood
The authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights underscored the deep hypocrisies of U.S. housing policies, asserting, “Throughout the post-War period, the subsidies handed out to the predominately White middle class and rich have been much larger, and much more discrete than those given to the poor, both Black and White.”Footnote 79 The U.S. government had lavished tax dollars on businesses during urban renewal while regularly displacing Blacks throughout this process. The U.S. government subsidized the creation of bustling suburbs while giving “the poor a highly visible social pittance called housing projects.”Footnote 80 The federal government had funded and blessed White flight, and these issues undermined efforts to desegregate schools, neighborhoods, and places of employment. In Where Do We Go from Here King pointedly described these injustices: the “suburbs [had become] White nooses around the Black necks of the cities.”Footnote 81
The single-family home is still a powerful cultural symbol in America. It represents the nation’s dedication to property rights, family integrity, and upward mobility. The SCLC’s housing advocacy invited the nation to consider why Blacks were disproportionately denied the American dream of homeownership if the nation were truly a land of opportunity for all. The SCLC interrogated the creation of the suburbs to challenge widespread fears that housing rights were simply thinly veiled communism. Specifically, while many suburbanites believed that they had achieved the American dream of homeownership without government welfare, through its housing advocacy, the SCLC exposed how massive government subsidies, not mere individual hard work and thrift, had fueled white economic prosperity. King contended that if anything, U.S. housing policies were part of a larger system that provided a form of socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.Footnote 82 Moreover, the SCLC’s housing advocacy forced Christians to reckon literally with a core question in the parable of the Good Samaritan: Who is my neighbor?Footnote 83
The SCLC battled for decent and open housing in cities throughout the United States in the mid- and late-1960s, with the Chicago Freedom Movement as the centerpiece of the SCLC’s efforts. King hoped that he could use the struggle in Chicago to dramatize the need for federal housing legislation,Footnote 84 but he never saw this development materialize. He was assassinated before the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. President Johnson signed that bill into law days after King’s assassination, in tribute to the slain leader.Footnote 85
The Economic and Social Bill of Right’s demand for the right to a decent house and the free choice of neighborhood comported with international human rights standards and law. Article 25 of the UDHR and Article 11 of ICESCR guarantee the right to housing.Footnote 86 Article 13 of the UDHR and Article 12 of ICCPR guarantee freedoms of movement and residence.Footnote 87 The demand for a right to decent housing also fit within an even older global frame. As the authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights note, the United States had helped to reconstruct Europe after World War II through the Marshall Plan, and the U.S. government should be willing to do for poor Americans what the United States had been willing to do for Europeans, including those Europeans who had been the United States’ deadliest enemies.Footnote 88
The Right of an Adequate Education
More than a decade after the court’s watershed ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, educational equality remained a dream deferred.Footnote 89 Just two weeks before King accepted the pastorship at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the court in Brown declared that “education [was] perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and “the very foundation of good citizenship.” The court added that education was “a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.”Footnote 90
The authors of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights asserted that Black children still received inferior educations compared to whites. The authors argued that any differences in Black graduation rates or academic achievement were not due to the “inherent deficienc[ies]” of Black children but rather “the inherent deficiencies of the school system and the general social and economic dignities imposed upon the ghetto itself.”Footnote 91 Recognition of an adequate education as a fundamental right would improve the educational experiences of all students and provide more children greater opportunities for economic and social advancement.Footnote 92
While definitions of an “adequate education” varied, the authors recognized that all Americans needed at least a high school diploma to enter a rapidly automating economy, and additionally that even the parents of poor children who were high academic achievers could not fund their postsecondary education. Drawing on World War II history, the authors asserted that recognition of a fundamental right to an adequate education would compel Congress to create a “peacetime G.I. Bill” to fund education for all Americans.Footnote 93
King profoundly appreciated the special roles education had played in his life and in the life of the country. King excelled academically as a child, began college at age fifteen, and earned a doctorate in theology from Boston University.Footnote 94 King had also seen firsthand how the classroom was a critical site in the nation’s legal and cultural wars. During his early years in Montgomery, he wrestled with racist backlashes to Brown and Autherine Lucy’s admission to the University of Alabama. In the years that followed, King and the SCLC worked closely with members of the Little Rock Nine, held multiple marches on Washington, D.C, commemorating Brown, and campaigned throughout the country to demand the end of all educational inequities.Footnote 95
The human right to an adequate education was, and is, well established. Article 26 of the UDHR provides for free and compulsory elementary education and progressively free technical, vocational, and higher education. Under Article 26, technical and vocational education must be accessible to all, and higher education should be open to all based on ability.Footnote 96 Articles 10, 13, and 14 of ICESCR reaffirmed Article 26 of the UDHR.Footnote 97 Articles 1(4) and 2(2) of CERD permit states to take “special measures,” such as using affirmative action in college admissions, to ensure educational equity.Footnote 98
The Right to Participate in the Decision-Making Process
The SCLC was deeply concerned with opening the political process to all and considered participation in the decision-making process as a fundamental right and an affirmation of the rule of law and the equitable distribution of democratic authority. People affected by a program should play a constitutive role in designing and administrating it. The Economic and Social Bill of Rights additionally called for greater structural safeguards for political activism and voting rights.Footnote 99
Much of King’s public ministry was defined by his commitment to making the political process accessible and responsive to all Americans. The SCLC’s first major program was the Crusade for Citizenship; the SCLC’s first major national event was the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, where King delivered his “Give Us the Ballot” speech.Footnote 100 King’s letter from the Birmingham city jail detailed the immorality of closing the political process to citizens.Footnote 101 The Selma campaign centered on securing free and equal access to the political process.Footnote 102 The SCLC championed reapportionment, forged new opportunities for Black elected officials,Footnote 103 and helped to create the political context for landmark civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Footnote 104 The SCLC often marched on city halls, on state capitals, and in the nation’s capital. In fact, King’s last major campaign culminated with a march on Washington.
Although race and class continued to hinder equitable participation in the political process, the U.S. government had made significant headway in this area since the SCLC’s inception. The Supreme Court, for example, had spearheaded the reapportionment revolution.Footnote 105 Congress passed, and the president signed, four civil rights acts in an eight-year span, most of them focused on voting rights.Footnote 106
The right to participate in the decision-making process is necessary to fulfill the demands of the Economic and Social Bill of Rights. This right fits better than it might at first appear. Article 21 of the UDHR and much of ICCPR clearly protect one’s ability to enjoy a truly participatory democracy.Footnote 107 In fact, even Articles 1, 2, and 6 of ICESCR recognize political rights.Footnote 108 As ICCPR and ICESCR both declare, “[I]n accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy his economic, social and cultural rights, as well as his civil and political rights.”Footnote 109 In turn, the Economic and Social Bill of Rights, like the human rights core, recognizes the interrelatedness and indivisibility of human rights.
The Right to the Full Benefits of Modern Science in Health Care
The Economic and Social Bill of Rights concludes with a demand for the right to the full benefits of modern science in health care. It was “an abiding scandal,” the authors stated, that infant mortality and life expectancy varied so drastically according to race and class. They praised Medicare for helping to address health inequities, but, at the same time, the authors flagged one of the program’s major limitations: it aided only those over the age of sixty-five: the “country ha[d] yet to extend coverage to millions of others who desperately need it.” Medicare’s reach suggested that the government was willing to provide medical care only to those deemed most deserving—the “worthy” poor. The Economic and Social Bill of Rights, in contrast, proclaims that “[e]very man, woman, and child in America should be guaranteed medical care” by the federal government.Footnote 110
King reserved his fiercest criticisms of U.S. society for the pervasive inequities in health. In 1966, he proclaimed, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.”Footnote 111 King blasted the American Medical Association for failing to address both racial discrimination in doctors’ treatment of Black patients and hospital segregation. In fact, King announced to reporters that hospital segregation was “racism in its most damnable form.”Footnote 112 King endorsed broad conceptions of health justice. He was concerned not simply with physical health but also with mental health and dental health. He was attentive to the quality of medical goods and services all people received and to the underlying determinants of health, including nutrition, housing, and environmental conditions.Footnote 113
King and the SCLC’s attention to a fundamental right around health meshes with international standards. Article 25 of the UDHR identifies health as part of the right to an adequate living standard.Footnote 114 ICESCR provides for an even more inclusive approach to the right to health than the UDHR. Article 7 of ICESCR recognizes the right to safe and healthy working conditions.Footnote 115 Article 10 of ICESCR recognizes protections for families, with special concerns for mothers and children.Footnote 116 Article 12 of ICESCR states that everyone has the right “highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.”Footnote 117 Article 12 of ICESCR adds that in order to fully realize this right, governments must, among other things, focus on children’s health, improve environmental and industrial hygiene, control epidemic and endemic diseases, and “create[e] conditions which would assure all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.”Footnote 118
Where Do We Go from Here? The High Costs of Discipleship
In their draft letter to federal officials, the authors do not outline how it imagined the process of constitutional change. They could have pursued constitutional reform through the Article V process or through constitutional litigation. Article V provides a clearly defined path, at least on paper, to amending the U.S. constitution. It states that an amendment shall become part of the constitution when “propose[d]” by “two thirds of both Houses” of Congress and “ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof.”Footnote 119 Thus, if the SCLC had pursued implementation of an economic and social bill of rights through Article V, it would have needed to conduct a massive national campaign. Further, if this approach were attempted in our contemporary context, it would face substantial challenges.
Moreover, an intense focus on changing federal constitutional law has serious limitations. Article V amendments are incredibly rare in U.S. history. Even in the instances when the Article V process has produced new constitutional amendments, those amendments can still become bogged down in debates over textual ambiguities and legislative intent. And as Brown illustrated, there can be backlash to legal precedent or evasion of established constitutional norms and doctrine.
On another front, traditional views on U.S. progress downplay the importance of the types of collective action needed to operationalize the revolution of values that King and the SCLC championed, and the moral vision advanced in the Economic and Social Bill of Rights. A conventional account of U.S. social relations holds that social progress will occur inevitably. This logic, when applied to race, explains that the United States has moved from slavery to Jim Crow to a modern, post-civil rights era, which most notably features the elections of Barack Obama as president and Kamala Harris as vice president.Footnote 120 This is a teleological understanding of racial change over time, and these progressive developments, according to this narrative, have proven that America is closer to the Promised Land now than ever before.
Yet it is more likely the opposite. A Black-white racial wealth gap, for instance, has persisted across the last five decades.Footnote 121 Although the Cold War is over, redbaiting remains a prominent feature in American public discourse.Footnote 122 Political polarization has increased over the last several decades, and issues of race and economics are significant fault lines in that polarization.Footnote 123 And given that the Burger court established precedents for the rejection of the fundamental rights claims made by the anti-poverty movement, today’s poor face far greater obstacles to constitutionalizing economic and social rights.Footnote 124
The SCLC recognized that there were high costs of discipleship in the struggle for economic and social justice a half century ago. Perhaps counterintuitively to those who believe in the teleological view of history, the cost of that discipleship is even higher now. So where do we go from here? To be sure, efforts to implement the moral vision in the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights through law would be just as challenging as it would be monumental. Yet, this draft document serves as a prophetic vision of the necessity of constitutional reform for the realizing of the beloved community and its commitment to a deep sense of social interdependence.
Public opinion polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans feel that King had a positive impact on the United States.Footnote 125 A great many elected officials, religious leaders, and judges across the ideological spectrum wrap themselves in King’s mantle.Footnote 126 King’s legacy is memorialized lavishly and often, including state and national holidays, street names, museums, and a towering granite statue just a short walk from places associated with his many marches on Washington, D.C.Footnote 127
If most Americans truly embraced King’s legacy as they claim, however, they would immediately demand a true revolution of values as part of a renewed social movement, one that uproots continuing forms of racial and economic subordination. They would agree that massive legal and policy reforms are essential and invaluable tools in this new revolution. They would lobby local, state, and federal governments to pass antiracist and antipoverty legislation. They might turn to movement histories and understand that social movements can change existing legal understandings of socioeconomic equality even without formally amending the constitution.Footnote 128 Legislators and judges could revisit decades of legal precedent and help to redesign constitutions so that they recognize positive fundamental rights.Footnote 129
The ideas expressed in the proposed Economic and Social Bill of Rights are deeply resonant with the moral vision of King and the work of the SCLC as shaped by the Black social gospel tradition. This document provides the vision that can inform the proper aims of law to fully enfranchise people living in the United States. The Black social gospel tradition provides the normative force as to why it is morally imperative this work be done. For King and those who would claim his tradition, these positive economic and social rights would realize in law the active faith of the Good Samaritan.
Acknowledgments and Citation Guide
The authors thank the journal’s editors and peer reviewers, research assistant Celia Janes, and participants in the roundtable, “Law, Christianity, and Racial Justice: Shaping the Future” for their terrific feedback. The authors have no competing interests to declare. This article is cited according to The Bluebook, 21st edition.
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