As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day today, we are taking inspiration from Dr. King’s lifelong commitment to economic justice. Dr. King’s anti-poverty advocacy is often glossed over in the pursuit of a simple, sanitized story of King and his legacy – but there is no doubt his dream of justice included the eradication of poverty.

In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Dr. King forefronted issues of poverty, saying, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.” He continues,

There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Just as nonviolence exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, so must the infection and sickness of poverty be exposed and healed – not only its symptoms but its basic causes. This, too, will be a fierce struggle, but we must not be afraid to pursue the remedy no matter how formidable the task. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty.

In the final months of Dr. King’s life, his focus was on the Poor People’s Campaign, a plan to bring people to Washington, D.C. to demand jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and increased educational opportunities. Although Dr. King was assassinated a month before he was set to go to Washington, the campaign continued. On Mother’s Day, May 12, 1968, Coretta Scott King led the first demonstrators, thousands of women, to the capital.

The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute was founded in that same year. Since our inception, we have been fighting the root causes of poverty through litigation, legislative advocacy, administrative advocacy, community lawyering, and public education. More than 50 years later, we still remember and benefit from the legacy of the anti-poverty advocates of the 1960s. Dr. King and his contemporaries laid out a vision of a society without poverty – a vision we will continue to fight for in 2023.