40th Anniversary of Poor People’s March on Washington is Opportunity for Californians to Act on King’s Dream

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Jenny Oropeza
California State Senator

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the “Poor People’s Campaign” to address issues of economic justice conceived by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. shortly before his death.

And while the Civil Rights movement stressed integrated schools and voting rights for African-Americans, the Poor People’s March encompassed the economically disadvantaged of all races: Latinos, Native Americans, Third-World immigrants and poor whites.

In his book, Why We Can’t Wait, King endorsed a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” and the idea has as much merit today as it did when the march ended 40 years ago. Dr. King’s agenda included plans for massive federal investments in jobs and housing programs. The march went on after his tragic death in April of 1968, but these plans never passed Congress. Forty years later, how are the poor doing in California?

The answer is that while some progress has been made, the poor in California are now falling behind the rest of the nation. In 1970, California averaged 20 percent fewer poor families than the national average (12 percent of Californians versus 15 percent of all Americans).

Today, those figures have been reversed as California now has a greater than average percentage of children living in poverty (19 percent in California compared to 17 percent nationally). Official Census data show that California has both the most poor people (more than 5 million and counting due to the recession) and one of the largest percentages of poor families in all of the 50 states.

It is true that poverty affects people of color more: The child poverty rate for Latinos and African Americans is about 27 percent, while the child poverty rate for Asians is 13 percent, with the poverty rate for whites at 8 percent. Poverty is also greater among Native Americans (19 percent) and children of immigrants from the Southeast Asian countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (26 percent).

More than half of poor children in California are U.S.-born Latinos. But there are numerous white-majority counties like Colusa, Del Norte, Glenn, Lake, Lassen, Modoc and Siskiyou with poverty rates 50 percent greater than the state average. Due to our stratospheric housing costs, California is in the bottom 10 percent in homeownership and also has more homeless than any other state.