In observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, observed on the third Monday of every January in honor of his birth date (his actual birthdate is January 15), we’re sharing this photograph taken at a 1967 rally in support of the Freedom Budget for All Americans.
The Budget was an economic proposal created and championed by civil rights and labor movement organizer A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), civil rights and gay rights organizer Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), economists Leon H. Keyserling (1908-1987) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), pediatrician and national chairman of the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-1998), as well as other allies from the labor movement, prominent economists, and notable figures from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The proposal was released in 1966, and aimed to marshal the resources of the federal government with the goal of achieving greater racial justice and harmony by ending poverty nationwide within ten years. Its agenda included a job guarantee for any person ready and willing to work, a guaranteed income for those unable to work, mandates for a living wage that would provide economic stability for the working poor, housing programs to address the growth of residential inequality and slums, programs for accessible and affordable medical care and education, and environmentally conscious planning to address environmental justice and sustainable growth.
Many of these policy proposals would later be adapted and adopted by King in 1968 as cornerstones of his Poor People's Campaign and his Poor People's March on Washington, an economic justice campaign organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and carried out under the leadership of activist Ralph Abernathy (1926-1990) following King’s assassination in April of 1968.
This photograph was selected from Lavish Welfare Schemes Ahead, an August 1967 article about the Freedom Budget in Nation’s Business, a monthly magazine published by the United States Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group representing American business interests. You can view digitized versions of over 1,000 issues this publication, which ran from 1912 to 1999, online now in the Hagley Library’s Digital Archive by clicking here.
