We Can Now Make Martin Luther King’s Last, True Dream A Reality

When we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this year on the 95th anniversary of King’s birth, let it not be yet another occasion to recall only the most popular of his messages. That’s too easy and, besides, it’s questionable how much King himself believed in his famous “dream” by the end of his life. He even went so far as to say publicly that it had “turned into a nightmare.”

Just a few years after his March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and its climactic “I Have a Dream” speech, he told NBC News in 1967 that he’d since done some “soul searching.” He said he realized that the “old optimism” of the civil rights movement, which arguably peaked at the National Mall that day in 1963, was “a little superficial.”

“Kumbaya” wasn’t his jam anymore, it turned out. Instead of envisioning Americans of every color and creed singing that song arm-in-arm —metaphorically speaking — late-career King was apparently way more into the Motown hit “Money (That’s What I Want).”?

He acknowledged in his NBC News interview that his efforts to affect change, powered by nonviolent protest and love-forward visions of a better future, had undeniably done plenty of good. For starters, it led to greater integration of many social institutions and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.?

But that wasn’t enough.

“The economic problem is probably the most serious problem confronting the Negro community,” he later said to Harry Belafonte on The Tonight Show, in February 1968, two months before his death. The many “legislative strides” the U.S. government had taken to address inequality, he said, ultimately “did very little to improve the lot of the millions of Negroes in the ghettos of the north and the nation generally.?

“In other words,” he went on, “it did very little to penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation in communities all over.”

To really close the equality gulf, King felt the U.S. would have to go beyond seeing its top government officials sign new bills into law. He began insisting that the country lift up its poor out of financial doldrums and eliminate the lower class by providing them resources and greater opportunities for economic security.?

“We got our gains over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak; it didn’t cost the nation anything … to get the right to vote established,” he said on NBC News. “Now we are confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars.”

It was in this request, King said, that he and his disciples were “getting our greatest resistance.” (Cue the Nicolas Cage meme that’s captioned: “You don’t say?!”)?

As he more vigorously fought for an end to economic oppression, King’s broad popularity waned, with many of the white moderates who’d supported him in the earlier days of his activism deserting him.??

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, I marched peacefully in protests organized by Black Lives Matter, an organization that carries King’s tradition of nonviolent dissent. While those more literal strides on the streets helped revitalize discourse around Black equality and the means unto which it can be achieved, I recognized that what I was doing would only move the needle so far.?

After asking more of myself, I created BLAPP, an e-commerce app that also maps locations of Black-owned businesses in a user’s area. It gives those who want to directly boost the financial latitude of Black Americans a chance to do so by patronizing the establishments that can now pop up on their smartphone screens.?

The most profound obstacles I’ve faced have come in the form of willful ignorance and fundraising hesitancy (see my previous post). People have long known how to correct the wealth and equity gap between People of Color and white Americans. (King was openly discussing it more than half a century ago.) But they have not chosen to see such plans through and, instead, continued to believe that institutional racism doesn’t exist. BLAPP is an opportunity for them to course correct. I expect that any challenges behind obtaining financial support will fade — and truth will proliferate — with each new download and the promise of BLAPP’s economic viability becomes increasingly apparent.?

BLAPP is an opportunity to realize Martin Luther King’s last, true dream.