King’s legacy includes his call for a guaranteed income, provided by the government.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column was first published in January of 2020. It has been updated.

Everyone claims a piece of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. Overall, this is appropriate and good for the country.

Although the initial focus of King’s efforts was the uplift of African Americans and a push for equal rights, his message was for all people.

I do, however, observe with amusement when even far-right conservatives profess to hold King up as their guide. Some even inaccurately assert that King was a Republican.

In reality, the Civil Rights icon claimed no party. Two of the greatest legislative achievements he and other activists helped bring about, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, happened under Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.

But King was also a strong advocate of personal responsibility, a mantle the GOP has adopted over the years at least rhetorically.

That said, King was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War and was pro-labor and pro-labor strikes. In modern times, he almost certainly would be classed with what conservatives consider the “radical left.”

His most staunch critics then considered him a communist. Republican Jesse Helms, North Carolina's infamous Senator No, said he regretted what he called King's “willingness to include among the advisors for his organization those whose records prove they were Communists.” Helms also opposed creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which the country will celebrate this coming Monday.

MLK was not popular, especially in his later years

Although King is revered today, many Americans at the time did not care for him. His popularity, reports Newsweek, began to decline precipitously after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, a Harris Poll showed his disapproval rating at 75%. As a basis of comparison, that is worse than the highest disapproval ratings for President Biden (63%, from a CNN poll in November) or Trump (68%, his final Pew Research Center rating as president).

Part of the reason for Americans’ shifting sentiment against King at the time was undoubtedly his move from desegregation efforts to class and economic issues, via his Poor People’s Campaign (which the Rev. William Barber II, a formidable Civil Rights leader with North Carolina ties, has recast in today’s America.) One of King’s most radical ideas to address poverty is what he called “guaranteed income,” or as it would be called today, universal basic income.

Expanded child tax credit was a preview of MLK’s vision to help the poor

In simplest terms, King believed that the government should give to all citizens a sum of money, a guaranteed income, to help them achieve a basic standard of living. In his last book, 1967’s “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” King critiqued previous efforts to solve poverty, which involved improving education, housing and other methods as first steps.

“The programs of the past all have another common failing,” he wrote. “They are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.”

The expanded child tax credit, passed by Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic but now expired, was distributed in monthly payments and was effectively for many families the type of income King was talking about.

It was geared toward lower income and middle class families and was shown to have reduced childhood poverty to historic lows. Those gains were reversed after the expanded credit expired in 2022, and the number of poor children rose from 5.2% to 12.4%. That translated into 3 million more children living in poverty than might otherwise have been were the credit still in place, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Congress is in bipartisan talks to pass a new expanded tax credit, during a big election year, which can taken as a sign of the credit's popularity.

In an analysis of King’s ideas on income inequality, The Atlantic notes that he believed that guaranteed income should be enough to give an American a “median standard of living” and should be pegged to rise when that standard does.

King also believed, as he wrote, that “New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.”

AI and automation will replace more jobs

Millionaire entrepreneur and lawyer Andrew Yang has been one of the most high-profile advocates for universal basic income; it was a concept he made a part of his unsuccessful 2020 campaign for president. His version of universal basic income would have put $1,000 a month in every American adult’s pocket, something he calls a “Freedom Dividend.”

Tellingly, several other high-profile advocates of some form of UBI are also wealthy business people — many of them commanding much more wealth than Yang. They include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Elon Musk, founder of the electric car company Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.

If you are wondering if they know something we do not — they do.

People in this wealth class are the type who participate in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the world’s business captains and politicians predict and (some say) plot out what’s next. In coverage of the event from 2019, The New York Times wrote that automation was all the talk — often behind the scenes.

“They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible,” business columnist Kevin Roose shared in his write-up on the conference, which was headlined, “The hidden automation agenda of the Davos elite.”

Trillions in lost wages. Then what?

Whether Big Business leaders want these mass layoffs or not, they likely see clearly than most that automation is coming anyway. The advances in artificial intelligence, AI, just since that Davos conference illustrate the steady march of the machines.

Hhalf the world’s jobs could be automated with technologies already in existence, leading to $15 trillion in lost wages, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, which researches economic and business issues.

These hard realities could and likely will break down even our uber-Capitalist, reflexive response against something like universal basic income.

And if UBI becomes a future reality, it will be one more area where King’s vision will be seen as being well ahead of its time.

Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Martin Luther King was not embraced in his day like he is today