Yeah, MLK was a very interesting dude.
Right of center by most accounts, but his legacy is compelling.
He was campaigning for worker's rights plus a universal guaranteed income and government-sponsored low-income housing as economic justice measures to lift up the living standard of the poor in this country when he was killed. He demanded a $30 billion annual investment in antipoverty measures, a government commitment to full employment, enactment of a guaranteed income and funding for the construction of 500,000 affordable housing units per year. If you consider those conservative, or right of center, we have very different views of conservatives in this country.
"We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, 'We are here; we are poor; we don't have any money; you have made us this way ... and we've come to stay until you do something about it.'"
“Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes… God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”
“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.”
“We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution [of wealth].”
“We realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will.” A just response, King believed, was a guaranteed annual income “pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income.”