By Ben Jealous
(Trice Edney Wire) – Three weeks before he was killed, Martin Luther King Jr. stood up in a high school gym in Michigan and argued with a number. The July jobs report says he was right.
It was March of 1968. The government said unemployment in the Black community was 8.8 percent. King said it was almost twice that. Not because anybody was cooking the books.
The country felt good about jobs that spring. The national unemployment rate was 3.6 percent, near the lowest since the Korean War. Washington called that full employment. King was telling them the number was hiding people.
He explained how the count worked. It counted people out of work and still looking. It did not count the people who had stopped looking. He described them plainly. People who had lost hope. People who had so many doors shut in their faces that they quit knocking.
“These people are considered the discouraged,” he said.
Add them back, he argued, and the true figure was closer to sixteen or seventeen percent.
That was fifty-eight years ago. The count still works much the same way. Presidents have come and gone. The count has not changed.
Last week the government released the July jobs report. The country lost 23,000 jobs. It corrected May and June, erasing 103,000 jobs we thought we had. Over the past year we have averaged about 34,000 new jobs a month.
Almost nobody is being hired. Outside a few industries, almost nobody is being fired either. If you have a job, you are probably safe. If you need one, the door will not open. Then came the number that would have gotten King out of his chair.
The unemployment rate went down. It fell from 4.2 percent to 4.1 percent. That happened because 264,000 people left the labor force. They did not find work. They stopped being counted.
You are counted as unemployed only if you have no job and you looked for one in the last four weeks. Stop looking, and you are not counted as unemployed. You are not counted at all. Nearly six million Americans say they want a job and are not counted.
They are not lazy. They stopped looking because looking stopped working. They did not stop wanting a job. They stopped believing one was coming.
Thirty years ago I crisscrossed this country arguing against NAFTA. Corporate lobbyists said we sounded like Chicken Little. Two decades and 63,000 shuttered factories later, every exaggeration they accused us of had come true.
Those factories did not close on Black towns or White towns. They closed on both.
King saw it coming. He wrote in 1967 that there were twice as many white poor as Negro poor in America. So he was not just giving a speech that night. He was building something.
He had marched to desegregate the lunch counter. That fight was won. The fight left was whether a man could afford what was on it.
In December of 1967 he announced the Poor People’s Campaign. The demand was jobs or income for all.
He meant to bring the poorest families in America to Washington and set them where the country could not look away. Not only Black families. White families out of the mountains. Mexican American families. Native families. Puerto Rican families. One caravan left Chicago on May 8, 1968. King never saw it. He was killed in Memphis on April 4.
The campaign went on without him and mostly failed. They built a camp on the National Mall and called it Resurrection City. Rain turned it to mud. Police cleared it in June. No jobs bill passed. Nobody got a guaranteed income.
But King was right about the count. He is still right. A country that stops counting people finds it easy to forget them.
There will be plenty of arguing about these numbers. Arguing has never hired anybody. Only people hire people. So here is what I ask of you.
If you run a business, interview the person your software screened out. Ask about the gap in the work history instead of assuming the worst.
If you know somebody who quit looking, walk with them back to the door. Say their name to somebody who is hiring.
If you belong to a church or a union or a lodge, find out this month who among you is out of work. Do not stop at praying for them. Make the call.
Dr. King argued with a number because he knew a number can hide a person. Count them. Then hire them.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
