by Kenny Anderson
In his final speech, April 3, 1968, a day before his political assassination, at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King stated: “We must begin the process of building a greater economic base in Negro communities.” Indeed this was a clear leadership directive to initiate Black economic development by establishing businesses.
For the most part as Black people we have never or barely associated Martin Luther King’s leadership with economic development other than Affirmative Action. We don’t associate him with confronting economic injustice, economic boycotts, struggling for economic justice, and particularly advocating for Black business development.
What we know of King has been reduced to his "I Have A Dream" speech, but what we don’t know is that this speech was connected to his main theme of ‘the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’.
King’s speech and overall leadership was never about civil rights alone, but was also about from the beginning a campaign for jobs and income, because King understood that economic injustice prevents ‘real freedom’ and was the most crucial issue that Black people would continue to face.
Throughout the civil rights movement, King and other Black activists had always been engaged with economic issues, from using economic tactics like the Montgomery bus boycott and the boycotts of places like Woolworth's that accompanied the lunch counter sit-ins. King stressed the connection between racism and economic injustice: “Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice, but tolerated or ignored economic injustice. But the Negro knows that these two evils have a malignant kinship.”
King would often reiterate that economic advocacy and development is a crucial part of our struggle against racial oppression. King began to focus more strongly on economic justice issues in the last few years of his life because even with so-called civil rights Black people were still at the bottom of the economic ladder. King once remarked: “What benefits is civil rights to a Negro to be able to go into an integrated restaurant, yet he does not have a job to afford a hamburger.”
It is obvious as Black people we’ve abandoned King’s legacy by ‘neglecting’ and ‘failing’ to follow through on his final economic directive to us. Yes, it is crystal-clear that we did not follow King’s order, we’ve ignored him to the fullest. Yes, the overwhelming majority of Blacks today live in neighborhoods dominated by non-Black ethnic national businesses that make billions of dollars off us.
King not only gave us an economic directive, he threw down an economic gauntlet, telling us: “American Negroes have greater economic potential than most of the nations – perhaps even more than all of the nations of Africa. The Negro challenge in America is to organize the economic power we already have in our midst.” Today Black people have nearly a trillion dollars in our mist.
According to a September 2011 Report, ‘The state of the African-American Consumer’, published jointly by Nielsen and the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), cites with a buying power of nearly $1 trillion annually, if African-Americans were a nation, they’d be the 16th largest purchasing power (GDP) nation in the world; a greater GDP than the current 16th rank nation of Turkey.
Over 40 years-ago, long before this 2011 report on Black purchasing power, King stated: “Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.”
Though we have nearly a trillion dollars of purchasing power in our midst, we as Black people our a national body of economically colonized consumers, who spend only 2 cents of every dollar with Black businesses of the nearly trillion we spend, 98 cents goes to create economic development and wealth for non-Blacks.
There are over 42 million Blacks in America that have more purchasing power than 72 million Turks. As Blacks let us take a look at the nation of Turkey who we rank over economically. Turkey has the 16th largest GDP, that Merrill Lynch, the World Bank, and The Economist magazine describe as a newly industrialized country with an emerging market economy.
Turkey is among the world's leading producers of agricultural products; textiles; motor vehicles, ships, and other transportation equipment; construction materials; consumer electronics and home appliances.
Turkey is the world's largest producer of hazelnut, cherry, fig, apricot, quince, and pomegranate; the second largest producer of watermelon, cucumber, and chickpea; the third largest producer of tomato, eggplant, green pepper, lentil, and pistachio; the fourth largest producer of onion and olive; the fifth largest producer of sugar beet; the sixth largest producer of tobacco, tea, and apple; the seventh largest producer of cotton and barley; the eighth largest producer of almond; the ninth largest producer of wheat, rye, and grapefruit, and the tenth largest producer of lemon.
Turkey’s livestock products, including meat, milk, wool, and eggs, contributed to more than ⅓ of the value of agricultural output. Fishing is another important part of the economy; in 2005 Turkish fisheries harvested 545,673 tons of fish and aquaculture. Turkish brands like BEKO and Vestel are among the largest producers of consumer electronics and home appliances in Europe.
Turkey's Vestel Electronics is the largest TV producer in Europe, accounting for 21% of all TV sets manufactured and sold on the continent in 2007. By January 2005, Vestel and its rival Turkish electronics and white goods brand BEKO accounted for more than half of all TV sets manufactured in Europe. Another Turkish electronics brand, Profilo-Telra, was Europe's third largest TV producer in 2005.
Turkish companies made clothing exports worth $13.98 billion in 2006; more than $10.67 billion of which (76.33%) were made to the EU member states. Turkish automotive companies like TEMSA, Otokar, and BMC are among the world's largest van, bus, and truck manufacturers.
Turkey has a large and growing automotive industry, which produced 1,024,987 motor vehicles in 2006, ranking as the 7th largest automotive producer in Europe; behind Germany (5,819,614), France (3,174,260), Spain (2,770,435), the United Kingdom (1,648,388), Russia (1,508,358) and Italy (1,211,594), respectively.
In 2008 Turkey produced 1,147,110 motor vehicles, ranking as the 6th largest producer in Europe (behind the United Kingdom and above Italy) and the 15th largest producer in the world. With a cluster of car-makers and parts suppliers, the Turkish automotive sector has become an integral part of the global network of production bases, exporting over $22,944,000,000 worth of motor vehicles and components in 2008.
Turkey is also one of the leading shipbuilding nations; in 2007 Turkish shipyards ranked 4th in the world (behind China, South Korea, and Japan) in terms of the number of ordered ships, and also 4th in the world (behind Italy, USA, and Canada) in terms of the number of ordered mega yachts.
What stands out glaringly about the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Turkey and Black people, is theirs is based on production output, while ours is based on total expenditure in buying – consuming products. Turkey’s GDP is expressed in business – manufacturing and production, creating jobs and wealth for their nation; while Black dollars buy consumer goods that we don’t manufacture or produce. Blacks spend billion of dollars on clothes, shoes, jewelry, hair styles, food, cell phones, and entertainment.
While Blacks are spending nearly a trillion dollars, yet in too many Black communities unemployment and poverty levels are soaring over 50 percent. Unfortunately Blacks have a spending spree outlook and very little of our purchasing power is transferred into investment capital to fund business development. We buy from the world, but we don’t produce or sell to the world like Turkey.
This economic suicide mentality coupled with racism reflects why there are so few Black owned businesses in our communities. Commenting on this underdevelopment King stated: “The economic highway to power has very few entry lanes for Negroes. Nothing so vividly reveals the crushing impact of discrimination and the heritage of exclusion as the limited dimensions of Negro business in the most powerful economy in the world. America’s industrial production is half of the world’s total, and within it the production of Negro business is so small that it can scarcely be measured on any defineable scale.”
The fact that Black people have purchasing power of nearly a trillion dollars that overwhelmingly goes to others on one hand is embarrassing, but it can also be very misleading regarding the racial disparities of wealth in America. In a recent study, ‘The Great Recession’, by the Economic Policy Institute, exposed that the recent recession period Blacks had an annual income of $13,400 compared to whites income of over a $134,000.00.
The EPI study states in terms of dollars – Blacks have 2 cents compared to whites 98 cents. A Black World study reports during this recessionary period that 25% of Blacks lost their homes and 38% have lost their jobs. Anothern recent wealth gap study by the Pew Research Center, reveals that the median wealth of whites in 2009 was $113,149.00 compared with $5,677.00 for Blacks.
According to the Pew Research the wealth gap between whites and Blacks have grown to their widest levels in 25 years. Leaving whites on average with 20 times the net worth of Blacks. As Blacks we cannot continue to participate in so-called American democracy just as oppressed and exploited nearly trillion dollar consumers.
Our current plight during this recession in America demands a program for economic empowerment as King advised us: “One point in the Negro’s program should be a plan to improve his own economic lot. Through the establishment of credit unions, savings and loan associations, and cooperative enterprises the Negron can greatly improve his economic status. He must develop habits of thrift and techniques of wise investment. He must not wait for the end of the segregation that lies at the basis of his economic deprivation; he must act now to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
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