By Marian Wright Edelman
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
This passage is from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination. In his speech in Memphis the night before his murder, Dr. King repeated the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan who stopped and helped the desperate traveler who had been beaten, robbed, and left half dead as he journeyed along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The Good Samaritan is traditionally considered a model of charity for his willingness to treat a stranger as a neighbor and friend. Dr. King agreed that we are all called to follow his example and serve those around us who need help. But he reminded us that true compassion—true justice—requires also attacking the forces that leave others in need in the first place.
If travelers are being assaulted on the Jericho Road, we should help bind their wounds, but also work to make the road a safe passageway. If our communities have neighbors in need and we volunteer at shelters or donate to food pantries and think we’ve done our part, we are only partially right. We have done an important part. But we are not finished if we are not also fighting to prevent and eliminate the violence of joblessness, poor education, poverty, and hunger and the inequalities and injustices that feed and accompany them and unjust systems that create them. With true structural change there would be far less need for charity; without it the very best charitable efforts will never be enough.
Dr. King, our great 20th century American prophet, understood this—yet like so many other prophets, his voice was often at odds with leaders or conveniently left unheard by the people in his own land. During Dr. King’s lifetime, President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty attempted to address some of the inequalities in the United States that needed redressing and restructuring, but that vision was not permanent. By August 1968, Richard Nixon accepted his party’s presidential nomination already criticizing President Johnson’s anti-poverty tactics, and suggesting instead: “Let government use its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man—American private enterprise. Let us enlist in this great cause the millions of Americans in volunteer organizations who will bring a dedication to this task that no amount of money can ever buy.” Instead of worrying about restructuring the edifice that had produced America’s beggars, he believed giving the edifice more power would help; instead of worrying about transforming the Jericho Road, he recommended relying on millions more Good Samaritans. The same threads have been remixed and repeated again and again, alongside the arguments that the safety net is actually a snare, ripe for shredding.
Our nation is now at a moment when even acknowledging that inequities exist in the edifice is under attack. Will Americans embrace attempts to hide and accept the deep unjust structural inequalities and injustices that favor the powerful at the expense of the powerless, the rich at the expense of the poor, and the greedy at the expense of the needy—or return to the call to transform the road?