Episode Details

Martin Luther King, Jr., who died 45 years ago this month, had long known that racial equality was inextricably linked to economic equity -- fairness for all, including working people and the poor. In the last year of his life, as he moved toward Memphis and assassination, Dr. King announced the Poor People’s Campaign to demand an “Economic Bill of Rights” for all Americans, regardless of color. But nearly a half-century later, that dream is still a dream deferred. On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch and author and theologian James Cone join Bill to discuss Dr. King’s vision of economic justice, and why so little has changed for America’s most oppressed.

Also on the show, poet Kyle Dargan, whose poetry provides a window into the humanity that Branch & Cone say is essential to get people working towards justice, visits Bill to talk about and read from his work.