By Siobahn McDonough, Photo: Henry Griffin/AP, Vox, March 18, 2022
In the last years of his life, frustrated by the failure of the civil rights movement to change the day-to-day financial circumstances of Black Americans, Martin Luther King Jr. turned much of his focus to questions of economic justice, and increasingly landed on one possible option. In 1966 testimony in front of the US Senate, King declared, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most revolutionary — the guaranteed annual income.”
More than 55 years later,King’s dream of a guaranteed income is about to get a test in his home neighborhood: Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Later this month, the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund (GRO), a community racial justice organization, and the nonprofit GiveDirectly will be launching the largest guaranteed income program so far tried in the American South. They’ll be sending out cash transfers averaging $850 per month to hundreds of women in predominantly Black neighborhoods throughout Georgia over the next two years. Starting in the Old Fourth Ward, the program will expand to other urban, rural, and suburban areas in the state, ultimately providing aid to about 650 women in all.
While direct cash giving programs have proliferated in the US and the rest of the world in recent years, the Georgia program stands apart in its intended targets and its ultimate aims. Income and wealth gaps by race and gender are persistently wide in the US — more than 25 percent of Black women live under the federal poverty line, compared to about 20 percent of Black men, 12 percent of white women, and 9 percent of white men. According to a 2019 Federal Reserve survey, the median Black household holds less than 15 percent of the wealth of the median white household.
Comments (0)