MLK Day: Whats Open?

More than 50 years after Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr., MLK , was assassinated in Memphis outside the Lorraine Motel room where he was organizing a crusade against poverty, the scourge remains entrenched as many Rhode Island citizens face January’s chill impoverished to the point of homeless.

Today, on the federal holiday recognizing King, the public and media focus largely on King’s efforts in the early days of the civil rights struggle, memorialized in Selma, which you can stream on Amazon.

In recent years, national efforts honoring King’s legacy have focused on  a day of service for millions of Americans. But by his reckoning, the evils of racism, poverty and war were intertwined, and King was determined to oppose them all. Locally, poverty has affected an increasing number of Rhode Islanders, with a surge in homelessness, which lawmakers and charitable organizations say requires not just structural change but immediate, urgent action to aid the homeless now.

During the past four years, according to the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness news release,  there was a 99.5 percent increase in calls seeking assistance through the Coordinated Entry System (CES), a nationwide system providing equitable access to housing and support to  people facing a housing crisis. There were 103,911 calls in 2024, driven by rising homelessness and economic hardships.

Legislators in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, frustrated by years of ineffective laws passed to address the problem, have written a letter calling on RI Governor Dan McKee to declare a state of emergency to speed aid to Rhode Island homeless. Shortly after, RI Senators joined the call for a homeless state of emergency with their own letter..

The House letter points to 54 people who have died due to living outside within the last year, and others who lost their lives because of diseases or illnesses developed as a result of their being homeless.

As Rhode Island celebrates King’s legacy, there’s much work left in his intended fight against poverty, whether an immediate state of emergency is achieved or not.

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, working to unite people across the U.S. and in Rhode Island to “challenge systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality of religious nationalism.”

The movement is a modern effort based on King’s Poor People’s Campaign, envisioned as  a march on Washington of around 2,000 people, speaking out against income inequity, lack of opportunity, and insufficient wages, according to MLK50. The website quotes King:

We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, ‘We are here; we are poor; we don’t have any money; you have made us this way … and we’ve come to stay until you do something about it.’

The Poor People’s Campaign’s agenda calls on federal and state governments to:

• Ensure the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share of urgent social needs, including decent and affordable housing, quality education and health care, safe and affordable water, and job creation.
• Protect voting rights and prohibit racist gerrymandering, hiring, policing, and sentencing policies that exacerbate inequalities for black and brown people.
• End military aggression, ban the proliferation of guns, and demilitarize our communities on the border and the interior.
• Ensure the right to clean water, air, and a healthy environment and increased public investment in jobs programs to transition to a green economy.

According to RI’s page on The Poor People’s Campaign website, Rhode Island’s contribution to the country’s continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan totals $17 billion since 2001, and could instead have created 14,000 new jobs in clean energy, or placed every Rhode Island child in Head Start early childhood education programs, or covered the cost of Medicaid for 190,000 adults for the past 17 years.

MLK Day: What’s Open?

While you’re thinking about all of that and how you might help change it with your current representatives or in the voting booth, remember the usual answers to common holiday questions:

Non-essential Government departments are closed, as are many corporations.