Without disagreeing with Tom or Rick directly, I'll start off where both of them left off: King's life was cut short, and at a moment when he was just beginning a new segment in his lifelong struggle against injustice. It's no slap at his grand intellect to suggest that he was still working through a lot of the policy implications his principles evoked.

He very clearly believed that the nation owed African Americans something for their suffering. He said so throughout his life, but perhaps nowhere more forcefully than his March 31, 1968 sermon at the National Cathedral, the last Sunday address of his life. It is worth quoting at length:

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black mans color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don't give him any bus fare to get to town. You don't give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You're free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Its all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

Now, it is true that this position does not preclude the idea that poor whites also deserved something. But the debt America owed to poor whites was, in his view, clearly of a lesser magnitude. And as the quotes Rick presents make clear, his belief that the poor of all colors should be helped was in part a tactical, political move: Whites will block significant assistance to blacks unless that assistance can be explained in color-blind terms.

Ironically, this was little different from Lyndon Johnson's belief, in 1964, that Great Society efforts had to be sold as poor relief, rather than assistance to blacks, and he made well-photographed trips to Appalachia to prove his concern. But this was, again, window dressing; Johnson clearly believed in tilting the playing field, and he initiated affirmative action quotas in government contracting in 1965. King, I submit, approached the question in similar terms, at least in the sense that his first principle was uplift for African Americans, not color-blind policymaking.

At the same time, I don't want to disagree with Rick completely. I don't think that King's concern for poor whites was only a tactical feint. As I said, I believe the question of how to fairly achieve racial equality was one that King was wrestling with until the day he died. In fact, I think it's clear from his later sermons and speeches--for instance, his 1967 Riverside Church address--that King was close to concluding that the very existence of this dilemma (that is, how to achieve equality equitably) was proof that American capitalism was bankrupt, and that the only solution lay in what he termed a "revolution of values." It's not an easy question to answer--indeed, it is one we have wrestled with ever since.