BACKGROUND: In 1976, Congress considered a Full Employment and Balanced

Growth Act. The subcommittee on employment, poverty and migratory labor, of the
committee on labor and public welfare met in order to investigate the possibility of
establishing a national policy and procedure for a guarantee to all able adult Americans
the availability of useful and rewarding employment. Many people testified before the
committee when it met on May 14, 17, 18 and 19, 1976. One of those who testified was
founder and co-chair of the Full Employment Action Council, Coretta Scott King, widow
of Martin Luther King, Jr. An excerpt of Mrs. Kings testimony is presented below.
[Excerpted from] Statement of Coretta King, CoChairman [sic],
Full Employment Action Council, Washington, DC
Mrs. King: . . . I am honored to have been invited to testify on behalf of the Full
Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1976. As co-chairman (sic) of the Full
Employment Action Council, I am going to read my testimony, but I also have some
recommendations to the bill as a supplement that I would like to also submit.
Senator Williams: We will be pleased to incorporate that with your statement. It will be
very helpful.
Mrs. King: Thank you.
It probably requires someone who is black to fully comprehend the helplessness,
loneliness, and anxieties of the unemployed. It requires a black, because blacks are more
than merely deprived. They are consciously and deliberately ignored as much as possible
by the larger society.
For so long, being black was to be invisible.
With the same design great effort is made to hide the unemployed; to erase them from
visibility and to blank out the constricted lives they live. The chilling resemblance of the
dimly seen unemployed to the leper colonies of the Dark Ages is not too extreme an
analogy.
A very intense campaign has been underway to establish that no one really cares about
unemployment. It is contended that only inflation engenders concern and fear. After all, it
is said, 92.5 percent are employed and only 7.5 percent are unemployed.
It does sound small when put in these bland, cold terms, and there are no cries of
anguish to disturb the sleep of the vast majority. But now put it another way: 7, 003,000
people mostly adults are without jobs. True, they eat but not too much; they have
some sort of shelter; some even have health care. But many, including children, are in
chronic ill health, or are ill nourished, and living a life of punishment and systematic
abuse as if they had done some evil to this Nation.
Psychologically, they are mauled even more terribly. Because they are what the English
call redundant, they are struck with the sledgehammer of inferiority. To be deprived is
bad, but to be deprived among the secure and privileged is far worse.
At least 20 million Americans are afflicted with this tragic, crippling disease for which
they bear no guilt and possess no means of cure. It is probably much more than 20

million counting family members and the huge uncounted numbers who have given up
looking for employment because the scarring of constant rejection was too unbearable.
Why are the unemployed hidden and their suffering silenced? For the same reason, the
same slickly polished device was used for blacks. If they were unseen, if their hurts were
unheard, people could be made to believe they were contented. Thus, people may not be
made to act about the matter of correcting a crying injustice.
The truth is millions of jobless living among us have lives of misery and we have the
ability to change it. The truth is, we should change the condition out of our moral
concern. But if that be too feeble, there is another reason. The sordid existence they
endure today may be ours tomorrow.
We are then told we cannot change conditions change must trickle down slowly as a
benevolent monarch drops coppers into the uplifted palms of a beggar. This nauseating
image of charity from the Middle Ages is still with us, institutionalized by the Ford
administrations trickle down theory. [Gerald Ford was president of the United States at
the time of Kings testimony]
We should believe them no more than we should have believed them 40 years ago in
1935 when they wailed that unemployment insurance and social security would bring an
end to free enterprise and democracy.
Let us put the issue sharply: We say the unemployed can be provided jobs at productive
labor with decent wages. It has been done in other developed countries without curbing
profits or liberties. Indeed, where some of the nations have encountered small increments
of unemployment lately, it is due to the slowdown of our economy impinging on theirs.
We say full employment does not entail galloping inflation. This period has demolished
the myth of the Phillips Curve [ id ]. As jobs moved down and prices went up, exactly
the opposite of its predicted motion occurred.
The auto industry dramatically threw hundreds of thousands out of work and
simultaneously lifted the price of its cars. The building trades have not seen such
unemployment since the depression of the thirties, and yet the prices of houses are so
high that homeownership is once again the American dream only for 15 or 20 percent if
the dreamers.
We say the loss to the economy by a conservative estimate of the Department of
Commerce is $221 billion, and therefore, we cannot afford the luxury of unemployment.
We say there is sufficient slack in the economy so that stimulation will not risk inflation.
We say the most appalling waste is the human deterioration that idleness induces.
The question that should haunt us most is that self-respect and self-confidence drained
away as enforced idleness keeps people from the sense of usefulness a job provides. How
haunted are we by the presence of parents without employment who must retain the
respect of their children? We should be haunted by literally legions of young people who
have no possibility of work, and almost the inevitability of a devastated life.
If pervasive criminal activity, and crime in the highest places is an example, how many
discouraged, cynical young people will begin life with crime in a desperate quest for a
shred of importance and identity? After all, if a former President [President Richard
Nixon], members of his cabinet, executive staff, a newspaper heiress, presidents of
corporations with televisions trumpeted names can engage in daily acts of crime, why
cannot the dwellers in the ghetto hovels partake of the same privileges?

It is true the former President and others have never climbed through windows and
stolen television sets. Here, too, their opportunities were superior, so they enjoyed high
status criminal activities.
Let us keep squarely in mind that youth unemployment in the ghetto has reached some
40 percent a horrifying figure.
If we are to eradicate poverty, drug addiction, and crime, we have to offer work as the
alternative to desperation and quasi-suicidal attitudes. Most of all we have to see to it that
these young people have employment opportunities.
Psychologists are more and more impressed by the permanence of behavior patterns
developed in teenage. A young person in the ghetto cannot find a job for $30 a day, but
they can readily find criminal work for $100 a day and need no education nor skill. It is
amazing the degree to which ethical barriers have held.
Everyone today has a sense that the seams of society are under intense strain. In this
circumstance, the powers that be are engaged in a substantial social gamble. They may
succeed for a time in diverting attention from unemployment and its solutions.
Yet, if in any society a large group is congealed, given coherence and in time grows
conscious of its own strength, a force will be born that news articles will not exorcise nor
propaganda dispel.
Just as the stubborn and immoral pursuit of the Vietnam was nurtured and intensified
the disaffection of tens of millions of Americans, and finally made Washington an oath
rather than a seat of government, so will mulish adherence to retaining an army of
unemployed lead to the growing contempt of Americans in their own Government.
Have the powers that be learned nothing from trying to keep blacks in segregation and
inferiority? Have they learned nothing from trying to stop trade union organizing in the
1930s? Have they learned nothing from trying to hide crimes of high Government
officials and agencies?
They are all finally dealt with, and the more intense the effort to repress, the more
turbulent the process of inevitable change. For black Americans in particular, the
economic policies and actions o the past few years have been nothing less than a frontal
assault on all the gains and victories of the 1960s. The legislation we black Americans
struggled for, and at times died for, is now being literally undermined. To my mind
current policies amount to nothing less that the repeal of the Civil Rights Acts of the
1960s, and the gutting of the promise of justice.
What good is the legal right to sit in a restaurant if one cannot afford the price of the
food? And what good is the promise of fair employment when there is no employment
for black Americans?
The deliberate creation of high unemployment has meant nothing less than the denial of
the basic human right to live as full-fledged members of the American system.
If the unemployed are to be treated as 20th century lepers, they will break out and not by
their own efforts alone. The decent-minded people of the Nation who must endure and
suffer with them will work with them and speed the day of reckoning.
Some are eager that the unemployed should organize and move into action and protest.
Unfortunately, unemployment is a complex phenomenon. It has struck hardest among the
unskilled and semiskilled. They were never able to acquire the tools of political
organization. They were separated cleanly from power and its uses. They will need a
period of experience before they make decisive moves.

It took two years of economic holocaust before the bonus marches moved on
Washington in 1932. It would be better if those who hold the reins of power do not force
confrontation.
This wise legislation, the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, establishes the responsibility of
government and the possibility of solution and can be the vehicle to avert turmoil and
strife. Nothing would so facilitate the improvement of black-white relations than the
elimination of competition for jobs which would result from this bill. This legislation is
wise because it serves the interest of white and black alike and in so doing, of the Nation
as a whole.
So there are no excuses for inaction, as in the early 1930s when no programs were
available. There is a program here now in the Congress and one of careful judgment and
sensible moderation. Is there wisdom in the administration, or are we on another disaster
course which will end by undermining the diminishing faith in good government which
remains? Can we retain that residue of faith from the days when the goals of humanity
were larger and more urgent than the goals of expansion and profits?
Somewhere right now, there is someone who has not been able to find work for 1
years. That person asks if he or she is still a human being, and asks if the bitterness and
tragedy is self-made or imposed. If the answer begins to come out that it is imposed, a
storm would have begun to gather. This it will be too late.
Thank you.
Senator Williams: Thank you very much, Mrs. King. That is a most emotionally moving
and conscience-stirring message, and it is just exactly what we needed to move on now to
action. We are very grateful. . . .
--from Hearings before 94th Congress, Second session on S.50 and S.472, May 14, 17,
18, 19, 1976. Pages 636640.