UNCOVERED: Commentary reparations would acknowledge injustice - Caught on Camera

It’s widely understood that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. evolved significantly on the issue of reparations during his short lifetime. Toward the start of his career, he was a moralist in his thinking, rather than the radical economic thinker he later became. In 2018, I befriended Dr. King’s former barber, Nelson Malden, now in his late 80s, and wrote a book with him titled “The Colored Waiting Room” about Nelson’s life and the American civil rights movement. Nelson relayed an interesting anecdote to me regarding a debate Dr. King had inside his barbershop with a sociology professor.

Nelson told me that King said to the professor, “Morality is one of the strongest forces in the American family.” The professor disagreed with King and said, “I beg your pardon, sir, but I believe that economics is the strongest force in the American family.” The professor went on to say, “When the Europeans came to this country, one of the first things they did was build the top universities in the New England area to educate themselves. When they got oranges in Florida, sugar cane in Louisiana, oil in Texas, grapes in California and tobacco in Virginia, they built Wall Street to control the capital, and then they built West Point to defend it.” He ended by saying, “That is the United States of America.”

Nelson reminded me that just before King was murdered, he began to speak out more publicly about economic injustice and inequality. He famously wrote: “No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages.”