Right now, the focus of many is on the upcoming party conventions. In such an environment, important things can sometimes escape notice. One such is what I present here.

The night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King delivered his Mountaintop speech. Buried deeply within it -and the likely cause of the order to kill him being issued- was an economic strategy he proposed to his people:

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now we are poor people, individually we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it. (Yeah) [Applause]

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight (Amen) to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. (Yeah) [Applause] Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. (Yeah)[Applause] Tell them not to buy–what is the other bread?–Wonder Bread. [Applause] And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. [Applause] As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now only the garbage men have been feeling pain. Now we must kind of redistribute that pain. [Applause] We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies, and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right. (That's right, Speak) [Applause]

Now not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. (That's right, Yeah) I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. (Yeah) [Applause] We want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. (Yes) Go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we don't do ourselves in SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We are telling you to follow what we're doing, put your money there. [Applause] You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in." [Applause] Now these are some practical things that we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base, and at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. (There you go) And I ask you to follow through here. [Applause]

From "I Have Been To The Mountaintop"

This strategy was lost the next day with the assassination. Yet the details of this speech remain essentially valid. Collectively, Black people still constitute a large economic block, enhanced by the major increase in earnings Black sports and media stars can now command. This power has largely gone unwielded.

I happened across this article while looking up something else:

A nearly century-old black-owned bank in Atlanta has seen a flash flood of new customers after a celebrity rapper called for African-Americans to pair their protests with their dollars.

Atlanta’s Citizen’s Trust reportedly received thousands of new accounts and inquiries since Atlanta rapper Michael Render, better known as Killer Mike, angrily reacted to the recent police shooting deaths of two black men in Minnesota and Louisiana by calling during a radio interview for African-Americans to move their money to black-owned banks.

[snip]

According to various news accounts on television and online, the Atlanta bank got more than 8,000 new deposit accounts in less than a week.

This is the only way people are going to get the attention of the money piranhas who exploit us and plunder our assets for their own personal gain. Race doesn't matter, gender doesn't matter, Orientation doesn't matter. But money does matter to these people, who at the very least are agents of the 1% if not members, and when money talks, they listen. If you want something, move your money. THEN maybe you might be willing to talk once they act on your behalf.

It's been a long time coming. Too long.

edited for spelling error