I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear. This week on Moorersing Company,

we hear from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Taylor Branch, and the father of Black Liberation

Theology, James Cohn, on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Economic Bill of Rights

for all Americans.

Freedom from fear is the necessary freedom to get the civil rights, to get the jobs, to get work against poverty,

even though the odds may be against you.

If you can deal with race and the fundamental denial of common

humanity through race, then it opens up possibilities. And the poet Kyle Dargin. The

idea of a more perfect union, I love that because it suggests rightfully so,

that it's not perfect now.

Thanks for joining us.

You may think you know about Martin Luther King Jr., but there is much about the man and his message we have conveniently forgotten.

He was a prophet like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah of old, calling kings and plutocrats to account

speaking truth to power.

Yet he was only 39 when he was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.

The march on Washington in 63 and the march from Selma to Montgomery in 65 were behind him. So was passage of the Civil

Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. In the last year of his life, as he moved toward Memphis

and fate, he announced what he called the Poor People's Campaign, a multiracial

army that would come to Washington, build an encampment, and demand from Congress

and economic bill of rights for all Americans, black, white, or brown. He had long known

that the fight for racial equality could not be separated from the need for economic equity,

fairness for all, including working people and the poor. That's why

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