Today in Washington DC, the new memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was dedicated in a ceremony and his legacy heralded with speeches and parades. At the same time, Occupy DC and Stop the Machine marched against corporate and financial malfeasance, social inequities and war. Walking in the warm sun, we approached the Washington Monument chanting Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Main Street! Occupy everywhere and never give it back! as other marchers, demanding jobs and racial justice converged with us to mutual cheers and together we merged into the crowds already gathered around a stage by the monument.

It was a heartwarming celebration of Dr. King’s legacy.

In the last months of his life, Dr. King publicly connected the dots between racism, economic injustice, and war. In the months leading up to his assassination in April 1968, Dr King was increasingly critical of the war in Viet Nam, speaking publicly against the war for the first time in 1967. He was moving steadily toward a more radical critique in the truest sense of the word: getting to the root of social evils, which King began to see as unequal economic power.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation invited Dr. King to give the annual Massey Lectures, which were broadcast in November and December 1967. In his lectures (published in book form as The Trumpet of Conscience), King explained his newfound outspokenness against the war; he saw funding for anti-poverty programs being diverted to a military build-up in Viet Nam. He said: “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continues to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube.” Dr King continued: “And so I was increasingly compelled to see the war not only as a moral outrage but also as an enemy of the poor, and to attack it as such.” The war in Viet Nam, King went on to say, “was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily higher proportions relative to the rest of the population… I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

“The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.”

Dr. King concluded the CBC broadcast by describing what was to become the Poor People’s Campaign, an undertaking of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Poor People’s Campaign was envisioned as being the largest, most extensive civil disobedience operation yet seen. King referred to this economic justice movement as the second phase of the civil rights movement. Using the nonviolent direct action tactics that characterized the first phase, Dr. King wanted to focus the nation’s attention on economic inequality and poverty. In the same way that the movement had drawn attention to racial injustice and forced the hand of legislators and politicians, King sought to evoke a citizen’s movement for an economic bill of rights, which included a thirty million dollar anti-poverty package, a commitment to full employment, and increased construction of low-cost housing.

The Poor People’s Campaign was going to bring a “multiracial army of poor people” to Washington DC to build–guess what?–a tent city on the Mall and paralyze the nation’s capital with acts of civil disobedience until the federal government redirected funds from the war in Viet Nam to this effort to abolish poverty. To his fellow members of the SCLC, King described this upcoming movement as a “question of restructuring the whole of the American economy.” He called for the nationalization of certain industries. “It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters,” King said in a trip to Mississippi in February 1968, “but now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”

This deliberately mulitcultural coalition would bring together not only poor people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but all of those citizens who were dreaming of a new society, all Americans who envisioned a more just and equitable social order. It would be the culmination and fulfillment of the social change that the civil rights movement, the first phase, had begun.

Dr. King was of course assassinated in April 1968, while helping to lead a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. He didn’t live to see the Poor People’s Campaign, which went ahead despite his murder. Demonstrators arrived in Washington DC in May 1968 and were housed in tents and shacks which they called Resurrection City. Without King’s charismatic leadership, however, and because so many legislators were and indeed President Johnson was so alienated by King’s criticism of the war, and because it was suddenly overshadowed by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Poor People’s Campaign packed up in June 1968 without much success.

It was more comfortable, for most Americans, to decry injustices in the Southern states. Looking more closely at poverty and economic justice in their own backyard was more difficult, more demanding, more costly and most would rather look the other way. Dr. King’s economic justice campaign did not galvanize them in the same way. King increasingly came under fire from former allies as well as critics for his outspokenness against the war, for going beyond civil rights to create more far reaching social change.

The Poor People’s Campaign has largely faded from the historical memory and is the most overlooked aspect of Dr. King’s legacy. Today, with the Occupy DC and Stop the Machine tent cities camped in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, respectively, it felt like Dr. King’s vision for a campaign to end economic injustice had been resurrected. I somehow felt that the work to which Dr. King was devoting himself in the last months of his life was coming alive. This was precisely the kind of movement he was building when he was murdered. It has become easy to pay lip service to the hero, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and honor him with statues, memorials and a national holiday. An important part of his living legacy, however, is in the Resurrection Cities of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Preachers frequently give their listeners the sermons that they themselves need to hear. I recently preached a sermon on the power of nonviolence and the courage of being a true practitioner of Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha, or soul-force. I said: Would I camp out in Tahrir Square? How about Wall Street? There are moments in our lives when the question of what we are living for becomes more urgent.

I am living such a moment in my life today. I have been watching with interest the growing protests on Wall Street, and have been going down to Boston’s financial district to show my support for Occupy Boston (where I was especially pleased that the Peace Abby loaned the protesters a statue of Mahatma Gandhi for their encampment). I have been studying and thinking about economic justice, and watched the online gurgling before the gush of protests burst out. Occupy Wall Street was suggested by the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters on its Web site in July, and before that, a group calling itself Stop the Machine was organizing a broad-based coalition to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in a Tahrir Square-like protest. This group committed itself to arriving en masse in Washington on the tenth anniversary of the US war in Afghanistan (October 6) if we still had troops in that country on that date. They were making the connection between the military-industrial complex, corporate influence on policy makers, social inequities at home and the seemingly never-ending wars overseas. As a passing thought, it occurred to me I could go to Washington DC and participate.

This historic moment now presses me with its urgency. I ask myself what I am willing to do. How am I going to live my convictions about justice, equity and compassion? Would I stop cursing at the newscast and actually get off of the couch and do something? The dictates of my conscience and the leadings of the Spirit are urging me to get up.

The courage of the young people in Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston ignited something in me, something between nostalgia and hope—nostalgia (when I was a youth, I camped out on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, protesting nuclear armaments and cruise missile testing in Canada) as homesickness for my own youth, and hope that a movement toward positive change was actually happening. Hope should not be the exclusive domain of the young, I decided, and cynicism is the logic of the chronically complacent.

I’ve written letters and made phone calls. I’ve given my time and treasure. I have attempted to be a witness, in the pulpit, to my faith and hope. The time has come for me to take my witness to the street. Protest movements (though not the be-all and end-all of social change) have their place, and I believe I have a place in this one.

I am joining the protests because we are shoveling our national treasure into the burning furnaces of endless war. At Occupy Boston, they chanted: Want to fix the deficit? Stop the wars! Tax the rich! The billions of dollars we are spending annually on warfare could be building schools and paying teachers, rebuilding infrastructure and creating jobs. Our armed forces and their families (mostly middle and working class folks) are disproportionately making sacrifices for these wars, and the middle class is paying for them. Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and tax loopholes for corporations have insured that the financial cost of the wars is being borne by middle class Americans. This does not seem fair to me. I am joining the protests because I want the so-called Bush-era tax cuts (they are now actually the Obama tax cuts) for the wealthy to be repealed.  I am joining the protests because I think sacrifices must be borne more fairly, the loopholes should be closed, and hiding funds offshore should be prohibited. I am joining the protests because I personally paid more taxes than General Electric did last year.

I am joining the protests because I want the Wall Street financiers who broke the law to be investigated and prosecuted. They helped cause the 2008 financial crisis and are not being held accountable while millions of middle and working class Americans are suffering because of their misdeeds. The protesters cry: They got bailed out; we got sold out! I called Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley (at 617-727-2200) and asked her to refuse any settlement deal that would give big banks wide immunity from investigation and prosecution. And I think more pressure needs to be brought to bear, especially on the Obama administration, made up as it is of many former barons of Wall Street. I am joining the protests because I think this kind of revolving door between industry and government is detrimental to public policy and the rule of law. I believe steps need to be taken to limit the influence of lobbyists and industry insiders in writing legislation.  I believe the right of former government regulators to work for the corporations or industries they once regulated needs to be curtailed.

I am joining the protests because I believe the Glass-Steagall regulations need to be reinstated. I believe the Securities Exchange Commission should be given stricter regulatory powers. I think the Citizens United decision of the US Supreme Court needs to be overturned—and I want to support the efforts that have begun to introduce a Constitutional amendment, as cumbersome as that is, to reverse this decision that gave corporations and unions the status of personhood and granted them First Amendment rights of free speech, opening the floodgates of unrestricted spending on political campaigns by these “persons.” I am joining the protests because I want to see campaign finance reform, including the passage of the Fair Elections Now Act.

For good measure, I believe the Consumer Protection Bureau should be strengthened, and compassionate aid should be provided for foreclosed homeowners that were victims of predatory lending. I would like to see basic financial literacy taught to people from across the class strata so that all citizens are equipped to make good choices about mortgages, credit card debt and managing household finances. I believe the “circle of protection” around social programs (including Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security) needs to be reinforced in all discussions of government spending, and that US Senator John Kerry and other members of the US Congress “Super Committee” need to be told so in no uncertain terms. Housing, health care and higher education are becoming less affordable to more people—both because of spiraling costs and depressed wages. I am joining the protests because the growing social inequities in US society are deeply disturbing to me and I think are detrimental to the health of our democracy.

I know the protesters have been criticized for not having demands, and for being incoherent (though I’m not sure “demands” are what they are about). But when I think about the issues that have brought them out onto the public squares of America, I see a tangle of interconnected issues—a corporate and military-industrial-complex stranglehold on government pushing us into expensive wars that are unduly being paid for by middle and working class Americans—who are being actively and increasingly impoverished—and, fired by an engine of unlimited growth, devouring our finite planet, rendering it uninhabitable. I can only speak for myself and for what motivates me, and I hope I have articulated here a sense of what—for me—these protests are all about, as multifaceted as it is. And why I feel compelled to put my voice and my body onto the public square in support of what I see as basic issues of fairness.

I am in Washington DC for several days participating in the Freedom Plaza protest. I don’t expect everybody who reads this to agree with me or join me. I think we can have a robust conversation about these issues—that is what Occupy Wall Street is about. How do you answer the question: How are we to be together as a nation and society, with fairness, prosperity and democracy the markers of our common life? I am answering the Inward Light in my actions in what I understand to be the best way I can.

One percent of the population of the United States controls upwards of a third of the country’s wealth and have a disproportionate influence on public policy and the exercise of the rule of law. The protesters insist: We are the 99% and this seems to me like the vital call of the democratic spirit.

They cry out: We are the 99%! And we are too big to fail!