Martin Luther King Jr.’s Freedom Budget, aiming to abolish poverty, deserves renewed attention today.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. warned in an essay written shortly before his assassination on April 4, 1968, that turbulence and anxiety in a profoundly unequal and divided country could lead to a circumstance where “we’ll end up with a kind of rightwing takeover in the cities and a Fascist development, which will be terribly injurious to the whole nation.”

To address the crisis, King declared, “We need an economic bill of rights.”

This is a message that is vital to remember today. With labor allies and top economists, King went to the White House in 1965 and 1966 to outline a “Freedom Budget For All Americans,” which sought these results over 10 years:

1. To provide full employment for all who are willing and able to work, including those who need education or training to make them willing and able.

2. To assure decent and adequate wages to all who work.

3. To assure a decent living standard to those who cannot or should not work.

4. To wipe out slum ghettos and provide decent homes for all Americans.

5. To provide decent medical care and adequate educational opportunities to all Americans, at a cost they can afford.

6. To purify our air and water and develop our transportation and natural resources on a scale suitable to our growing needs.

7. To unite sustained full employment with sustained full production and high economic growth.

The Freedom Budget was a visionary document that declared, in labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s words, that “we meet on a common ground of determination that in this, the richest and most productive society ever known to man, the scourge of poverty can and must be abolished – not in some distant future, not in this generation, but in the next 10 years!”

Their work of the 1960s remains unfinished in the 2020s.

Amid the wreckage of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, it is vital to understand that there was nothing particularly radical about the plan. It was a modest investment in the agenda that King argued was necessary to avert the societal divisions, violence and fascist threats that were on the minds of the civil rights leader more than 50 years ago – and that are on the minds of Americans today.

Democrats had power in the mid-1960s, but failed to realize the full promise of King’s stirring plea: “to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

King’s language was poetic, yet he spoke of a practical agenda. There are those who call today for dialing back the bold agendas outlined by progressive leaders. They dismiss talk of abolishing poverty as fiscally unrealistic and utopian. But lawmakers and pundits who are pushing for a more cautious and piecemeal approach would do well to consider King’s counsel.

He warned in 1966: “The Freedom Budget is essential if we are to maintain social peace. It is a political necessity.”

JOHN NICHOLS is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation.