2027 Commemoration Theme

Economic Justice: The Unfinished Work

The 1963 gathering we remember for Dr. King's dream had a fuller name: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights and economic rights were never separate struggles. The right to sit at a lunch counter meant little, he argued, to someone who couldn't afford the meal. 

In the last years of his life, King made economic justice central to his work. In 1966 he moved his family into a West Side Chicago apartment to confront slum housing, exploitative landlords, and housing discrimination through the Chicago Freedom Movement. He called for a guaranteed income and full employment, and he named poverty alongside racism and militarism as intertwined evils. He was organizing the Poor People's Campaign, a multiracial coalition demanding an economic bill of rights, when he traveled to Memphis to stand with striking Black sanitation workers who were demanding fair wages, safe conditions, and recognition of their dignity. He was killed there in April 1968. His economic vision is one of his most important legacies, and one of the least finished. 

This year’s theme, Economic Justice, invites us to consider that unfinished work—and the forms it takes in our lives today. 

The questions King raised are still our questions. They show up in rent and housing costs, in wages and working conditions, in who can see a doctor or put food on the table, in the racial wealth gap, and in how new technologies are reshaping work. They are close to home, too. Evanston became the first U.S. city to fund reparations for housing discrimination, a local effort to reckon with how economic harm is built and passed down. 

Higher education is part of this story. Universities promise economic mobility, and they also shape who can afford to enter, how much debt people carry out, how work on campus is valued, and how institutions relate to the neighborhoods around them. As Northwestern marks 175 years, the commemoration invites us to ask honest questions about who has access, who does the work, and who benefits, and to imagine what an institution committed to economic justice might look like. 

King’s work reminds us that commemoration can be more than remembering. It can also be an opportunity to study, question, practice, create, and act. This year we invite the Northwestern and Evanston communities to do more than learn about economic justice. We invite you to practice it: to gather, to question, to create, to serve, and to build something together. 

Economic justice is not only a question of what people have. It is a question of what people are able to do, become, build, and imagine.