capital. Say, he sits down with the Democrats and says "Look; moving folks around clearly dosen't work, but we've got such poor schools our kids are never going to thrive if they stay, and just busing them to you would lead to overcrowding. So, let's send over our instructors and some of our money instead."
Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had been arguing your later point for decades before MLK stepped onto the scene, and the result was desegregation. The states had decided that it was better to desegregate the schools because it would be easier for whites to move than for blacks to do the same. In only a few cases did states determine that they would establish “separate but equal” facilities, and even the courts determined those moves weren’t enough (see Texas Southern University’s law school). Martin Luther King simply saying to Democrats like Richard Daley, “We’ll hush on busing, but send our kids better textbooks,” wasn’t going to make much of a difference, especially in the Midwest and North. By 1968, Pandora’s jar had been opened in regards to integration as we know it, and those trends wouldn’t be reversed.
Now where Dr. King would’ve been able to impact on the issue of poverty, education and housing is if he took the Poor People’s Campaign to it’s natural conclusion – the mass organization of African Americans across the country: unions for welfare recipients, strong neighborhood associations in housing projects in the inner cities, and active parent-teacher associations in black schools. I even see King advocating for increasing participation by African Americans in the AFL-CIO, or calling for African Americans to break away from the unions as white working class voters grew more uncomfortable with the advances made by minorities.
