In what he described as a “solemn” speech at the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Black History Month event, economist Darrick Hamilton, PhD, called President Donald Trump’s popularity a “symptom” of a bipartisan economy that has failed to promote security and prosperity for most Americans.
“Trump’s continued electoral success lays bare our nation’s vulnerability, our fears, and our divisions,” Hamilton said Feb. 6 during his keynote, “Fulfilling Dr. King’s Legacy from Civil Rights to Economic Rights: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies to Fulfill Economic and Racial Justice.”
Musician Makai Guest plays "Lift Every Voice And Sing."
Hamilton, the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, a private college in New York City, said King warned about the deterioration of America’s economic and social integrity decades ago.
“President Trump’s playbook leveraged a tried-and-tested tool: a political and economic appeal to relative status,” said Hamilton, referring to when individuals compare their wealth and standing to others in society.
“An accurate impetus for Trump’s staying power is the result of a larger truth: that when people are economically insecure, they become increasingly vulnerable to the narratives and the promises that honing in on relative status offers to them. Appeals to relative status are effective precisely because they tap into economic grievance, precarity, and loss.”
(View a photo gallery below.)
He said the bipartisan economy, fueled partly by financial sector bailouts, has deprived people of the necessary economic resources to thrive.
“While Trump absorbs our attention with feuds grounded in our differences, both economic and political power continue to consolidate amongst the top while excluding and mitigating our collective action to address our looming and evident existential crises, such as the climate catastrophes that we face, migrant crises, and violent global conflicts which still plague our planet,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton said the racial wealth gap, which has its genesis in slavery, has largely remained unchanged.
“Race and social identity in general have been weaponized to strategically generate hierarchy and propel systems of poverty, stratification, and persistent inequality,” he said. “The empirical reality is that race-based disparities persist and even widen with higher socioeconomic attainment.”
He said he studied the racial wealth gap in Baltimore by incarceration status. He called the gap “dramatic” and said it was no surprise that those who had been incarcerated have less wealth than those who haven’t.
“But the combination of being Black and not having experience in a carceral system is associated with less wealth than being white and having experience with the carceral system,” he said. “Studying hard, working hard, playing by the rules does not address the socially established structures that persist.”
Hamilton said America doesn’t empower poor people and instead manages them as a surplus population: It socially isolates them, conscripts them to the military, incarcerates them, and implements policies to control their reproduction and fertility.
“They are characterized as persistently unemployed and unemployable, a source of urban crime and malice, and whose subsistence need we deem as drains on our fiscal budget,” he said. “This fuels the rationality of, why fund government agencies and programs which at best misallocate resources to irresponsible individuals, or worse, create dependencies to further fuel irresponsible behaviors? It feeds into a proverbial American narrative that through hard work and effort, individuals could turn their proverbial rags to riches.
“If Black people would only engage in more productive behaviors and habits, we would be able to capture a greater share of America’s vast wealth. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.
Hamilton pointed out the groups that possess the wealth and power in America have long been shaped by the government. He used examples from the 19th century: fugitive slave laws and enshrined racial structures that defined ownership as well as the government’s displacement of Indigenous people from their homelands and the transfer of those lands for free to the white middle class.
“From the beginning of our American project, our government has proactively shaped our economy, determining who reaps the benefits of our capital flows and our economic prosperity,” he said. “There’s no amount of individual economic effort that can overturn century-long programs of resource hoarding amongst the wealthy and the powerful few.”
‘Profound Legacy of Unfinished Work’
Hamilton said that by the late 1960s, King emphasized the connections among economic rights, freedom, and racial justice. King called for a federal job guarantee, guaranteed income, and reparations for Black Americans and had just launched his Poor People’s Campaign before his assassination.
“Tragically, and perhaps not coincidentally, King’s life was cut short in 1968 before the phase of this vision, with an emphasis on economic rights, could fully be realized, leaving a profound legacy of unfinished work that we need to accomplish,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton concluded that King knew decades ago how to stand against “the conditions that facilitated Donald Trump’s strong-man breed of divisive politics”: by building movements and organizations that fight “an economy grounded in despair, risk, insecurity, and a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots.”
“Now is always the time to build on the lessons of Dr. King and shift our prevailing paradigm toward a more inclusive and self-prosperous future with the strategic direction of our public resources toward people and a sustainable environment in both an industrial and economic sense,” he said. “In the end, the optimistic message is that the power lies within us.”
‘I See You’
UMB Provost and Executive Vice President Roger J. Ward, EdD, JD, MPA, MSL, opened the event by greeting the crowd with “Sawubona,” which means “I see you” in Zulu.
“I’m affirming your value, your dignity, and your place in this shared moment,” he said before quoting King: “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”
“We are called not only to remember his words, but to live them, to see one another fully, to stand for justice, and to recognize that our collective well-being is intertwined,” Ward said. “At UMB, we are deeply committed to advancing equity, justice, and opportunity, principles that Dr. King championed throughout his life. Our core values challenge us to think critically about our own roles in this ongoing work. How do we as individuals contribute to a more equitable and just society? How do we as an institution use our collective power to drive meaningful change? Black History Month is not just about looking back at progress; it is about recommitting ourselves to the hard but important work that still lies ahead.”
After Hamilton’s speech, Lady Brion, MFA, a spoken-word artist and the state of Maryland’s poet laureate, performed several of her works including “Two Baltimores,” about the different realities residents face depending on their ZIP code.
The event also honored UMB’s 2025 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Diversity Recognition Award winners: student group, Initiative for Maximizing Student Development; faculty group, EMBRACE Initiative; staff group, School of Social Work team that leads efforts around advancing access and championing fairness.
UMB recognized two Community Champion of Equity and Justice Award winners: Kevin Ricks, founder and chief executive officer of Lee Lee Kiddz, and Baltimore Racial Justice Action, an anti-racism and anti-oppression nonprofit.