It’s easy to accuse an activist like the Rev. Lennox Yearwood of overreaching when he calls the battle to make retail behemoth Wal-Mart do right by inner-city people the “lunch-counter moment for the 21st century.”
 
Thing is, though, the brother has a point.

Yearwood, who is CEO of Hip Hop Caucus, a Washington D.C. group that works to give the hip-hop generation a voice in their future, made that comment during a recent conference call with a group of urban activists who are worried that this country is drifting farther away from Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of ending poverty in the richest nation in the world. They are especially concerned that the nation’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart, which pays wages so low that some of its workers qualify for food stamps and other public benefits, has its sights on expanding into job-strapped communities. The company, they say, is more about further exploiting the misery of the people who live there rather than help lift them out of it.

Yearwood believes now, as it was in the 1960s with Woolworth’s segregation, the issue isn’t just about a convenient job or cheap shopping. And he’s right. Back in the day, black people could shop at Woolworth’s. They could even buy a hot dog at Woolworth’s. But they couldn’t eat it there.

So that hot dog came at the cost of their dignity.

But the way Yearwood and a number of other civil rights and political leaders see it, black communities will be forced to put their dignity on the line again if Wal-Mart has its way. A new report by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy -- the group that helped Inglewood, Calif., fight Wal-Mart’s plans to build a store there -- and the Partnership for Working Families decries its business strategy for expanding into black communities. Much of that strategy entails massive public relations campaigns and giving money to ministers, politicians and charities -- who tend to be all too happy to persuade the masses of black people who live there that they have no choice but to accept a low-wage existence.

That’s too bad. Because they ought to at least try to see their constituents through the lens of potential rather than through the prism of hopelessness. They ought to be driving the terms for Wal-Mart’s move into their communities, not the other way around. They ought to be trying to do what Martin Luther King Jr. tried to do when he was alive: Appeal to conscience, not acquiesce to greed.

When it comes to Wal-Mart and greed, there’s a lot to work with.

Like many other people, I used to wonder why activists made such a fuss about injustice at Wal-Mart. The reason is simple. Wal-Mart rakes in nearly $300 billion annually, and the family that owns it, the Waltons, is worth billions.

When a company is that huge, it can afford to transcend profit motives to set the right ethical and humanitarian standards. What’s more is that it can afford to do so. Companies much smaller than Wal-Mart pay living wages and decent benefits and manage to stay in business. There’s no reason why any of its workers ought to have to rely on public assistance to make ends meet.

That’s the thing that black community leaders ought to keep in mind when dealing with Wal-Mart. They also need to understand that as bad as the employment picture is in their communities, they do have some leverage. Wal-Mart is running out of places to build, so in a sense, urban communities are a last frontier.

Most of all, like Yearwood, black leaders need to remember their history. They need to remember that for a long time, black people accepted and lived with indignity just to survive. It wasn’t right then, and it isn’t right now. If an infusion of jobs can’t be a vehicle to help struggling inner-city people reclaim their dignity by helping to lift them out of poverty, then, in the long run, not much will change. And instead of giving Wal-Mart a pass for giving money to them or other groups, those leaders would do well to realize that charity is one thing.

Justice is another.