> In Martin Luther King's day, the line was that all that was needed was equality of opportunity.
If you actually read and/or listen to King's speeches and writings, rather than just passively consume the propaganda image constructed by exactly the forces King railed against, you would know that it wasn't, at least not the way you seem to be thinking. King explicitly saw as necessary radical redistribution to acheive much greater equality of material condition (see, e.g., the “Three Evils” speech); he did not buy into the idea that material conditions that are the outcome of systems of distribution of scarce resources could be cleanly severed from “opportunity”, such that you could have even rough equality of the latter with gross inequality of the former.
If you actually read and/or listen to King's speeches and writings, rather than just passively consume the propaganda image constructed by exactly the forces King railed against, you would know that it wasn't, at least not the way you seem to be thinking. King explicitly saw as necessary radical redistribution to acheive much greater equality of material condition (see, e.g., the “Three Evils” speech); he did not buy into the idea that material conditions that are the outcome of systems of distribution of scarce resources could be cleanly severed from “opportunity”, such that you could have even rough equality of the latter with gross inequality of the former.