Is a Guaranteed $24K Job Really the Future? | Brazil's Best Instagram Spot

William Darity Jr., a Duke University professor, has pushed the idea of a federal jobs guarantee into the mainstream.

If there’s some future day when the federal government guarantees a quality job to everyone who wants one, an increasingly popular notion as we arrive at the 10-year anniversary of the global financial crisis, historians can trace the program back to a guy who plays the blues harmonica.

William Darity Jr. is an economist and the director of Duke University’s Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity. He's authored or co-authored hundreds of economics journal articles, not to mention a microeconomics textbook. And even more striking than the volume of this musically minded economist’s scholarly output are the questions he’s chosen to explore.

With the march approaching in the summer of 1963, some of the most powerful men in America tried to take it, and its organizer, down.

Martin Luther King Jr. may have supplied the spirit of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, but the organizational muscle behind the landmark civil rights demonstration was provided by a 53-year-old Quaker from Pennsylvania named Bayard Rustin.

For nearly two months before the March in August 1963, Rustin, its chief organizer, chain-smoked his way through constant meetings and telephone conversations, presiding over every aspect of the planned march.

Rustin, Dr. King’s mentor in nonviolence, was in many ways a force of nature when it came to fighting injustice. But the man who could tame the police — and who many fellow activists thought would become the “American Gandhi” — had an Achilles’ heel, at least given the time in which he lived.

This nearly deserted area welcomes you to the farthest reaches of the city and delights with its wildness and photo ops.

The stand-up paddleboard glides over the murky estuary water. Clusters of oysters cling to the arched roots of the surrounding mangroves. A watery “plop” puts my senses on alert. Could that have been an alligator, I ask my instructor, Leonardo Henrique Souza dos Santos (known as Leo). “No, you won’t find alligators here,” he laughs, before adding seriously, “They’re all in Recreio.”

Recreio is a district in Rio de Janeiro that borders the Barra de Guaratiba neighborhood, where I was stand-up paddling. Located 56 kilometers from the city’s downtown, it’s one of the westernmost points and geographically the southernmost point of Rio. It’s also a world apart from the city’s iconic regions — like the famous Copacabana Beach, where skyrise buildings line the famous sands and samba-fueled parties last all night. Instead, Barra de Guaratiba is made up of forest-covered mountains, empty white beaches and immense hiking trails. And did we mention a stellar Instagram spot?