Most Americans today know that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, but few know why he was there. King went to Memphis to support African American garbage workers, striking to gain recognition for their union.
He was one of the last survivors of a historic walkout that demanded respect and a living wage and that drew Martin Luther King to their cause.
Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious violence that he and the freedom movement endured. It largely leaves out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor
Throughout his adult life, Martin Luther King Jr believed in striking down not only racial apartheid but class exploitation. That twin commitment was embodied in his final effort: the often-forgotten Poor People’s Campaign.
Karesha Manns is a McDonald's worker in Memphis, Tennessee, in the city where Dr. King was fighting for a living wage when he was assassinated. She makes just $10 an hour; nowhere near enough to cover basic necessities.
Strikes can improve wages and working conditions, but history shows that more formal channels of negotiation are required to resolve the contradictions between society's reliance on public employees and its failure to value their labor.
Reader Comments: Parkland vs. NRA; Trump's Arming of Teachers - Not; Criticism of Pledge to Transform the Resistance, and America; Labor - War on Workers, Labor in the 70s, Janus, West Virginia Teachers on Strike; Science; Sex and Drugs; I AM 2018 - The Fight Continues - Memphis - April 2 - 4; and more.....
Jerry Wurf, the national president of the public workers union American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, considered the Memphis sanitation workers’ protest more than a strike; it became a social struggle, a battle for dignity. Wurf called the strike a “race conflict and a rights conflict.”
Spread the word