http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/04/04/on-anniversary-of-king%E2%80%99s-death-recommit-to-helping-the-poor/ Martin Luther King Jr. addresses striking sanitation workers the day before he was killed in Memphis.
The issues on which Martin Luther King Jr. was working when he was killed 39 years ago today in Memphis are as relevant now as they were then.
King went to Memphis in April 1968 to lend his support to a strike by the almost all-black city sanitation workers, many of whom were standing up against white authority for the first time in their lives and who were demanding recognition of their union, AFSCME Local 1733.
The Memphis sanitation workers strike was about basic human dignity, says Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road (available at The Union Shop Online™), which chronicles events in the strike and King’s assassination. Writes Honey:
King came to Memphis for a simple reason: He was trying to organize poor people, and here were poor people organizing themselves. He had to be there.
As King said the night before his death, addressing the strikers.
You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.
King, a longtime supporter of unions, and the sanitation workers recognized the importance of union membership to lifting black workers out of poverty, says AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Bill Lucy, who was one of the organizers working with the Memphis strikers in 1968.
As Lucy says today:
The workers in the Memphis public works department and I think workers across the South recognized that their future was tied to their ability to organize a union and have a union represent them in the areas of wages, hours and conditions of employment. So no matter how bad the situation was, it would be worse if they were not able to form a union. And as bad as the strike got and as tough as life was, they were not about to give up until they achieved recognition of a union.
Dr. King’s involvement showed he recognized the fact that you had people who worked every single day and yet were not able to raise themselves out of poverty…and that the civil rights struggle and the struggle for workers’ rights are intertwined.
Just in case there’s any doubt that the problem of the working poor still exists, McClatchy Newspapers recently reported the percentage of poor Americans living in severe poverty reached a 32-year high in 2005. Nearly 16 million people were living in severe poverty—families of four with two children making do on less than $9,903 a year or individuals living on less than $5,080.
McClatchy’s analysis of U.S. Census figures found that one-third of the severely poor are younger than 17, and nearly two-thirds are female. Nearly two out of three people (10.3 million) in severe poverty are white, but blacks (4.3 million) and Latinos of any race (3.7 million) make up disproportionate shares.
The Memphis strike began Feb. 12, 1968, after workers were unable to resolve a grievance over the deaths of two co-workers on the job. They won recognition of their union two months later, but not until they had endured attacks by police, bogus arrests and the death of one marcher, as well as insults and other indignities from the white leadership, led by then-Mayor Henry Loeb.
King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, prompted President Lyndon Johnson to send federal troops to Memphis and dispatch the second in command of the Labor Department to mediate the strike. On April 16, just under two weeks after King’s death, the workers reached an agreement with the city. For more information on the Memphis strike, click here.
Both Lucy and Honey, a professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma, say the struggle to lift poor people out of poverty is not just a union struggle. Poverty affects entire communities, they say, and unions are the best way to combat poverty.
“King often said a union is the best anti-poverty program available,” Honey says.
Lucy says the sanitation workers could not have persevered without the support of the local community.
We could not have won the strike in Memphis without the community recognizing that what happened to these men and their fight would ultimately be the lifting or diminution of community-based power, and the union was key to that. The strike reflected the deep-rooted and broad-based problems in the community: the lack of power, the absence from the political process, no structured organizations to reflect the interests of workers or community. That’s why the community instantly recognized that what was playing out in Memphis during this strike were issues that affected poor people everywhere.
People are beginning to understand the true relevance of King’s message today, Honey says, particularly as they learn more about what he was doing in the last years of his life such as opposing the Vietnam War and organizing poor people.
He explained why we have problems in this country, why we pour money into war to make profits for corporations and put so little to help workers. If we really study what King was saying, we can learn great things about how to get our priorities straight.
Lucy agrees, saying the anniversary of King’s death is a time to recommit to the ideas for which he lived:
People say King was one of the great leaders of the 20th century, but we’ve got to get people to follow the same issues he was analyzing and working on. The Poor People’s Campaign was his effort to show America the plight of the working poor. And if there’s a message for today, it’s that we have people across this country working every single day and still can’t raise themselves out of poverty.
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