During a heavy rainstorm in Memphis on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers had been crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of the trash truck was accidentally triggered. On the same day in a separate incident also related to the inclement weather, 22 black sewer workers had been sent home without pay while their white supervisors were retained for the day with pay. About two weeks later, on February 12, more than 1,100 of a possible 1,300 black sanitation workers began a strike for job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition. Mayor Henry Loeb, unsympathetic to most of the workers' demands, was especially opposed to the union. Black and white civic groups in Memphis tried to resolve the conflict, but the mayor held fast to his position.
As the strike lengthened, support for the strikers within the black community of Memphis grew. Organizations such as COME (Community on the Move for Equality) established food and clothing banks in churches, took up collections for strikers to meet rent and mortgages, and recruited marchers for frequent demonstrations. King's participation in forming a city-wide boycott to support the striking workers was invited by the Reverend James Lawson, pastor of the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis and an adviser to the strikers. Lawson was a seasoned veteran of the civil rights movement and an experienced trainer of activists in the philosophy and methods of nonviolent resistance.
Those are two paragraphs of Teaching With Documents:
Court Documents Related to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Memphis Sanitation Workers, the Background, found on the website of the National Archives, in the section for Teachers called Teaching with Documents. (since these are US Government documents, there is no issue of copyright violation). In case you did not know, King was in Memphis to help with the strike of the Sanitation workers when he was assassinated, 43 years ago this evening, which is why today is an appropriate day to show support for those government workers - municipal and state - who wish to be unionized.
Allow me to offer a bit more about King in Memphis.
It was a logical extension of King's work to assist with this effort. At the time he was in the midst of planning the Poor People's Campaign, itself an extension of his understanding that the rights of African-Americans required economic equality as well as political equality.
Remember, I am quoting from an official Government website, where we read
King, building on the tradition of civil disobedience and passive resistance earlier expressed by Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi, waged a war of nonviolent direct action against opposing forces of racism and prejudice that were embodied in the persons of local police, mayors, governors, angry citizens, and night riders of the Ku Klux Klan.
King was committed to supporting the campaign. He spoke to a rally on March 18, and promised to lead a large demonstration on March 28. Unfortunately that event saw some violence as a group of rowdy students at the end of the parade chose break the windows of local businesses. There was some looting. The March was halted, but dozens were injured and one looter was killed.
This episode prompted the city of Memphis to bring a formal complaint in the District Court against King, Hosea Williams, James Bevel, James Orange, Ralph Abernathy, and Bernard Lee, King's associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
King and his companions negotiated with the disagreeing factions in Memphis. He was upset at the violence that had ensued. For those who saw the movie Gandhi, it is not dissimilar when Gandhi threatened to suspend the campaign for independence for India when violence had broken out at one of the demonstrations: Gandhi wondered if this meant they were not yet ready for their own nation.
In this case the SCLC intensified the training in non-violence, Lawson and Andrew young negotiated with the judge who had issued the restraining order sought by City, and got permission for another March, to take place on April 8. To quote again from the website:
The details of the agreement would be put into place the next day, April 5.
This was the message that Young conveyed to King as they were getting ready to go out to dinner. Moments later, on that evening of April 4, 1968, as King stepped out of his motel room to join his colleagues for dinner, he was assassinated.
At the web page you will find images of documents from the case. Among these are
a flyer distributed to sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, asking them to "March for Justice and Jobs." Included are directions for the route to be followed and instructions to the marchers to use "soul-force which is peaceful, loving, courageous, yet militant."
There is also a flyer
requesting volunteer assistance and offering instructions to sanitation workers and their sympathizers for the duration of a strike.
In this 2nd (of three) one reads things like stopping subscriptions to the local newspaper but continuing to pay one's local carrier his subcription, and also these words:
Do not buy new things for Easter. Let our Lent be one of sacrifices. what better way to remembe Jesus' work for us and the world?
I quote that to remind people that King's work was absolutely rooted in his faith and his ministry. King knew his history, that early Christianity was rooted among the have nots of Roman Society. He certainly knew the words of Matthew 25 about these the least of my brethren. He understood that economic dignity was an essential part of human dignity. He certainly understood and demonstrated that collective action, PEACEFUL collective action, was an important step in the direction of obtaining that dignity, so long denied to so many.
So long as King only advocated for Negroes as 2nd class citizens, he was an annoyance, but not as much of a threat to the organization of society. When he opposed Vietnam, when he embarked on the Poor People's Campaign, some question what he was doing. Yet he saw all of his work as a seamless garment, like the Robe which the Gospel says could not be divided among his executioners. It was a seamless garment, because one cannot divide up the rights and dignity of persons as if some are more important than others. There is, or should be, dignity in all work, and no matter the task the workers are entitled to respect.
Sanitation Workers. The les pleasant description is garbagemen. One of the least pleasant yet most necessary tasks for the health of an urbanized society. They, too, were entitled to respect. They, too, had and should be shown dignity.
One might say that among American workers the Black garbagemen on whose behalf King was laboring at the time of his death were the least of our brethren.
In our time the rights of workers, the dignity of what they do, is under severe attack. It is not just the actions of Governors like those of Wisconsin and elsewhere who seek to take away rights and deny dignity to government workers. It is also a society that seems willing to tolerate the destruction of the middle class, the replacement of high paying jobs with jobs insufficient to support a family. It matters not if one is a sanitation worker or nurse or teacher in a government job, or a foundry worker or an auto worker or a retail worker in the private sector. If these our brethren are treated as less than fully worthy of rights including those of decent pay, if their right to organize for better pay and better conditions is to be eliminated so that the already wealthy and powerful can obtain even more wealth, we will cease to be a liberal democracy and become a banana republic. The health of a society should be measured not by the wellbeing of those at the top but by that of those at the bottom.
43 years ago this evening Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while striving for the rights of the least among us. How appropriate that today many will remember that event by demonstrating for the rights of so many of us, including the right to organize, including the right to collective bargaining, including all the rights necessary to obtaining and maintaining dignity in the very work we do, work that sustains our society and our nation.
Today I remember Martin Luther King Junior by being a public school teacher.
Today I will take time to make sure my students know who King was, a person far beyond the parts of a speech given in 1964 that are often repeated.
Today they will be reminded or learn what he was doing when he was assassinated.
I teach. That is my witness. That is my commitment to all of my brethren.
I learned that from many, but especially from the life and work of King.
What about you.