In 1968, a united black community in
Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300 municipal sanitation workers
as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for black
personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized
tenant and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor
and black children. They demanded rights to food and medical care from a city
and medical establishment blind to their existence.
That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots
organizations met in Atlanta to support Martin Luther King’s dream of a
poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for
economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the
“determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights.
“Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited
poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious
and racial groups,” the delegates declared.
So when King came to Memphis to support the
strike, a local labor and community struggle became intertwined with
his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong enough to reorient
national priorities from imperial war in Vietnam to domestic
reconstruction, especially in America’s riot-torn cities. To non-poor
Americans, King called for a “revolution of values,” a move from
self-seeking to service, from property rights to human rights.
