by Thomas F. Jackson
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.
