By Cody Yarbrough
In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis. Normally this is the part of his narrative where the storyteller starts to become reminiscent and somber. Where they begin to speak about his legacy and review his last few speeches as some form of farewell before his untimely departure. In reality, King’s time in Memphis was another important battleground in his lifelong war against oppression.
When we think of Dr. King’s legacy and his role in the civil rights movement, we often only think about his campaign for equal voting rights for Black Americans. But we rarely speak about the cause he was fighting for when he died. Labor rights. To King, civil and labor rights were inseparable, with neither being achievable without the other being realized simultaneously.
He explained this line of thinking in 1961 at a union convention, stating that, “Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”
Statements like this led to King being labeled as a communist and as anti-American. The reverend understood that social equality meant next to nothing without financial equality. Towards the end of his life, he began to focus more and more on advancing the economic prosperity of Black people in America through efforts like the Poor People’s Campaign and his support of labor strikes across the country like in Memphis, TN.
Memphis was embroiled in a massive sanitation workers’ strike. After years of racial discrimination from management and a garbage truck malfunction that killed two Black workers, 1,300 Black sanitation employees formed a union and walked off the job on Feb. 12, 1968.
Their demands were simple. They wanted equal promotion opportunities, an open channel of negation between their union and the city, paid overtime, and – most importantly of all – a pay raise from $1.70 per hour to $2.35. However, then-mayor Henry Loeb had no interest in bending to the demands of a mob of “uppity Negros,” and decided to engage in a weeks-long challenge of attrition in hopes that the unionizers would exhaust their means to live before he exhausted the patience of the citizens of Memphis.
King joined the strikers in the month of March and led a march that resulted in an assault by police officers that left dozens injured and a teenage boy dead. The Reverand Doctor wasn’t shaken by this display of state-sanctioned brutality, though. It wasn’t his first rodeo after all. He would return to Memphis less than a week later to speak with local organizers and rally those in the community still shaken up by the police attack. In what would be his last speech, he preached about unity, class solidarity, resilience, and hope for the future. He even took a moment to call for the community to boycott certain items to show support for the striking workers and put extra pressure on Loeb.
“We are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy Wonder Bread–tell them not to buy Hart’s bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies, and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.”
As fellow civil rights icon Dick Gregory described him in a 2015 MLK Day celebration in Ypsilanti, King was a turtle: hard on the outside, soft on the inside, and willing to stick his neck out. King had no intention of abandoning the sanitation workers in their most crucial hour. The community had received the call to join the fight. City leadership had been called out and notified that violence wouldn’t break the Black workers’ resolve. And his fellow organizers were already cooking up the details for their next demonstration.
And then somebody shot Dr. King.
Fifty-seven years later, his death has taken on an almost mythological status. Some believe he supernaturally knew that his end was near and used his final speech as a subtle way to say goodbye. Others tied his assassination to a grand conspiracy by the U.S. government to eliminate the man who they deemed public enemy No. 1. No matter what you might believe about the assassination of MLK, it’s clear to anyone who’s studied his work and his character that he didn’t intend to stop his fight for equality until people of all creeds and colors could peaceably enjoy a slice of the American pie.
King’s dream didn’t die with him, however. In cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Atlanta, his words about labor rights and economic equality found a home in the community as soon as they left his mouth. Two years after MLK was killed in Memphis fighting for the rights of workers, the state of Michigan was engulfed in a labor fight not too dissimilar.
The 1970 General Motors strike saw more than 400,000 autoworkers stand up for themselves and demand fair treatment from their employers. They wanted a pay raise, larger pensions, and a guaranteed cost of living wage increase. Nothing out of the ordinary, but nothing that GM wanted to hand over to them. This was far from the first time Michigan-based auto workers had gone on strike, but it certainly was the Blackest strike in automotive history. Southeast Michigan had seen a steady growth of Black people migrating from the south over the previous decades. Somewhat less prejudiced communities and better job opportunities for Black people sparked this “Great Migration” to the north and led to many car manufacturing jobs being filled by Black workers.
But as author Austin McCoy noted in his 2023 paper titled “Labor and Black Power,” Black workers across the country began to bond together in the fight for Black economic advancement in the wake of King’s death and his fight for the same cause.
“Black workers in various economic sectors organized and were inspired by Black Power principles such as community control, self-determination, and racial solidarity. This Black Power unionism utilized an array of strategies and tactics, ranging from direct action and radical class struggle to negotiation and lawsuits, to combat racial discrimination in employment. Black workers in sectors such as construction and auto and steel industries also utilized strikes, shutdowns, and other forms of protest to combat the intransigence of labor unions that failed to address segregation at the workplace, poor treatment of Black workers, and seniority policies that made work more precarious for them,” McCoy wrote.
These were people who knew firsthand the kind of trouble that could come with picketing and shouting in the streets. It would’ve been much easier for them to shrug their shoulders and say, “At least it’s better than where we came from.”
Despite the loss of King and many others like him, the people never forgot their message. The work that MLK and others had done in the 1950s and 1960s had changed the national Black consciousness. No longer was it good enough to demand not to be abused, Black people were now demanding to be included in the American Dream.
Now in the current day where Detroit and Atlanta and Memphis are predominantly Black cities, and the police no longer brutalize strikers, the efforts of King with workers and unions is little more than obscure history trivia. The ability for Black people with low or middle socioeconomic standings to organize and negotiate with huge white-owned corporations is equally (If not more) important to having the ability to vote. If you ever wanted to know what “Black power” looks like, go check out a picket line. And if you’ve ever wondered what Dr. King would be doing if he were active today instead of in the past, go check out the closest labor rally.
About Post Author
