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.
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.
King’s
assassination—and the urban revolts that followed—led to a local Memphis
settlement that furthered the cause of public employee unionism. The Poor
People’s March nonviolently won small concessions in the
national food stamp program. But reporters covered the bickering and
squalor in the poor people’s tent city, rather than the movement’s detailed
demands for waging a real war on poverty. Marchers wanted guaranteed public
employment when the private sector failed, a raise in the federal minimum wage,
a national income floor for all families, and a national commitment to
reconstruct cities blighted by corporate disinvestment and white flight. And
they wanted poor people’s representation in urban renewal and social service
programs that had customarily benefited only businesses or the middle
class. King’s dreams reverberated back in the movements that had risen him up.
By Peter Mathews
