Remembering King’s last heroic campaign
While most Americans remember Martin Luther King, Jr’s. “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, they should also remember King in 1968. It was his last year of life and perhaps his most heroic.
He faced criticism from the media, cascading threats of violence from segregationists and the ultra-right. In his book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?“, King wrote: “Before you can come up with a cure, you first have to know the disease.”
While many had accepted phase one come for the poor and working poor with a new agency for change: poor people themselves, with middle and working-class allies.
He told a reporter, “We are dealing in a sense with class issues, the gulf between the haves and have-nots.” He called it the Poor People’s Campaign.
These issues and more came together during King’s last campaign in Memphis. At Mason Temple on March 18, he saw 1,300 black men unified on strike with the slogan “I Am A Man,” combined with powerful labor-community alliance that fought for equal rights for the black community and union rights for the working poor.
“I have never seen a community as together as Memphis,” he told community leader Rev. James Lawson. King stuck with striking workers to the end. After he was assassinated, they won their strike, and the Poor People’s Campaign went on from Memphis to the nation’s capital.
These 50 years later, unionists, Fight for $15 activists, and the new Poor People’s Campaign meeting in Memphis, have been renewing campaigns for racial, gender, and economic justice. On April 4, not only here but around the world people are remembering our history and renewing our common struggle to be free of racism, violence, poverty and war.
We remember King’s words, “You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.” And we remember his admonition to us all that “we can all get more together than we can apart.”