The OAH in Memphis, Thirty-Five Years Since King

Michael Honey

What could be more appropriate for the OAH this year than meeting in Memphis? Our meeting will highlight movements for social justice in American history, one of the most important of which took place in the Bluff City. The strike of black sanitation workers in Memphis opened up a new direction for both the labor and the civil rights movements. It also focused renewed attention on unionization of the black working poor as an answer to their poverty and lack of power. The struggle in Memphis also closed off whatever optimism remained in that era, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and then that of Robert Kennedy. Before long, President Richard Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell ran the country, doing their best through legal and illegal methods to shut down movements for social change.

King argued in the last year of his life that social justice movements had come to a crossroads. Unions had failed to reach beyond the ranks of well-paid, industrial, blue-collar workers to organize the ranks of poor people. The black freedom movement had not fully moved beyond demands for equality before the law to demands for what King called "economic equality." When he came to Memphis to speak in support of the sanitation strikers at Mason Temple on 18 March 1968, he had begun a new phase of struggle for the rights of the poor, in America and around the world.

"It is murder, psychologically," King said, to deprive people of jobs and income, yet "millions of people are being strangled in that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse." If the nation did not change its values and its structures of power, he said, "we're going to find ourselves sinking into darker nights of social disruption," while depriving millions "of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." At the time King came to Memphis, he had almost despaired of organizing a base for his Poor People's Campaign. But at Mason Temple, ten to fifteen thousand black workers, preachers, students, and a broad spectrum of the entire black community, joined by white unionists and liberals, turned out. He told freedom movement leader Reverend James Lawson that "you are doing here in Memphis what I am trying to do nationally." He told his audience, "You are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."

King re-energized a strike and community movement that took nearly two months to win, but only at a terrible cost. When he attempted to lead a mass march on 28 March, it turned into window breaking by black youths and a murderous riot by the police. This forced King to return again, vowing to lead another march, in defiance of a court injunction. On the night of 3 April, again at Mason Temple, he reviewed the history of the freedom movement, and called for a renewed solidarity between all peoples, reminding his audience that "either we go up together or we go down together." The next day he was cut down at age thirty-nine as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

As we gather in Memphis, there is a history to both celebrate and mourn. The Lorraine Motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum. When we organized a conference on the King legacy there in 1993, twenty-five years after his death, luminaries from the movement urged that people begin to see the whole King, including his demands for economic justice and an end

to war, as well as his civil rights leadership. With the marvelous scholarship of the King Papers Project at Stanford and other new research connecting labor and civil rights history, we are starting to fully appreciate that legacy.

The home of the blues on Beale Street, where thousands of black workers and poor people sought relief from Jim Crow, is now a cultural site. The downtown, once a dreadful display of urban poverty, has been to some degree rebuilt. AFSCME Local 1733, including the sanitation workers union, has organized around the city and helped to secure the election of a black mayor and many black elected officials. The police force--a brutal army of occupation in the 1960s--is now multi-racial and includes many women. In many ways, Memphis has changed for the better since 1968.

Yet the factories where black and white workers built the unions of the industrial era are mostly gone; unions and civil rights organizations are not what they were; and a huge portion of the black community remains desperately poor. Although many African Americans live in the suburbs and interracial mingling is common, black and white children in the schools, in housing, and in terms of opportunities still live mostly separate lives. The culture King warned against, in which "machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people," remains the same. We have not shifted "from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society," as Dr. King urged us to do. Our society continues to "take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few," in King's words, and war spending still sucks up resources that could be used for the poor like "some kind of demonic suction tube."

Memphis and the U.S. are better because of the struggles and the sacrifices of the past, yet many people have lost the sense of hope for the future that King sought to instill by organizing social movements. "If I did not have hope, I couldn't go on," King said during the Poor People's Campaign, and we still need that hope to create the "revolution in values" that he called for at the end of his life.

What gave King the most hope was the movement of workers and poor people that he found in Memphis. Sanitation workers like Taylor Rogers and industrial union organizers like Ida Leachman have continued to fight for King's legacy. So has Ken Riley, the leader of dockworkers in Charleston, South Carolina, who fought off conservative attacks against their union and built coalitions with civil rights groups for the last two years. Such African-American union leaders and luminaries like Julian Bond will attend our gathering as panelists and speakers, and we hope that local ministers, students, unionists and civil rights activists will attend as well.

Through our conference, and by participating with the April 4th Foundation in memorials and marches in the street, it will be our privilege to join with them on this historic occasion.

The merger of labor and civil rights concerns provided a powerful and hopeful moment for social justice movements that stood, as King suggested, "at the crossroads" in Memphis in 1968. Perhaps, at this juncture of the OAH's history, we can help to shift the common paradigm of the King legacy, focusing less on his "I Have a Dream" (not his title) speech, and more on the significance of what happened in Memphis thirty-five years ago. We still face "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism" that King fought against then, and have more reason than ever to study and attend to King's call for a new kind of social justice coalition for the rights of the poor.

Michael Honey is the Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies at the University of Washington and a professor of labor and ethnic studies and American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma.