Be concerned about your brother. You may not
be on strike. But either we go up together or we
go down together.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.,
APRIL 3, 1968, MEMPHIS
ON APRIL 3, 1968, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., SWAYED at the pulpit in a late night gathering at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. At age thirty-nine, King sometimes looked like an older man, tired, worn, and discouraged. Exhausted from constant travel, often making four or five speeches a day and sleeping only a few hours per night, King had a sore throat and slight fever. His companion, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, said King had those symptoms whenever he felt premonitions of death. Thunder and lightning rent the air, and when a ceiling fan made a banging sound it startled King as if it were a rifle shot. Memphis that night experienced one of the drenching downpours that regularly swept through the Mississippi Delta, as a storm outside turned into a tornado that wreaked havoc on neighboring towns and killed several people. King had at first stayed in his hotel, but when told that the news media and hundreds of his supporters demanded his presence, he had made his way to the temple through a driving rain.
King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had fought since 1957 to “redeem the soul of America” by seeking equality before the law, integration, and voting rights for all. The country’s adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had completed a “first phase” of the freedom movement, King said. Now he wanted a “second phase” struggle for “economic equality,” so that everyone could have a well-paying job or a basic level of income, along with decent levels of health care, education, and housing. Along with the A. Philip Randolph Institute, King had promoted a detailed document called an “Economic Bill of Rights for All Americans.” Before coming to Memphis, he had been crisscrossing the country for weeks, promoting a multiracial coalition to pressure Congress to reallocate money for war to money for human needs. King called it the Poor People’s Campaign, a “last ditch” effort to save America from the interrelated evils of racism, poverty, and war. Urban rebellions of the last four summers, and the wanton destruction of human life and waste of America’s economic resources in the escalating Vietnam War, he feared, would lead to escalating racism and repressive, authoritarian government.
Time magazine in 1957 had declared him “no radical,” but America’s segregationists and right wing saw King as just that. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover publicly called him a liar in 1964 and in March 1967 ordered a counterintelligence (COINTELPRO) campaign by his field agents to prevent the rise of a “black messiah,” and redoubled efforts to counteract King. From the 1963 March on Washington onward, Hoover’s agents followed King, wiretapped his office, his hotel rooms, his house. They even sent an anonymous letter that urged King to take his own life or else have his private life exposed. Hoover’s FBI leaked fake news and distorted reports to journalists, presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the heads of all major departments of government, the military, and the CIA. FBI secret agents paid agents provocateurs to stir up dissension and conflict among King’s followers and within the Black Power and New Left movements.
Southern segregationists and the ultraright John Birch Society sent out pamphlets and postcards, and mounted billboards on southern highways, claiming to picture “King at a Communist Training School”—in fact, a picture of King and Rosa Parks and Myles Horton at the nonsectarian Highlander Folk School, the one institution in the South where blacks and whites were encouraged to frankly discuss issues. A right-wing campaign by neo-Nazis and promilitary, anticommunist groups painted the famous Baptist preacher as Communist.
By 1968, King had suffered a bombing of his home and his hotel room; body blows by a neo-Nazi in the South; stoning by whites armed with baseball bats wanting to kill him in a suburb of Chicago; a raucous anticommunist shout-down in Grosse Point, Michigan, largely due to his stand against the Vietnam War. Death threats plagued King and his family. Some saw him as a dangerous radical troublemaker, others thought King wasn’t radical or militant enough. King’s philosophy of love and nonviolence looked like old-fashioned sentimentalism unsuited to violent American realities. H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” and it was true. Most Americans did not understand nonviolence as a philosophy or strategy for social change. Many in the business and political classes also opposed King’s strong support for unions as a way to obtain a greater degree of racial and economic justice. Although today many have come to see King as an icon for American values, in his own time he was often reviled, physically attacked, and dismissed as a false prophet. In 1968, he was struggling to survive.
Yet to most African Americans, and certainly to his audience in Memphis, King offered extraordinary inspiration, dedication, book learning, and gifts of oratory. On this evening in Bishop Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ, hundreds of striking black sanitation workers, their families, and community activists knew King understood the plight of the working poor. They were now in the sixth week of a desperate struggle and King came to support them in their efforts to raise their families above the poverty level through unionization. In December 1964, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, King had returned to his hometown of Atlanta to join picket lines and declare an economic boycott to support some six hundred black women on strike, declaring, “We have decided that now is the time to closely identify our movement very closely with labor.” King told a reporter “many more” alliances between civil rights and labor movements would follow. Memphis became one of those efforts, along with his dozens of speeches to union rallies, picket lines, and conventions in the years to come.
Some in his audience in Mason Temple thought King looked exhausted, but he soon proved otherwise. Speaking without notes, he started quietly, slowly. King imagined himself moving from the beginning of time to have a “panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now.” He took his audience back to the struggles against slavery in Egypt and Greece, back to the Civil War and slave emancipation, and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vow that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” during the Great Depression. King described the past as a mighty movement for human freedom. But he said if the Almighty asked him when he would most want to live he would answer, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.”
Why? In 1968, he lived in a climate of left-right political polarization, white racial backlash, and massive carnage by and against the U.S. military in Indochina. He admitted, “The world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around.” Yet he saw 1968 as a time of great social change. His voice rising, King cried out, “Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world!” From South Africa to Memphis, “the masses of people are rising up.” And their demand “is always the same: we want to be free.” Humanity’s difficulties had accumulated, so that all problems had to be solved together, creating an opportunity for what King called “the human rights revolution.”
King had only been to Memphis a few times, yet he seemed to know his audience and their issues well. Conditions in Memphis exemplified the country’s failure to move beyond civil rights to economic justice. African Americans, many of them recent migrants from the collapsing cotton economy, suffered from high unemployment, low wages, and soaring poverty. Perhaps half of the population of young black men had no jobs at all. Of those who had jobs, some 80 percent of black women worked in the homes of whites, with no labor law protections, and 80 percent of employed black men did unskilled labor. For black women and men in factory, service, laboring, or municipal jobs, a union provided their only hope for a better life.
The conditions of Memphis sanitation workers exemplified the plight of the working poor. They suffered from low wages, abuse by white supervisors, unsafe conditions, and systemic poverty. Through their union organizing, they protested being dismissed from work by white supervisors for the slightest infraction; being forced to carry leaking garbage tubs on their heads; eating their lunches in the shade of the garbage truck; being hurt and even killed on the job; reeking of garbage when they came home because they had no access to washing facilities. They sought an end to wages so low that men worked full time but their families lived in poverty. The all-male group demanded union recognition, collective bargaining rights, and deduction of union dues from their paychecks to make it possible to pay for a union staff person to represent them and operate a union effectively. Getting the city of Memphis to recognize their right to belong to a union with collective bargaining rights became the single most important point of conflict, and gave rise to the worker slogan, “I Am a Man.”
Some 1,300 workers had endured six weeks of unemployment, hunger, and foreclosures on cars and homes. White police had attacked strikers, ministers, and civil rights activists with tear gas, the chemical Mace, and clubs; the police and FBI had infiltrated the ranks; the mayor had hired strikebreakers and threatened to fire strikers. The black community, women and men alike, understood and rallied behind their “I Am a Man” picket signs as a cry for recognition, of their union and their human dignity.
Some saw the strike of garbage and street and sewer workers as a small story, but, as he had done during the Montgomery bus boycott thirteen years earlier, King elevated it as part of an epochal movement for human freedom. “We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world,” he said, to shouts of affirmation. “We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying . . . that we are God’s children and we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.” In good Baptist-preacher style, he speeded up his cadence and intensity as the audience response gave him power and energy.
King’s staff had strongly opposed going to Memphis. Sanitation worker Taylor Rogers recalled, “He was planning this big march to Washington. All his staff thought it was outrageous of him to stop and come to Memphis. But he went where he was needed, where he could help poor people. That’s why he dropped everything, regardless of what all his staff people told him. Even if it had been poor white workers, King would have done the same thing,” he recalled. “That’s just the kind of person he was.” But on April 3, King was in a crisis.
He had given a rousing and powerful speech at a mass rally for striking workers in Memphis on March 18, and vowed to come back to lead a mass march and a general strike of workers, students, and teachers. When he returned on March 28, everything went wrong. King had tried to lead a solidarity march, but black teenagers and possibly agents provocateurs broke out store windows after a Black Power lumpen proletariat group called the Invaders had egged them on. Its leader, Charles Cabbage, told me his group deliberately set out to discredit King’s nonviolence strategy through disruptive street actions. Black ministers led King out of the march while James Lawson tried to halt it. Police officers charged, beating everyone in sight and sending many marchers to the hospital. It was a brutal police riot as much as anything, but mass-media news stories depicted King as a instigator and a coward running from the melee. Hostile congressmen and news outlets charged that King could not mount a nonviolent march in Washington, D.C. King had seen Memphis as a natural starting place for his Poor People’s Campaign, in which African Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and poor and working-class whites would besiege Congress to demand acceptable standards of housing, health care, education, and meaningful employment—economic justice for all. The richest country in the world, he said, had the means to end poverty; it only lacked the will to do so.
Memphis put all that in jeopardy. King felt he had to return to lead a nonviolent mass march or an image of movement disunity around nonviolent tactics would destroy his credibility to launch the Poor People’s Campaign. In this emotionally charged atmosphere, King called on his audience at Mason Temple “to stay together and maintain unity,” to not fall prey to what the Pharaoh had done during slavery. “He kept the slaves fighting among themselves,” he said, but “when the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.” In his last days, King spoke repeatedly about the legacy of slavery and the need to overturn it through solidarity.
King insisted, “We’ve got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be . . . that there are thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights, wondering how this thing is going to come out. That’s the issue.” King’s return to Memphis was a faith act: buffeted by opposition from outside and inside the freedom movement, King refused to back off. Often on the road for three hundred days a year, he declared, “The preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones. And whenever injustice is around, he must tell it.” King still had the fire.
In this extemporaneous speech, King drew on the seemingly impossible victories of the past for strength: the student sit-ins and freedom rides of the early 1960s; black children standing up to fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama; civil rights and labor mobilizations that successfully pressured Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guaranteeing equal access to the law, to public facilities, and to jobs; the sacrifice of lives in Mississippi and in Alabama to obtain the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
People often called the civil- and voting-rights campaigns from 1955 to 1965 the Second Reconstruction, an effort to bring back the rights crushed by violence after slave emancipation and Reconstruction following the Civil War. But King now sought yet another phase of struggle, beyond civil and voting rights, for economic justice. In “these powerful days,” he said, an interracial coalition could “make America what it ought to be.”
In King’s last speech he reminded his audience of the collective power they had as consumers and workers. If employers and politicians would not do right by the sanitation workers, he warned them, “We do have an agenda that we must follow. . . . And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.” A boycott of Memphis downtown businesses—and of the Commercial Appeal newspaper that had distorted the issues and misled much of the white community—had already proved the power of economic withdrawal, a tried and true method of labor and civil rights movements.
In making his appeal for solidarity, King relied on black southern familiarity with the gospel of Jesus and his role as a prophet demanding economic justice. “God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children can’t eat three square meals a day,” King said. He drew on the Good Samaritan parable told by Jesus to his disciples to drive home his point. He painted a word picture of the desolate, curving, dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, and told the story of the Samaritan who stopped to help a man of a different race who had been beaten, robbed, and left for dead. The wealthy and religious Levites had passed him by, but the lowly Good Samaritan risked his safety to save another man’s life. Virtually all of the people in Mason Temple that night knew this story and its meaning. King’s last speech was part of a biblical epic that they heard from the pulpit and sang about almost weekly.
King’s lesson was, “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.” He thought the parallel to Memphis was obvious. “The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ Rather, ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them.’ That is the question.” Going down the Jericho Road, King had said many times, required “dangerous altruism”—being willing to sacrifice for others. That belief remained at the core of his religion and his life.
True to form, as King neared the end of his speech he became as one with an electrified and uplifted audience. Against the powerful winds and crackling lightning outside, people shouted “Tell it!,” “Go ahead on!” and rose from their seats. King took them beyond the petty tyrannies they lived with day in and day out: ministers attacked by police, strikers whose children were hungry, students who had walked out of school—they all shared a vision of more noble human relationships. People may be poor, they may be tired, King told them, “but whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they’re going somewhere. Because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.”
King then turned to his premonitions of death. He recalled the mentally ill black woman who stabbed him through the chest with a letter opener in 1958. That dagger lodged against his aorta, and would have killed him if he had merely sneezed. He gave thanks that he did not sneeze, so that he could be a part of the great changes brought about by the freedom movement. Starting with the bombing of his home in Montgomery in 1956, King had counted his days as numbered. When an assassin murdered President John F. Kennedy with a rifle bullet on November 22, 1963, King had told his wife Coretta that this is how he too would die.
King recounted that when he and his aides got on the plane in Atlanta that morning, “The pilot said over the public address system, ‘We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night.’ ”
King was a toxic figure to racists and the extreme right, to the FBI, and to the police and many white public officials. The commander of the Memphis Police publicly warned that King could be killed if he returned to Memphis. King said, “And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now.” King’s voice trembling, he asserted, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.”
From his parable of the Good Samaritan on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, King had moved to the image of Moses leading the oppressed Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, looking out from Mount Pisgah across to Jericho and seeing Canaan, the land the Lord promised as a land of freedom for the Jews. Black preachers for generations had used the Exodus as a story of hope for liberation from slavery. King’s audience knew the story well. They also knew that according to scripture, after he saw the Promised Land, Moses died.
Raising his voice, King concluded, “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land!” He shouted out a verse from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, an anthem written to end slavery, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” King turned, almost in a trance, and nearly collapsed into the arms of Ralph Abernathy, surrounded by James Lawson and his other colleagues.
Pandemonium swept Mason Temple. King’s last speech came at a hard-won moment of spiritual triumph. He had frequently said, “I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place.” But King spoke of something more valuable than life itself. People with a common history of slavery, barbaric lynching, daily oppression in public places, police brutality, incarceration, poverty and labor exploitation, employer and white worker discrimination, the unimaginable humiliation of black women raped with no consequences for the rapist—yes, these people could quickly understand this moment.
In Mason Temple a community deeply wronged by injustice called upon its collective resources and sense of solidarity. This is what the Movement was all about: creating hope out of despair, taking action instead of giving in to fear, finding joy and speaking of love rather than succumbing to hatred. While some recalled the foreboding of King’s last speech, Rev. James Lawson, who had brought King to Memphis, remembered the uplifting power of King’s speech that night. He took it not as a sign of darkness to come but as a ray of light breaking through the clouds, a promise of freedom that inspired them all. Some who were there also felt a deadly chill mixed with King’s ecstatic prophecy. Clarence Coe, a black member of the United Rubber Workers Union, whose union hall provided the launch pad for strike activities, commented, “I mean, if you listen to King’s last speech, he could see it, but he had just gone to the point that he couldn’t turn around. And he knew it was going to happen. He knew it was going to happen.” Despite concern for King’s life, Coe felt King’s message of hope.
In contrast to his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, witnessed by over 200,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial and broadcast live across the nation, King’s “Promised Land” speech came at an almost private moment, among a small, beleaguered group of people and a community in turmoil. It burned deeply into the consciousness of those present, solidifying resolve and strength to move forward. This moment displayed King’s prophetic role in building alliances and solidarity. Because of Memphis, he would be remembered not only as a civil rights icon but also as a labor hero.
With a Bible in one hand and the Constitution and Bill of Rights in the other, King had played a key role in the struggle for freedom and economic justice for thirteen years. He was thirty-nine years old. He would be assassinated the next day.
* * *
MORE THAN FIFTY years since Memphis, how should we remember King? People know of him as a civil rights advocate, but do they know about his lifelong struggle for economic justice and the empowerment of poor and working-class people of all colors? How we remember King matters. It helps us to see where we have been and to understand King’s unfinished agenda for our own times.
James Lawson, perhaps the person closest to King’s philosophical framework, told me that most Americans don’t fully understand King because they don’t understand nonviolence. An advocate of nonviolence “has made a major decision and a major analysis about violence that is all-encompassing,” seeing life’s “cruelty systems” as interrelated parts of the same problem. A failing in how we remember King, said Lawson, “is our typing of him as a civil rights leader. We do not type him as a pastor, prophet, theologian, scholar, preacher . . . and that allows conventional minds across the country to thereby stereotype him and eliminate him from an overall analysis of our society.” Beyond King’s dream of civil and voting rights lay a demand that every person have adequate food, education, housing, a decent job and income, and a more revolutionary quest for a nonviolent society beyond racism, poverty, and war.
Popular treatments primarily portray King through his magnificent speech given at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, in which King called on America to live up to its historic ideals of equal rights in which all people would be defined by the “content of their character” and not the color of their skin. Congress declared King’s birthday a national holiday in 1986, the first one added to the calendar since Memorial Day in 1947. Since then, school assemblies and civic gatherings have often remembered King as a symbol of color-blind democracy. This way of remembering King appeals to a politically diverse audience, including advertisers, educators, the mass media, and elected officials. The King holiday helps us to imagine the best kind of country we could be and makes us proud to be Americans.
Yet most people misremember King’s historical context. In 1963, King was calling on President John F. Kennedy to honor the emancipation of African Americans from slavery one hundred years before with a new freedom agenda. Historian Will Jones helps us to remember that this agenda was not only about civil rights. August 28 was publicized as a “March for Jobs and Freedom,” and it resulted from many years of organizing by black workers and their unions. In his speech, King said the nation had given former slaves a “bad check”—a promise of freedom that had not materialized. Generations later, his dream was not only for equal rights but also for a substantive change in people’s economic and social conditions.
At various times, as part of his larger discourse from civil to human rights, King often used the phrases “economic justice” and “economic equality.” What did he mean? In 1961, he explained it to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). “There is no intrinsic difference” between workers—skin color and ethnicity should not divide those who work for a living—he said. “Economic justice” would require “a land where men will not take necessities to give luxuries to the few,” and “where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity.” In our own time, when “everything decent and fair in American life” is under threat, as King said it was in his time, we might do well to remember his fight for economic justice as part of his dream for a better America.
Although public awareness often focuses on his “first phase” of the movement for civil and voting rights, we now have a plethora of scholarship that sees the “radical” King as “an inconvenient hero” who led a movement beyond civil rights to more fundamental economic and social change. Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute and the King Papers Project, led by senior editor and historian Clayborne Carson, has given us a deep understanding of King’s life and thought. In 1997, Coretta Scott King took Clay and Susan Carson into her basement and introduced them to a box of over two hundred folders of King’s early letters and sermons. Drawing on these documents, volume 6 of the King Papers, edited at Stanford University, helps us to see that King’s criticisms of American capitalism and his search for economic justice did not just appear in his last tumultuous years. Rather, King early on described himself as a “profound advocator of the Social Gospel” who decried a capitalist system that put profits and property rights ahead of basic human rights. The King Papers also allow us to better understand King’s ancestors, who lived in slavery and segregation and fought for economic justice and human rights, guided by the black church and the Christian Social Gospel.
A generation of freedom-movement scholarship puts King in a broad context and goes against the “great man” theory that views history as motivated mainly by leaders that too often surrounds popular memories of King. Historical accounts show that he existed in a milieu of many people working for change, including other preachers and church people, labor organizers, peace advocates, socialists, communists, civil rights organizers, and nonviolence advocates going back many years. Historians write today of the “long civil rights movement” stretching back to the 1930s and forward into the present. That movement was part of an even longer black freedom struggle that began when Europeans brought the first slaves from Africa to the North American continent in 1619. Labor history documents slavery and slave resistance, and the long struggles of working-class women and men to make a better world. Movement scholarship sees King as one extremely important actor in a complex of individuals and movements at the grass roots.
Freedom history documents generations of people struggling against slavery and segregation: military veterans and rural residents protecting their families with force of arms against police and vigilante violence; the Black Power movement building on the work of Malcolm X to organize cultural, artistic, economic, and political power; younger people in our own era struggling against mass incarceration, police brutality, and economic impoverishment; and continuing protests against the most pernicious aspects of both Jim Crow capitalism in the South and racial capitalism in the North. Ordinary people picked up the themes of economic justice and civil rights. As one example, in October 1963, in Homewood, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, a local coalition called the United Negro Protest Committee led by black men and women picketed a company employing 1,200 workers but almost no black people. Their effort to open up skilled and unskilled jobs for African Americans (pictured on the cover of this book) also led them to picket the local plumber’s union that had kept blacks out. Their efforts were among the hundreds of struggles for economic justice inspired by local organizers as well as King’s leadership and eloquent speeches.
Freedom-movement scholarship especially remembers King’s leadership in the context of black women, including Coretta Scott King, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Dorothy Cotton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Diane Nash, and so many others who built families, communities, and movements. In the South, women filled the pews, sang the songs, boycotted the buses, sheltered freedom fighters in their homes, went on strike, and went to jail by the thousands to build the movement that King represented through his oratory and strategic leadership. From slavery onward, black women did much of the work and bore disproportionate burdens in making America a wealthy nation, and in the modern era fought for welfare rights and family and community development. One finds little writing about King by women authors in part because they have been busy restoring the role of women to their rightful place in history.
* * *
TO THE PROMISED LAND does not provide a King biography or an overview of freedom-movement history, but rather seeks to bring to a larger audience a different memory of King. It focuses on his struggle to achieve a greater degree of economic justice, a struggle especially relevant to our own times. My own work grows out of both research and personal experience. I followed King’s leadership as a young person—as a conscientious objector to war, as a participant in the Poor People’s Campaign, and as a civil liberties organizer in Memphis and the South in the years after his death, from 1970 to 1976. Since that time, as a scholar trained at Howard University and other institutions of higher learning, I have traced how black and white workers, men and women, challenged slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, and economic injustice. My research continues to benefit greatly from interviews graciously granted to me by scores of workers and civil rights activists who improved their lives through union organizing and whose lives traced back to the 1920s and forward to the present.
A signal moment in how I remember King occurred in April 1994, when I found a file of King’s labor speeches in the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change library in Atlanta. These speeches, some in typescript written by King’s labor advisers and others in King’s own handwriting, gave me a different view of King and made me wonder how he and his colleagues built alliances with workers and organized labor. This book delves into that story. In addition, my numerous interviews with and study of James Lawson, the ministerial leader of the Memphis sanitation strike whose life and teachings more closely parallel that of King’s than any other person, also greatly influenced my perspective.
Historians constantly search for and reshape our knowledge of the past, often based on the challenges they face in their own times. This book is part of that search. It is my hope that remembering King’s unfinished fight for economic justice, broadly conceived, might help us to better understand the relevance of his legacy to us today. It might help us to realize that King’s moral discourse about the gap between haves and have-nots resulted from his role in the labor movement as well as in the civil rights movement. In addition to remembering the eloquent man in a suit and tie at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, we could also remember King as a man sometimes dressed in blue jeans marching on the streets and sitting in jail cells, or rousing workers at union conventions and on union picket lines. We must also remember him as a man of nonviolence often surrounded by violent police and screaming mobs, and at times physically assaulted by white racists. The nation may honor him now, but we should also remember the right-wing crusade against him in his own time as he sought just alternatives to America’s exploitative racial capitalism.