A world of scholarship exists on Martin Luther King, Jr., and freedom- and labor-movement history. Citations below are not meant to survey that historiography but to indicate where I focused my research and lead readers to additional sources. Notes follow more or less as items appear in my narrative. The quotes from Dr. King on the opening page of this book, and many subsequent quotes, appear in Michael K. Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011). I found these speeches in 1994, in series 3 of King’s “Speeches, Sermons, and Statements, etc., and/or About Labor Unions or Labor Groups,” in the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change Library (now designated online as the King Center). Its archives may be found in digitized form on the Center’s website (http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive), although my references are to the paper copies I used, designated as MLKP Atlanta.
Introduction: PROMISED LAND
Under the direction of senior scholar Clayborne Carson and his coeditor Tenisha Armstrong, the Martin Luther King Papers Project at Stanford University has published seven volumes of the King Papers as of this writing. I list references to its documents as MLKP Stanford. Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute also provides extensive online resources: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu.
Sources on King I used in this book include: Clayborne Carson, Martin’s Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., A Memoir (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Keith D. Miller, Martin Luther King’s Biblical Epic: His Final, Great Speech (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), and Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (New York: Free Press, 1992); David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Random House, 2014); Jennifer J. Yanco, Misremembering Dr. King: Revisiting the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Martin Luther King, Jr., The Radical King, ed. Cornel West (Boston: Beacon, 2015); Michael Eric Dyson, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and How it Changed America (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Tavis Smiley, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year (New York: Little, Brown, 2014); William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King, The Inconvenient Hero (New York: Orbis, 1996); Harvard Sitkoff, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998), and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006); Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sacred Mission to Save America, 1955–1968 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2004); and David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), provides the definitive account of King’s thinking on economic justice and identifies him as a “democratic socialist.” I have relied heavily on Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), and All Labor Has Dignity, cited above. Over the years I have done numerous interviews with James Lawson. Most useful on economic justice were a personal interview on May 6, 2005, in Santa Barbara, California, and see “Forty Years Since King: The Memphis Sanitation Strike,” Labor: A Journal of Working-Class Studies of the Americas, vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 9–13.
Also, see my film, “Love and Solidarity: James M. Lawson and Nonviolence in the Search for Workers’ Rights,” 2016, available from Bullfrog Films; and Kent Wong, Ana Luz Gonzalez, and Rev. James Lawson, Jr., eds., Nonviolence and Social Movements: The Teachings of Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr. (Los Angeles: UCLA Labor Center, 2016). David Halberstam, The Children (New York: Random House, 1998) begins his book with a short biography of Rev. Lawson.
On the United Negro Protest Committee picketing the Mine Safety Appliance Company in Homewood, Pa., “UNPC’s Pickets March for Jobs at Mine Safety: Future Hiring is Issue” and “‘Hands Off’ by CHR on UNPC-Union Tiff,” Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 5 and 26, 1963, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Guides to freedom-movement history include: Harvard Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History (March 2005): 1233–67; Talitha LaFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), and “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History (December 2009): 751–76; Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Jacquelyn Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985). A collective memoir of black women in the freedom movement is Faith S. Holsaert, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); see also Laurie Beth Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical, Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Chapter 1. “WE THE DISINHERITED OF THIS LAND,” 1929–1956
Opening epigrams are from Dr. King’s letter to Coretta Scott, 125–26, and King, “Thou Fool,” transcript of a sermon at Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church, Chicago, n.d., 1967, MLK Speech files, MLKP Atlanta, ser. 3,.
I rely in chapter 1 on Clayborne Carson, et al., eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King., Jr., vol. 6, Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1948–March 1963 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 1, Called to Serve, January 1929–June 1951 (1992); Carson, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the African-American Social Gospel,” ed. Paul E. Johnson, in African-American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Martin Luther King, Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Carson (New York: Grand Central, 1998); Martin Luther King, Sr., Daddy King: An Autobiography (New York: Morrow, 1980); Coretta Scott King, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), and Scott King, as told to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 2017). Adam Daniel Williams, 1861–1931, and Alberta Williams, 1903–1974: http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc.
Cornel West, “The Religious Foundations of the Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” in Peter J. Albert and Ronald Hoffman, eds., We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: Pantheon, 1990), quotes on 116, 117, 119; King’s speech, “There are three major social evils,” to District 65, Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) on September 8, 1962, appears in Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 55–65.
“Racial capitalism” refers to America’s capitalism organized by race, while “Jim Crow capitalism” refers to postemancipation capitalism under segregation in the South. M. F. Ashley Montague, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); William McKee Evans, Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2009); Jacquelyn Jones, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (New York: Basic Books, 2013); George Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America (1935; repr. New York: Oxford, 2007); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007), and Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (London: Verso, 2015); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1990); Michael Honey, “Class, Race, and Power in the New South,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, ed. Timothy Tyson and David Cicelski (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 163–84; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (New York: Oxford, 1978); Peter Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London: Verso, 1996); Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance (New York: Knopf, 2010). Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), documents the grim legacy of horrendous racial violence close to King’s home town of Atlanta.
Daddy King, as many referred to him, changed his name from Michael to Martin Luther King, as did his son. Carson, et al., The Papers of MLKP, vol. 1, 30–31. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, ed. Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, 1965); author interview with C. T. Vivian, Atlanta, Georgia, November 8, 1997.
Scholars have debated the reasons for King’s plagiarism in his graduate school research papers. Keith Miller has shown that King never left the mode of Protestant preachers who borrowed freely from each other without attribution to popularize basic themes of Christianity in “Becoming Martin Luther King, Jr.—Plagiarism and Originality: a Round Table,” Journal of American History 78, No. 1 (June 1991): 11–123; Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (New York: Free Press, 1992).
On American traditions of nonviolence, Leilah Danielson, American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); King’s comments on capitalism, Martin to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952, King Papers, vol. 6, 123–26. Coretta Scott King’s memoirs cited above provide moving insights into King family history.
On the red scare against labor and civil rights: Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Anne Braden, HUAC: Bulwark of Segregation (National Committee to Abolish HUAC, 1964), Braden Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; Curtis S. McDougal, Gideon’s Army, vol. 3 (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965); John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994); Robert H. Zieger, Timothy J. Minchin, and Gilbert J. Gall, American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries, 4th ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Mark I. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), and Black Workers Remember (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Robert Rogers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Communists and Socialists were in conflict over sharecropper organizing but both left an interracial organizing legacy: Michael K. Honey, Sharecroppers’ Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African-American Song Tradition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
On postwar southern organizing: Michael K. Honey, “Operation Dixie, the Red Scare, and the Defeat of Southern Labor Organizing,” in American Labor and the Cold War, ed. Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 216–44; Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 114–22; Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), ch. 9; Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, chs. 8 and 9; author interview with Myles Horton, New Market, Tennessee, June 1–2, 1981; Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Robert O’Harrow, Jr., and Shawn Boburg, “The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016; Alex Heard, The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South (New York: Harper, 2010); Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1988); Horace Huntley, “The Red Scare and Black Workers in Alabama: The International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, 1945–53,” in Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835–1960, ed. Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 129–50; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism; Ellen Schrecker, “McCarthyism and the Labor Movement: The Role of the State,” in The CIO’s Left-led Unions, ed. Steve Rosswurm (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 139–58; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75, No. 3 (December 1988): 786–811. Eric Arnesen defends left anticommunism, “ ‘No Graver Danger’: Black Anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 13–52; Martha Biondi, “Response to Eric Arnesen,” 59–64, sees anti-communism as a disaster for the labor and civil rights movements. See also Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Harvey A. Levenstein, Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
The Montgomery bus boycott: The Papers of MLK, vol. 6, Introduction, and quotes on 6, 73, 125–26; Scott King, My Life With Martin Luther King, 127–30; Troy Jackson, Becoming King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of a National Leader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Jeanne Theoharris, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013); Timothy Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 133, 191, 210–11; Neil McMillen, The Citizen’s Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64 (1971, repr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 55–61. Black southerners used armed self-defense as a matter of course to protect themselves: Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Charles E. Cobb, Jr., “That Nonviolent Stuff’l Get You Killed”: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), accepted the necessity for self-defense on a personal level, pp. 27, 57. Racist handbills distributed in Montgomery, dated February 10, 1956, are in the A. Philip Randolph Collection, Library of Congress Manuscripts Collection (LOC). On Bayard Rustin’s early work with King, Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 64–73, 83; John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 265–98; Thomas Jackson, “Recasting the Dream: Race and Poverty in the Social Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Stanford University seminar paper, June 1989. With drafts written by Rustin, Dr. King clearly explained nonviolence in Christian Century 74 (February 6, 1957) and in King, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 196–99; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical, Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Chapter 2. “WE HAVE A POWERFUL INSTRUMENT,” 1957–1963
Epigraph, “There are three major social evils,” in Michael K. Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 55–64. Sources for this chapter include Time, Feb. 18, 1957; David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 79–80, 83, 89. On Iola Curry’s anticommunist obsession, Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 92; Hugh Pearson, When Harlem Nearly Killed King: The 1958 Stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); Coretta Scott King, as told to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 88; James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper, 1986), 41; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); King, “A Look to the Future,” in Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 3–18; Guy and Candie Carawan, Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out, 1990), and David Spener, We shall not be moved/No nos moverán: Biography of a song of struggle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016), on southern freedom songs heard around the world. Author interview with W. E. “Red” Davis, St. Louis, January 26–28, 1983, on his travels with King after Highlander. The Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties in Richmond, Virginia, and others distributed the Georgia Education Commission slander on King, Aryan Views and White Folk News (Waco, Texas, July 1963), Randolph Papers, box 30, “smear literature,” Library of Congress Manuscripts Collection; Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 105–7, ch. 3. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 28–33, 38, 39, 43–44; Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful Dynasty (New York: Grand Central, 2014). Author interview with Myles Horton, New Market, Tennessee, June 1–2, 1981; Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987); Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, ch. 8. The Southern Conference Educational Fund’s monthly newspaper, 1945–1970, documents the persistence of the red scare; Braden and Wilkinson clemency petition dated June 7, 1961, in the Braden Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010); Anne Braden, The Wall Between (New York: Monthly Review, 1958); Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Post-War South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); see also Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 28–29; John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 266.
King, “The Future of Integration” speech, Chicago, October 2, 1957, is in MLKP Atlanta, ser. 3. The Packinghouse Worker newspaper and the United Packinghouse Workers of America collection 118, Wisconsin Historical Society, documents the union’s powerful civil rights efforts. On Russell Lasley, Pat Kinney, “Civil Rights Hero had Waterloo Roots,” Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, February 17, 2013, http://wcfcourier.com/news/local/civil-rights-hero-had-waterloo-roots/article_71a9ac9e-c986-5b9b-89a7-e55d71b24794.html. See also Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996); Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History, Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). Ralph Helstein rallied black workers and defended labor’s left while conceding to the CIO and AFL-CIO that Communists could not hold top positions: author interview with Les Orear, Chicago, August 1, 1981; and Cyril D. Robinson, Marching With Dr. King: Ralph Helstein and the United Packinghouse Workers of America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011). Kim Scipes, AFL-CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010); Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, rev. ed. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2005).
On SCLC, SNCC, and King: Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical, Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 184, 188; Septima Clark, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, CA: Wild Tree Press, 1986); Dorothy F. Cotton, If Your Back’s Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Aria Books, 2012); Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), quote on 227; Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Randolph’s “Dear Brother,” letter to unionists, December 8 and April 1960, Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, box 24, A. Philip Randolph Papers, Library of Congress. Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Cornelius Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); Herbert Hill, “Racism Within Organized Labor: A Report of Five Years of the AFL-CIO, 1955–60,” in MLKP Atlanta, box 140:31, Trade Unions. F. Ray Marshall, The Negro and Organized Labor (New York: Wiley, 1965), 46–48, 53–85, 177–207; Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981 (New York: International Publishers, 1981); Robert H. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014); Eric Arnesen, ed. The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). SCLC Press Release, Statement in Defense of Randolph, October 13, 1961, MLKP Stanford. King, “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins,” in Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 31–46; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Economic Development, 1936–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). AFL-CIO, Proceedings of the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, vol. 1 (Miami Beach, FL, December 7–13, 1961). On survival of the black vote and its effect in Memphis: David M. Tucker, Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reform, 1949–1986 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 54–60; Elizabeth Gritter, River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865–1954 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 177–87ff. On union racial divisions: Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). “Dr. King’s Statements on 1199, 1959–68,” MLKP Stanford, shows a long, deep connection between King and 1199 Hospital Workers Union. Inventories of District 65 RWDSU Papers at the Tamiment Library, and Lisa Phillips, A Renegade Union: Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), document King’s long-standing connection to RWDSU. On 1199 see Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers’ Union, Local 1199 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
On FBI repression: David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 44–49, and throughout; Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), 38–39, 41–77, 157–58ff; Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). A few weeks before King’s death, a CIA memo uncovered through a FOIA inquiry said, “According to the FBI, Dr. King is regarded in Communist circles as a ‘genuine Marxist-Leninist who is following the Marxist-Leninist line’ ”; Garrow, “The FBI and Martin Luther King,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2002, 80–88, quote on 88. The FBI began wiretapping Levison on March 20 and its “Communist Infiltration” investigation of SCLC began on October 23, 1962: Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 482. FBI files on King are now available online. On Nazi and racist threats: George Lincoln Rockwell, White Power (Dallas: Ragnarok Press, 1967)—a reader wrote on a library copy of this book at the University of Washington, “This man should be ashamed to be a human being.” William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington: Brassey’s, 1999), quotes on 326, 271. For chilling images of whites screaming for King’s blood, see Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, “Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965–1985,” WGBH and Public Broadcasting System. John Harold Redekop, The American Far Right: A Case Study of Billy James Hargis and Christian Crusade (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1968), 22–39, and Hatfield’s warnings, i–iii; Lori L. Bogle, “The U.S. Military, the Radical Right, and Harding College’s National Education Program: Propaganda Partners of the Cold War, 1958–1962,” Organization of American Historians national conference in Chicago, Illinois, March 29, 1966, paper in author’s possession, quote on pp. 14–15. Michael C. Pierce, “The Racist Origins of Right to Work,” Labor Notes #463 (October 2017), 4–5. Elizabeth Jacoway Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation (New York: Free Press, 2007).
King quote on “right to work” laws in the ILWU Dispatcher, March 2017, p. 2. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 5. On “Bombingham,” Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974), and Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 101–3ff. On civil rights martyr William Moore, Mary Stanton, Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003). “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Horace Huntley and David Montgomery, eds., Black Workers’ Struggle for Equality in Birmingham (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), quote on 24. When southern AFL-CIO leaders adhered to national AFL-CIO equal rights doctrine many rank-and-file whites resisted, undermining both unions and democracy: Alan Draper, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968 (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1994), and Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: New Press, 1997).
“Emancipation March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” flyer, Randolph Papers, box 26, Library of Congress; King quotes, Detroit speech, “Now is the time,” in Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 76–86. On UAW support for the civil rights movement, Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995); John Bernard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1983); and Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism. King to O’Dell, July 3, 1963, and O’Dell to King, Jan. 29, 1963, MLKP Atlanta, ser. 1, Primary Correspondence; author interview with Jack O’Dell, Seattle, Feb. 5, 2010; Jack O’Dell, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, ed. Nikhil Pal Singh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), quote on 52, and “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class,” in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 7, no. 3: 33–52. Emilie Raymond, Stars for Freedom: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). King’s eulogy, in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (New York: Warner Books, 2003), 81–87, 96; Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, 109, 115, 117.
Chapter 3. ”NORTHERN GHETTOS ARE THE PRISONS OF FORGOTTEN MEN,” 1964–1966
“Martin Luther King, Jr.: Never Again Where He Was,” Time, January 3, 1964; Hoover’s surveillance: Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 484; King, Why We Can’t Wait (1964; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). Mississippi freedom movement: John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1994); Chris Meyers Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 225–27. Nancy Maclean, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Difference a Law Can Make,” and symposium on Title VII, in Labor: a Journal of Working-Class History of the Americas 11, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 19–48, and MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: Opening the American Work Place (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 73–74ff; Timothy Minchin, Color of Work (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and Fighting Against the Odds: A History of Southern Labor Since World War II (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005). Wharlest Jackson Civil Rights Cold Case Project, http://coldcases.org/cases/wharlest-jackson-case.
On the war and electoral shifts: Marilyn Blatt Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Alan Draper, “Labor and the 1966 Elections,” Labor History 30, no. 1 (1989): 76–92; Rick Perstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). King wrote, “The Civil Rights Act is a reality, Goldwaterism has been soundly defeated and we have embarked on the prodigious journey into the Great Society. It would seem that we are well on the way to equality. . .” Saturday Review draft titled “The Movement: Prospects for ’65,” MLK Research and Education Institute, Stanford. On the FBI and the Nobel Prize: Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America, 219–21; Dorothy F. Cotton, If Your Back’s Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Aria Books, 2012), 8–22.
On the Scripto strike: Hartwell and Susan Hooper, “The Script Strike: Martin Luther King’s ‘Valley of Problems’: Atlanta, 1964–65,” Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia 43, no. 3 (1999): 5–34; Tera Hunter, To ’joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Leonard Dinnerstein, Jews in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Vartanig G. Vartan, “Civil Rights Group Backs Scripto Strike in Atlanta,” New York Times, December 17, 1964, p. 46, ProQuest; Paul Good, “Dr. King’s Group Enters Labor Dispute in Atlanta,” Washington Post, December 5, 1964, p. A12, ProQuest; author interview with C. T. Vivian, Atlanta, November 8, 1997; “SNCC wins SCLC support in boycott of Scripto Co,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 19, 1964, p. 16, ProQuest Historical Newspapers; G. S. Carlson, “King Says Prepare For World Boycott of Scripto Products,” United Press International in Chicago Daily Defender, December 22, 1964, p. 1, ProQuest; David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 368–69; Kathryn Johnson, “Memoir Recalls MLK, family and the movement,” Associated Press in Broward [Florida] Times, Jan. 21–27, 2016; “Atlanta’s Dinner For Dr. King Gains,” New York Times, December 31, 1964, 10, ProQuest. “Union and Freedom,” a film by the International Chemical Workers Union, 1964, George Meany Memorial Archive at the University of Maryland-College Park Library manuscript; The Scripto Strike: A Guide to Records, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta. Scripto news stories accessed through ProQuest Historical Newspapers include: Baltimore Afro-American, September 23, 1933, October 19, 1946, December 5, 12, and 19, 1964, January 2, 9, and 30, 1965; Chicago Daily Defender, November 30, December 14, 21, 22, and 24, 1964, October 12, 1968; Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1964; Washington Post, December 5, 11, and 15, 1964; New York Amsterdam News, December 19, 1964, October 19, 1968; Wall Street Journal, December 1, 1964; New York Times, November 16 and 28, December 21, 22, 25, 29, and 31, 1964, and January 10, 1965. “King Calls Secret Ballot ‘Our Secret Weapon’ In Integration Struggle,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 25, 1962. Thanks to Richard Agee and Suzanne Klinger for helping me research the Scripto story.
On Selma: Coretta Scott King, as told to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 2017, 131–34, 140, emphasis in the original; Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011). King called Malcolm X’s strategy one of “reciprocal bleeding” and “a desperate course of action”: “Dr. King’s statement on Malcolm X,” March 16, 1964, MLKP Atlanta, ser. 1-1, 15:16. John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 187. Freedom singer Bettie Mae Fikes told me in 2009 that she still suffered from post-traumatic stress from being arrested and locked up during the Selma movement as a teenager. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 81–82; death statistics: Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America, 266; Gary May, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); and Mary Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). “Leaders Flock to Detroit for Mrs. Liuzzo Funeral,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 30, 1965, ProQuest. William Oliver to King, June 1, 1965, sent $2,755 collected from workers at plant gates in Michigan and New York, MLKP Atlanta, ser. 1-1, 24:4.
Labor alliances and black worker challenges: King to Reuther, September 1965, thanked him for a $5,000 donation and enclosed an SCLC memo “To All Union Representatives,” suggesting unions train civil rights activists to organize unions. SCLC records, box 245:2, MLKP Atlanta, and see also Reuther’s correspondence files, UAW President’s Office, Walter P. Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. Meany to King, June 3, 1964, and NAACP flyer, “Vote No on State Question 409,” National Labor College Archive M 28 Civil Rights Department 9-00, University of Maryland College Park Library manuscripts; Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 23–24. Black workers at Atlantic Steel in Atlanta and elsewhere used Title VII to sue the United Steelworkers union for workplace discrimination: Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), documents, 227–50; Dennis Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875–1980 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2003); “Struggles in Steel,” California Newsreel, 1996. A. S. Miller to King, March 30, 1964, and King to Quill, March 25, 1964, box 13, folder 9, ser. 1-4, 4-6, MLKP Atlanta. When King endorsed the Philadelphia chapter of the American Federation of Teachers in an election, the National Education Association objected, leading to months of controversy. King-Hoffa correspondence also showed complications. Primary Correspondence and Administrative Records 1955–68, SCLC President’s Office, MLKP Atlanta.
On voting rights, Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014), and Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America, 486; Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). UAW Region 6 Statement to the Governor’s Commission on the LA Riots, file 6.6.1.4, Kenneth Hahn Papers, box 317, folder 3, Huntington Library, Pasadena, California. Newsweek, August 20, 1965, reported on the antagonism toward King. Reuther invested heavily in his “Citizens Crusade Against Poverty,” and King and Reuther sought to organize alliances. President’s files, MLKP Atlanta, 6:10–13, and UAW President’s Office, correspondence, Walter P. Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Reuther Library.
Manning Marable, “The Crisis of the Black Working Class: An Economic and Historical Analysis,” Science and Society, vol. 46, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 130–61; Charles Killingsworth, “Negroes in a Changing Labor Market,” 68, quote on 73, and Vivian W. Henderson, “Region, Race, and Jobs,” 80, in Arthur M. Ross and Herbert Hill, Employment, Race, and Poverty (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 18–19, 3–48, 55. Jacquelyn Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 256–57; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 245–46, 256; Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 243, 247, 255, on cotton mechanization and unemployment; F. Ray Marshall, “Industrialization and Race Relations in the Southern States,” in Guy Hunter, ed., Industrialization and Race Relations: A Symposium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 91, on decline in median income. Clarence Coe quoted in Michael K. Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 360.
Labor-civil rights divergence: Kim Philips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995), and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), ch. 5; Peter Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Andrew Young speaking notes, September 16, 1965, before District 65, King Labor Speeches, MLKP Atlanta. King, “Labor Cannot Stand Still,” convention of the Illinois AFL-CIO, October 7, 1965, in Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 112–20. A “Freedom Budget” for all Americans: Budgeting Our Resources, 1966–75 to Achieve “Freedom From Want” (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, Oct. 1966); Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 95–96; D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 396–403 and ch. 17; King, “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots,” Saturday Review, Nov. 13, 1965, 33–35; Daniel Levine, Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 174, quote on 187.
“Its towering housing project,” Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, 143; James Ralph, Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 46, 48, 103–5, 112. Mary Lou Finley, Bernard Lafayette, Jr., James R. Ralph, Jr., and Pam Smith, eds., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Civil Rights Activism in the North (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015). Martin L. Deppe, Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966–1971 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). Aram Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), 171–76; John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 369–73; Donna Cooper and Charles V. Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: The African-American Struggle for Civil and Economic Equality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, 426–29; Joseph Peniel, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement, Democracy, and America in the King Years,” American Historical Review, vol 114, no. 4 (October 1, 2009): 1001–16. William Julius Wilson, When Jobs Disappear: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1997); Heather Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-war Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 1962). Erik S. Gellman, “ ‘The Stone Wall Behind,’ The Chicago Coalition for United Community Action and Labor’s Overseers, 1968–1973,” in David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey, eds., Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 112–243; Gellman, “In the Driver’s Seat: Chicago’s Bus Drivers and Labor Insurgency in the Era of Black Power,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, vol. 11, no. 3 (2014): 49–76. Milton Derber, Labor in Illinois: The Affluent Years, 1945–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). On the “malignant kinship,” Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Carson quote in Mary Lou Finley, et al., The Chicago Freedom Movement, xi. “SCLC 10th Convention Urges Labor-Civil Rights Alliance,” The Mine-Mill Union, vol. 25, no. 9 (September 1966); Alan Draper, “Labor and the 1966 Elections,” Labor History, vol. 30, no. 1 (1989); Bayard Rustin, “Civil Rights at the Crossroads,” American Federationist, vol. 73, no. 11(November 1966): 16–20. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 536, 532.
Chapter 4. “IN GOD’S ECONOMY,” 1967–1968
Epigraph, King speech, February 15, 1968, Mississippi Leaders on the Washington Campaign, St. Thomas AME Church, Birmingham, Alabama, MLKP Atlanta, ser. 3; author interview with Jack O’Dell, Seattle, December 17, 2012; Coretta Scott King, as told to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 87–88, 149, 150; Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); King, “A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967, in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper, 1986), 232–33. Apparently unlike America’s leaders at the time, King had read the history of Vietnam’s oppression by French, Japanese, and American military occupations and concluded that there was no justification for continuing it; Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 324–31.
King, “Civil Rights at the Crossroads,” Address to the Shop Stewards of Local 815, Teamsters and Allied Trades Council, Americana Hotel, New York, May 2, 1967, in Michael K. Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 121–36. King was correct that the federal government had subsidized white ethnics and the middle class at the expense of African Americans: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). “An American Tragedy, 1967 Detroit,” Newsweek, August 7, 1967, 18–27; “An Army Expert in Guerrilla War Sees a New Vietnam Developing in Our Ghettoes,” I. F. Stone’s Weekly, February 5, 1968, 3; “Detroit’s Economic Disaster,” Newsweek, August 7, 1967, 57–58; Heather Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Telegram, King to LBJ, quoted in Gordon Mantler, Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960–1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 92. King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 24, 4, 5, 211, 214, 218; King, “Where Do We Go from Here?” SCLC presidential address, 1967, in Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope, 245–52.
New York Times and Washington Post quotes in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 553–54, and Louisville incident, 561; Richard Lentz, Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), documents jaded media representations condemning King’s antiwar speech and his antipoverty crusade; King at the National Conference quoted in Sylvie Laurent, “Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Race: The 1968 ‘Poor People’s Campaign,’ Class, and Justice,” 79, unpublished manuscript in author’s possession; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 344, 357–58, 362, 466 n. 41; King, Where Do We Go from Here?, 87. Philip S. Foner, U.S. Labor and the Vietnam War (New York: International Publishers, 1989); King, “Domestic Impact of the War in Vietnam,” Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, November 11, 1967, in Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 137–52. David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 214, 215, and Bearing the Cross, 532–35, 576, 580–82, 590–600; Mantler, Power to the Poor, 96–97ff.
On the Poor People’s Campaign: Andrew Young observed that “once we moved North . . . the private sector turned against us,” that “the working poor were not among the members of the big unions,” and that SCLC had more experience with middle-class people, making the Poor People’s Campaign very difficult indeed: Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 440–47. Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America, ch. 14. King, “What Are Your New Year’s Resolutions?” January 7, 1968; Press conference; “Why We Must Go to Washington,” January 16, 1968, and “See You in Washington,” January 17, 1968, all at Ebenezer Baptist Church; “To Minister to the Valley,” February, 23, 1968, Ministers Leadership Training Program, Miami, Florida, all in MLKP Atlanta. Not wild ideas: Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Knopf, 2015); Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream? (New York: Random House, 2012). Horton quote in transcript of Myles Horton interviews for Frank Adams, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem, NC: J. F. Blair, 1975), in Highlander Folk School archive, box 17, folder 23, MLK, Wisconsin Historical Society.
“MLK and Welfare” transcript, Chicago, January 5, 1968, MLKP Atlanta; Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 76ff; King speech, Waycross, Georgia, transcript, March 22, 1968, MLKP Atlanta. King said, “We’ve had the privilege of working very closely over the last few weeks” with the Welfare Rights Organization, speech transcript, Jackson, MS, March 20, 1968, MLKP Atlanta. Women were the largest group signing up: Registration forms, box 180:2, SCLC Papers, E-8, PPC, MLKP Atlanta; Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 507–8. Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005). Kotz, Judgment Days, 79. On February 7: King, “In Search for a New Sense of Direction,” Vermont Ave. Baptist Church, Washington, DC, February 7, 1968, and comment in “Why We Must Go to Washington,” SCLC Conference, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, January 15, 1968, MLKP Atlanta. War on Poverty statistics from Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 194. King speech transcript, February 15, 1968, Mississippi Leaders on the Washington Campaign, St. Thomas AME Church, Birmingham, Alabama, ser. 3, MLKP Atlanta. “Speaks to a Mass Meeting, Montgomery, Alabama,” transcript, February 16, 1968; “Pre-Washington Campaign,” mass meeting, Selma, February 16 and 19, 1968; “That argument should never have come up,” King to Mississippi Leaders on the Washington Campaign, St. Thomas AME Birmingham, February 15, 1968; King, “To Minister to the Valley,” February 23, 1968, Ministers Leadership Training Program, Miami, Florida, all in MLKP Atlanta; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 590–91; Young, An Easy Burden, 444; Mantler, Power to the Poor, 91, 109–11; Myles Horton, The Long Haul (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 118. Donald Lobsinger interview, June 23, 2016, Detroit Historical Society, https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/287; Jude Huetteman, “Remembering King’s Visit,” Grosse Pointe News, January 5, 2017.
Chapter 5. “ALL LABOR HAS DIGNITY,” 1968
King, March 18, 1968, AFSCME speech in Michael K. Honey, ed., “All Labor Has Dignity” (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 167–78. Author interviews with James Robinson, Alzada and Leroy Clark, Clarence Coe, George Holloway, and Leroy Boyd in Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For extensive documentation for this chapter, see Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), and Joan Beifuss, At the River I Stand (Memphis, TN: B & W, 1985). Beifuss led a team of researchers under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to create the Sanitation Strike Collection, Mississippi Valley Collection, McWherter Library, University of Memphis (SSC). Jesse Epps interview, SSC. Author interview with Taylor Rogers and Bessie Rogers, in Honey, Black Workers Remember, 293–301. For details on early Memphis, see Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), chs. 1 and 2.“Something is going to take place,” in Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 40. On Memphis elections, Elizabeth Gritter, River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865–1954 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014); Papers of Henry Loeb III, and news clipping files, Memphis Public Library; David M. Tucker, Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980); G. Wayne Dowdy, Crusades for Freedom: Memphis and the Political Transformation of the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010); and Laurie Beth Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Ezekial Bell and T. O. Jones interviews in SSC. Beifuss, At the River I Stand, 32–34. Paul Winfield, David Appleby, Allison Graham, and Steven Ross, “At the River I Stand,” California Newsreel film, 2004. “The people just booed him right down,” Commercial Appeal, February 14, 1968; Epps and Lucy interviews, SSC; Beifuss, At the River I Stand, 55; Joseph G. Goulden, Jerry Wurf, Labor’s Last Angry Man: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1982); S. B. “Billy” Kyles interview, SSC; Ortha B. Strong Jones said the union slogan meant “we had somebody who would protect us if we needed help,” quoted in Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 502; Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), examines this gendered slogan as an appeal for human dignity. The “Dignity” photo taken by Richard Copley is in Honey, Black Workers Remember.
The Commercial Appeal cartoon is of T. O. Jones, February 24, 1968. Richard Lentz documented the Memphis commercial media’s overwhelming bias, “Sixty-five Days in Memphis” (master’s thesis, Southern Illinois University, 1976); on the wider issue of media racism see Lentz, Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). The black-owned, Sengstacke family’s Tri-State Defender provided an informative weekly alternative, and WLOK and WDIA played to black audiences. Kimberly L. Little, You Must Be From the North: Southern White Women in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). William Lucy and George “Rip” Clark and Jesse Epps interviews, SSC. Author interview with Tommy Powell, August 6, 2004, Memphis. Beifuss, At the River I Stand, 107–8; Commercial Appeal, March 12, 15, and 16, 1968. Goulden, Jerry Wurf, Labor’s Last Angry Man, ch. 5. The UAW at a national level had a long battle with Local 988 in Memphis to get it to desegregate facilities and advance black workers: Local 988 records under UAW Local Regions, UAW President’s Office records, Reuther Library.
Despite larger estimates of the March 18 turnout, Mason Temple could have only held 3,500 to 5,000, according to a seat count by Keith D. Miller, Martin Luther King’s Biblical Epic: His Final, Great Speech (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Lucy’s comments on King’s speech in Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1991), 459–60. The media failed to report: Commercial Appeal, March 19, and Beifuss, At the River I Stand, 201–2. King and Levison: Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 372, and David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 606. Memphis music provided a powerful elixir blasted daily from WLOK and WDIA, and African Americans had been tuning in to it for years. Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Robert Gordon, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Chapter 6. “DANGEROUS UNSELFISHNESS”
“I literally cried,” quoted in Amy Nathan Wright, “The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Marks, Mississippi, and the Mule Train,” in Emily Crosby, ed., Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), and on conditions in Marks, 109–43. Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribners, 2003), 512–13. Poor People’s Campaign tour, rally speech, Grenada, MS, March 18; Laurel, MS, and Eutaw, AL, March 20; Clarksdale, MS, February 15; “Mississippi Leaders on the Washington Campaign,” St. Thomas AME Church, Birmingham, AL, and Albany, GA, March 22, 1968, in MLKP Atlanta, ser. 3. On the mysterious white donor, Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 720. On King’s tour in Mississippi and New York and last days in Memphis, David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 608–24.
For details on the March 28 events in Memphis, see Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), and Joseph Rosenbloom, Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). “According to their strategy,” author interview with Charles Cabbage, August 4, 2004, Memphis, TN. Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 367–69; Gordon Mantler, Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960–1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 93; Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989); and Michael Friedly and David Gallen, eds., Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1993). King, “Honoring Dr. DuBois” on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, reprinted in Esther Cooper Jackson, ed., Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 31–39. Like King, James Lawson suffered from daily racist and right wing threats during the Memphis strike: Lawson Papers, Vanderbilt University. Media and FBI-orchestrated attacks on King on March 28, in Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 367–73. “Martin Luther King Warned,” Natchez [Mississippi] Democrat, April 8, 1968, essentially blamed King for his own death. King spoke at the Washington Cathedral, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, March 31, 1968, in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper, 1986), 268–78. Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 470–71. A report by Lt. E. H. Arkin, a special agent of the Memphis Police Department, revealed combined police and FBI surveillance: “Civil Disorders, Memphis, Tennessee,” February 12 to April 16, 1968, Beudoin Collection, Misssissippi Valley Collection, McWherter Library, University of Memphis. The FBI often knew of threats against King but failed to alert him: Files on the Memphis Sanitation Strike, Memphis Field Office, 157-1092, and FBI files on King, 100-106670, FBI Reading Room, Washington, DC. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 401–7, 445–46ff.; Coretta Scott King, as told to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 154, 160. William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (London: Verso, 2003), believed government agencies collaborated in killing King; see also The Final Assassinations Report, House Select Committee on Investigations (New York: Bantam, 1979). But Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1998), and Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the International Hunt for his Assassin (New York: Doubleday, 2010), document Ray as the trigger man. See also Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 407–8, 435, 460. The National Civil Rights Museum annex displays evidence in the King murder. Young, An Easy Burden, 470-72; Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, quote on 512; Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 492. Anecdotes and racist comments collected after King’s death, Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 444–46, 463–64, 478–82, Lawson quote on 454. Judith Smith, Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), documents Belafonte as one of King’s most dedicated supporters and fund-raisers.
King, “The Drum Major Instinct,” in Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope, 267; Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, 178–79, quote on 180. On continuation of the Poor People’s Campaign: Mantler, Power to the Poor, ch. 4, quote on 152. Charles Cabbage showed up as a marshal in the list of participants, MLKP Atlanta; Bobby Seale remembered going to the PPC as his salute to King, in a talk at the University of Puget Sound, April 5, 2017, Tacoma, WA. John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). King, “Showdown for Nonviolence,” Look, April 16, 1968, 23–25, and “Trumpet of Conscience,” Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope, 647–48. Author interview with William Lucy in Honey, Black Workers Remember, 318. “Love and Solidarity: James M. Lawson and Nonviolence in the Search for Workers’ Rights,” Michael Honey, producer and director, Bullfrog Films; and Lawson and Kent Wong, Nonviolence and Social Movements (Los Angeles: UCLA Labor Center, 2016). “Mrs. King Gives Aid to Unionization,” Commercial Appeal, April 30, 1977, and see Honey on Memphis Furniture organizing, in Black Workers Remember, 343–47, 366–67. Some of King’s favorite unions obtained a King holiday through contract demands before declaration of the national holiday; Honey, ed., All Labor Has Dignity, 197–99. David Chappell, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Random House, 2014), ch. 4, quote on 101; Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, wrote that six million people signed petitions for the King holiday, 272.
“Even as we fight”: Sharon D. Wright, Race, Power and Political Emergence in Memphis (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Peter T. Kilborn, “Memphis Blacks Find Poverty’s Grip Strong,” New York Times, October 5, 1999. Author interviews with Kevin Bradshaw, February 8; Gail Tyree, February 9; A. C. Wharton, February 9; Otis Sanborn, Daphine McFerrin, and Elena Delavega, February 11, all in Memphis, 2016; and Kay Davis, phone interview, July 9, 2016. Michael Honey and David Ciscel, “Memphis Since King: Race and Labor in the City,” Poverty and Race 18, no. 2 (March/April 2009): 8–11. Michael Powell, “Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains,” New York Times, May 30, 2010. David H. Ciscel and Michael Honey, “Memphis 50 Years Since King: The Unfinished Agenda,” Poverty & Race (July-September 2016). Elena Delavega, “2015 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet,” Mid-South Family and Community Empowerment Institute, University of Memphis. Honey, “Black Workers Matter: The Continuing Search for Racial-Economic Equality in Memphis,”in Aram Goudsouzian and Charles McKinney, eds., An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018). Rev. William J. Barber II, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), is calling for a new Poor People’s Campaign. King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), “The World House,” 195–223.