SUPPORTED BY GRANTS FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR the Humanities, Professor David Yellin and Carol Lynn Yellin and others who had lived through the traumatic experiences of 1968 formed the Search for Meaning Committee, a group that compiled the marvelous Sanitation Strike Collection (SSC), now housed in the Mississippi Valley Collection (MVC) of the Ned R. McWherter Library at the University of Memphis. It includes scores of interviews, clippings, video-and audiotapes, correspondence, newsletters, flyers, and more. I relied heavily on this archive for my research, as well as on At the River I Stand, an elegant if underappreciated account of the strike, first self-published by English Professor Joan Beifuss in 1983. In this book, I set out to create a more fully historicized account of the strike and its roots in black history, as well as the evolution of Martin Luther King’s labor and coalition politics, and the Poor People’s Campaign. My narrative is constructed mainly from “primary sources”—eyewitness accounts created at the time events occurred or shortly thereafter—drawing on the strike collection and an array of other sources.
For this purpose, I have drawn heavily on oral histories—some recorded by Beifuss and her colleagues, others by researchers for the Ralph J. Bunche Papers at Howard University, between 1968 and 1972. Interviews recorded in the 1980s and 1990s by me, and by researchers for the At the River I Stand film, may be more subject to the memory lapses and embellishments that come with time, yet these, too, remain “primary” sources as eyewitness accounts. Oral history remains crucial to telling what happened and also what people thought about what happened, especially in an era when workers, the poor, and African Americans were largely shut out of the mass media and elective office and could not get their stories told. I use oral history and other sources within a historical context, however, doing my best to compare, contrast, and understand. I list oral histories in the bibliography, but I do not cite them in the source notes, since the reader can infer from the text when I am drawing on an interview and who that interviewee is. Where that may not be clear, I list a citation in the source notes.
The use of intelligence records requires some explanation. I used the FBI’s Martin Luther King, Jr., file (100-106670, which I refer to as FBI/MLK), at the FBI Reading Room in Washington, DC. But I relied on scholars who have seen more of those files than I have—namely, David Garrow, Taylor Branch, and Gerald McKnight. I worked most heavily in the Memphis field office files on the Sanitation Strike (157-1092, which I refer to as FBI/MSS), which consist of five files in chronological order. I also used Lieutenant Ely Arkin’s “Civil Disorders, Memphis, Tennessee,” which is a summary of the Memphis Police Department’s surveillance of the strike (referenced as “Arkin Report”). The City’s larger collection of “Red squad” files were destroyed by the MPD in 1976 so the public could not see them, making this our only record of their contents. I used all these political surveillance records sources with care and skepticism. Agents were paid for the purpose of finding damning information, and their surveillance reports often distort facts to present a case for prosecution of supposedly “subversive” individuals such as King. Documents were collected in the context of government “counterintelligence” actions to undermine King, the Poor People’s Campaign, and other Movement activities through disinformation, provocation, and various forms of intimidation and other illegal actions against citizens exercising First Amendment political rights. Surveillance records often tell us more about the nature of illegal government repression than about the actions of those under surveillance. Yet the taxpayer money used to create surveillance records at least has provided historians with important chronological accounts, a view of how police agencies affected Movement organizing, and information reported to police agencies by people in the community. I list FBI documents by their date and often by the sub-document number, by which any researcher can locate them. All FBI documents used are available under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
I have been cautious in referencing the voluminous and conflicting federal, courtroom, and journalistic investigations of the King assassination, which I do not try to unravel and which has spawned an industry of experts. The FBI moved all its documents dealing with the King assassination into a special file that is code-named “Murkin,” which is available on microfilm. I refer to literature on the assassination primarily as it relates to the story of the Memphis movement and how people in Memphis perceived King’s death.
In the source notes that follow, I try to provide clear documentation without overwhelming the reader with citations. A voluminous historiography exists on King, civil rights, black workers, and the labor movement, and I humbly invite readers to explore it. Various works on King by David Lewis, David Garrow, Taylor Branch, Peter Ling, Clayborne and Susan Carson and the King Papers Project, Adam Fairclough, Thomas Jackson, Stuart Burns, and others have gone far beyond narrow treatments of King as a “civil rights leader.” I also urge readers to consult the many marvelous histories of labor and the black freedom movement, and, for greater depth on issues in Memphis, to see my first two books, listed in the bibliography. I cite secondary accounts only as they directly affect the story, and I avoid repeating sources of common knowledge among scholars or using large numbers of “see also” references. My citations in the source notes are minimized by short titles referring the reader to the bibliography, and key phrases provide documentation in the order in which information appears. My own personal interviews with various people in this book will be placed in an oral history collection and made available to the public.