All labor has dignity…. You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.
—Martin Luther King, Memphis, March 18, 1968
AS THE CONFRONTATION IN MEMPHIS ESCALATED, MARTIN Luther King, Jr., promoted the Poor People’s Campaign. Much like the strikers, he confronted a stone wall of opposition from the American power structure. Trapped in an escalating whirlwind of controversy over his outspoken condemnations of poverty, racism, and war, he clearly had stepped beyond the reigning consensus in the Democratic Party, the mass media, and even among many middle-class blacks. King had called into question “fundamental patterns of American life,” said Andrew Young, and, as a result, “We had become the enemy” to the country’s establishment. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in particular, plotted King’s ruin.
The FBI paid close attention to his every move. On February 23, the day that police had first attacked marchers in Memphis, King had left SCLC’s conference of ministers in Miami to join hundreds of others in New York City honoring W. E. B. Du Bois at a Carnegie Hall event sponsored by Freedomways magazine. The Kennedy administration had forced King to fire its managing editor, Jack O’Dell, from the SCLC staff in 1963, for O’Dell’s ties to the labor Left, yet King had continued to work with him. King and others acknowledged Du Bois as one of the great scholars and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century, but the U.S. government had taken away his passport for advocating peace with the Soviet Union and an end to U.S. nuclear testing and had indicted him for his peace activities. Partly as an act of defiance, Du Bois publicly joined the Communist Party in 1961, declaring, “Capitalism cannot reform itself” and “No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” He died in exile in Ghana on the eve of King’s famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
King appreciated this spirit of resistance and kept in his files a copy of Du Bois’s defiant statement made when he applied for admission to the Communist Party. At the Freedomways banquet, King blasted “our irrational obsessive anti-Communism” and praised Du Bois as “a model of militant manhood and integrity.” The FBI thought King’s statements proved he was a Communist sympathizer, and it peddled this view in memos to the mass media, which proved especially responsive in the South. The Hattiesburg American in Mississippi seized on King’s Du Bois tribute, writing, “People become so deluded with the causes behind which King operates that they refuse to see his radical left tendencies and connections.” The Birmingham News ran a front-page story on King’s association with O’Dell, headlined, “King, Red Ex-aide Team Up Again,” and another titled, “King Shows Kindly Disposition toward Reds.” The Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger claimed, “Secret FBI records definitely tie Martin Luther King with Communism.”
On March 4, big-city mayors endorsed the Kerner Commission’s dire warnings about the urban racial crisis and King announced that poor people would march toward the nation’s capital on April 22—using the Kerner Commission’s recommendations as demands. On the same day, Hoover ordered FBI field offices to “prevent the rise of a black messiah” and create a new “racial intelligence” section that would, among other things, “publicize King as a traitor to his country and race.” The FBI created a comprehensive list of informants to counter the Poor People’s Campaign and “serve again to remind top-level officials in Government of the wholly disreputable character of King.” The FBI also held a “racial conference” to plan ways to sabotage the Poor People’s Campaign, dubbing its operation “POCAM.” Agents spread rumors in Birmingham’s black community that welfare recipients who joined the campaign would have their benefits cut off, and they promoted stories in the media that King was only using the campaign to manipulate the poor and boost his own ego. The president, his cabinet officers, the attorney general, various arms of the military, the Pentagon, the Secret Service, and members of the media continued to receive various FBI memos with the title, “Martin Luther King, Jr.—Security Matter—Communist.”
The FBI and the media campaign reinvigorated a far-right attack against King. The John Birch Society put African American Julia Brown on tour to speak in advance of King in cities he planned to visit (her salary paid by the FBI) and publicized Brown as a former FBI secret agent within the civil rights movement who claimed Communists had taken control of the Movement. (When Brown had visited Memphis in February 1966, the whole John Birch Society in Memphis had turned out.) The FBI campaign circulated claims by Representative Albert Herlong of Florida in the February Congressional Record that would be used against King in Memphis and elsewhere: “As is usually the case whenever one of these so-called nonviolent demonstrations is organized it will result in violence. When this happens, King will sanctimoniously retreat to his ivory tower, after having ignited the fires that cause violence, and say he could not help it, it got out of hand.”
In the latter part of February and throughout March, scare stories appeared in the mass media that King’s campaign would “lay siege” to the U.S. capital. Even sympathetic columnist Mary McGrory wrote that King was “playing a last, desperate card” and “fighting desperately to regain sovereignty over his people. The Spring Campaign represents his last stand.” The rightist National Review accused King of “making a bold play for leadership [out] of this year’s insurrectionary development” that would turn “a haphazard series of events into a coordinated rebellion…[that] can only end in bloody race war.” Reader’s Digest editorialized that King’s campaign would create “a Washington paralyzed” and “that Communism’s worldwide propaganda apparatus is set for a field day.” It quoted Roy Wilkins accusing King of “bowing” to “ultra-militants” whose goal is “not freedom of speech but Mafia-like dictatorship.”
King complained to newsman Daniel Schorr that the mass media ignored him if he did not make statements as militant as those by Stokely Carmichael but then pilloried him if he did. He continued to lose allies in the New Left who derided coalition politics. His long-time ally Bayard Rustin warned that King would do better to drop the Poor People’s Campaign and try to elect Democrats in the fall. And, according to SCLC Executive Director William Rutherford, “Almost no one on the staff thought that the next priority, the next major movement, should be focused on poor people or the question of poverty in America.”
The state of the American labor movement also remained a vexing problem, causing King to vent his frustrations in a speech before the Hospital Workers Union Local 1199 in New York City on March 10. “I’m often disenchanted with some segments of the power structure of the labor movement,” he said, because most unions failed to take up the burden of organizing the poor and challenging racism inside or outside of the unions. The AFL-CIO strongly supported the Vietnam War, and complacency and apathy reigned in some of the most successful unions. By contrast, he said, Local 1199 provided financial support to the Movement and helped to create the Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace. “If all of labor would emulate what you have been doing over the years, our nation would be closer to victory in the fight to eliminate poverty and injustice,” King told his cheering audience of largely female, black, and Puerto Rican workers. The purges of CIO leftists had decimated social movement unionism, but Local 1199 still maintained “the radiant and vibrant idealism that brought the labor movement into being.” The United Farm Workers, headed by Cesar Chavez, whom King had met only briefly, came the closest to reviving the old CIO spirit of grassroots organizing, but most unions did not see themselves as part of a poor people’s movement, and King had no clear strategy to get them involved.
On March 14 and 15, a promising gathering of Chicanos, Native Americans, and poor whites met with African Americans in Atlanta to discuss uniting behind the Poor People’s Campaign. But King was elsewhere. On March 14 in Grosse Pointe, an all-white and wealthy suburb of Detroit, a city wracked by racial polarization following the massive riots of 1967, King told 3,000 listeners, “The most critical problem in the other [black] America is the economic problem.” White flight from the cities and the explosion of suburbs were producing two Americas divided by “a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged, hard, individualistic capitalism for the poor.” A white Navy veteran shouted out, “I didn’t fight for communism [and] traitors, and I didn’t fight to be sold down the drain.” As he tried to continue, white hecklers repeatedly interrupted King. “I think it would be rather absurd for me to work for integrated schools and not be concerned about the survival of the world in which to integrate,” King protested. He appealed for unity, saying, “The destinies of white and black America are tied together,” and we have to “live together as brothers or we’re all going to perish together as fools.” But members of Donald Lobsinger’s anti-Communist group, called Breakthrough, famous for picketing and physically attacking antiwar protesters, continued to shout that King was a “traitor” because of his opposition to the war.
A discouraged King left for Los Angeles. A few days later, the news media revealed that American soldiers had murdered more than 300 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai; along with the Tet Offensive and the bloody battle of Khe Sanh, it illustrated the worsening situation in Vietnam and the racism gripping America. The disturbing pressures of 1968 led to a visible change in King’s demeanor. Exhausted, depressed, guilt-ridden, angry, ill with sore throats and low-grade fevers caused by his lack of sleep and rest, King worried out loud about the possibility of a kind of racial fascism in America. He remained acutely aware of Harris polls showing that most Americans, including most African Americans, disagreed with his antiwar stand. Constant criticism and controversy had a tremendously corrosive impact on him, according to King biographer David Garrow.
King’s dream for a fair and equal America—so clearly enunciated at the March on Washington in 1963—had been brutally pounded by riots, white backlash, and war. Yet, without hope, one dies, he had told his staff at the beginning of the Poor People’s Campaign. Hence, in the midst of his seemingly hopeless campaign against poverty, war, and racism, and despite the odds against him, King told Lawson he would come to Memphis. It was thirty-four days into the strike.
JAMES LAWSON HAD been keeping King up to date by phone, and the two men understood implicitly that Memphis strikers personified the plight of the black working poor and unemployed all over America. But King’s staff practically begged him not to go to Memphis. “We had charted out fifteen cities that we were going to try to organize,” said Andrew Young. “We were trying to organize poor whites, Hispanics, southern blacks, northern blacks—I mean, there was just a tremendous organizing job and I didn’t know how you could take on anything else.” King decided, however, to go to Memphis. To do it, he had to fly from a speaking engagement in Los Angeles to New Orleans, then to Jackson, Mississippi, and then on to Memphis. He moved SCLC’s planning conference on the Poor People’s Campaign from Jackson to Memphis and said he would begin his planned speaking tour through the Mississippi Delta from there. Memphis would be just a one-day diversion. Young complained, “We had been through this too many times to think Martin could just go to Memphis, make a speech, and leave.” King’s deep and problematic involvement in Albany, Georgia, in the Meredith march, and other major campaigns had begun similarly—with one little speech.
As King flew to Memphis on Monday, March 18, a crowd of between 9,000 (a police estimate) and 15,000 (a Movement estimate) had already filled Mason Temple by 7 PM. Many more crowded into the doorways and aisles—and they would stand there for the next four hours. Some wore suits and ties, brightly colored church clothes, while others wore work clothing, as the working poor and the middle class mixed together. It began much as any church meeting would. Many ministers who had not been involved in the strike came out to see and be seen with King. Reverend L. R. Donson of Belmont Baptist Church presided, Reverend Charles Thomas read scripture, Reverend W. L. Varnado offered a prayer, and Myrtis Ewell sang, “God Bless America.”
The mass meeting had heavy religious overtones, but it also extolled the gospel of labor rights and the black freedom struggle. Memphis Labor Council President Tommy Powell excoriated Mayor Loeb, and the crowd cheered enthusiastically as he passed around a petition and called for 100,000 signatures to remove Loeb from office. Jerry Wurf, with his gray hair and dark glasses, might have been mistaken for a rabbi—until he opened his mouth. Soberly, deliberately, he recounted the origin of the strike among the sanitation men, whose hours of work had been shortchanged one too many times. He told of the deaths of two workers ground up in a garbage packer on February 1. His talk sped up and his volume rose as he described inhumane conditions of work, his finger poking at the air. He hoped that in the future, striking workers could not only sing, “God Bless America” (as they did that night), “but that America would also give some of them its blessings.” Outrage flooding into his voice, Wurf said the city took money out of workers’ paychecks for debt collectors, so why couldn’t they do it to support their right to have a union?
As his anger rose, so did shouts of “Tell it,” “Yes,” and “Right on!” “These men tell us that all their lives they’ve been wanting to be men. As men, they’ve been struggling to be dignified. And they tell us that this may be their only chance. And they’re not giving up!” On this night, as on many others, Wurf recalled, “I had the extraordinary experience of standing and pounding a New Testament” in a Christian church. The workers did not mind either his Jewishness or his New York accent. Wurf felt secure and welcomed before black audiences in Memphis, repeatedly describing the labor struggle as part of the struggle of African Americans for dignity and a better life, and fusing his message with that of the workers.
Church was a good place to do it, and Ralph Jackson had become extraordinarily good at it. Reverend Jackson bellowed, “Loeb said we could pile up garbage as high as the roof tops. Let’s help him pile it up!” Jackson challenged black doctors, barbershop and beauty-shop owners, teachers, and insurance executives (who had resisted a strike among their own workers several years earlier) to give financial support now. “The preachers have been carrying this thing on their backs for two weeks now. It’s about time for us to hear from some of the professional people who make their money off a black folk!” Jackson seemed to form his mouth into a trumpet shape—shouting, waving both arms for dramatic effect. His voice grew harsh and raucous as he shouted his conclusion: “We will not stop until every black man gets a chance to lift himself up! We are on the march, and we will stay there, nothing can stop us!!”
By now, black youths were standing up, rocking back and forth in unison, singing:
We shall not, we shall not be moved,
We shall not, we shall not be moved,
Just like a tree, standing by the water,
We shall not be moved.
This church hymn, transformed into a labor-movement anthem by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in the 1930s, had returned to the freedom struggle in the 1960s and now was part of both movements through the sanitation strike. Black youths also sang another old church song, transformed by the freedom movement:
I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom,
You know I woke up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom,
I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom,
Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!
The mass of people joined in on yet another hymn-turned-labor-turned-civil-rights anthem, sung first in black churches, then by black women on strike in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1946—members of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA), one of the CIO’s civil rights unions expelled during the cold war purges. That song was finally imported into the civil rights movement via Highlander Folk School, and people in Mason Temple now swayed back and forth, arm in arm, singing as people had done in mass meetings throughout the 1960s,
We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome, some day.*
The unity created by their common musical expression took practical forms. While people sang, they donated canned food and clothing, and church leaders passed garbage cans and buckets through the audience for donations to the strike. O. W. Pickett, AFSCME staff, and COME—which that night announced its donation of $10,000 to the strikers—all raised money and channeled it through COME. Ministers and youth passed out the COME Appeal newspaper, educating people about the demands of the workers, the status of public-employee organizing throughout the United States, and the support of white union members for the strike. It pointed out: “The Negro minister has taken an irrevocable stand on the side of the sanitation workers in their strike and has issued a ringing challenge to the antagonistic and personality degrading white power structure in the City of Memphis.” It listed “ten things you can do” to support the strike and called on all of the educated and professional classes to join in the fight.
Henry Loeb still hoped to split apart black organizations and factions over money, organizational turf, and tactics, but this mass meeting made that appear far less likely. Crammed into a church auditorium, this cross-class alliance of African Americans—as well as a few white union, church, and academic activists—by their presence and spirit brought back memories of the unity and uproarious street demonstrations of Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery. This meeting proved that the strike was not about to fail.
LAWSON TOLD KING on Sunday night that on Monday, March 18, he would probably be speaking before the largest indoor mass meeting ever seen in the civil rights movement. No other black facility in the South held as many people as Mason Temple. But when he and Jesse Epps met King at the airport, Lawson said, “Martin, I’m sorry. I said you would probably speak to 10,000 people tonight…. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to speak to 10,000 people.” King’s face fell. Epps chimed in, “Yeah, it looks, doctor,…as though you might speak to 25,000 people.” Lawson laughed, “He just lit up like a lantern.”
At 9:07, an hour and a half into this mass meeting, King made his way through a side door at Mason Temple, escorted arm in arm by S. T. Thomas and other sanitation workers. Lieutenant Jerry Williams and a handful of black detectives waited in the wings, welcomed at this point by Lawson as a security detail for King. King and his entourage of James Bevel, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, and local supporters, “had to squeeze our way through standing-room-only aisles with people all over the parking lots,” Lawson recalled. “And it was clear that Martin was their man. That obviously was the case, which I had been telling him all along, you see. That he represented the aspirations and the struggle of our people.” King’s spirits soared as the huge crowd greeted him with a long, loud, standing ovation. With fists raised, thumbs upturned, fingers pointed in a victory signal, black Memphians greeted him as a brother. In this “sardine atmosphere,” as Reverend Lawson called it, no shouts of “Black Power” or cries of “sellout” assailed him. The “spirit of Memphis”—unity, determination, and mass participation—reinvoked the power of the early 1960s black freedom struggle.
“Martin was visibly shaken by all this,” said Lawson, “for this kind of support was unprecedented in the Movement. No one had ever been able to get these numbers out before.” This meeting brought together the labor struggle, civil rights, and the black religious tradition of prophetic oratory in a marvelous new convergence. Ella Baker famously said that King didn’t make the Movement, the Movement made King, but he now demonstrated why the Movement also needed him. King reached beyond his anxiety and depression back to his strengths. Speaking for more than an hour, using almost no notes, King helped people to see the strike as something much larger than a local issue and to gain spiritual strength for the fight ahead. The Memphis crowd shouted out support and punctuated his statements with shouts of “That’s right,” “Yeah,” “Tell it, doctor,” and they interrupted his speech dozens of times with strong, swelling applause.
He began quietly, speaking almost in a monotone:
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be in Memphis tonight, and to see you here in such large and enthusiastic numbers. As I came in tonight, I turned around and said to Ralph Abernathy, “They really have a great movement here in Memphis.” [applause] You are demonstrating something here that needs to be demonstrated all over the country. (“That’s right.”) You are demonstrating that we can stick together [applause] and you are demonstrating that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person suffers, if one black person is down, we are all down. [applause]
Memphis showed the ability to “unite beyond the religious line,” King said—something he had been preaching and teaching about for years. “We have Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, members of the Church of God in Christ, and members of the Church of Christ in God, we are all together. [applause] And all of the other denominations and religious bodies that I have not mentioned.” He could barely get a sentence or two out of his mouth before people broke into cheers and celebration.
King warmed up to his subject and spoke with increasing emphasis and rising tones of excitement. The other great need, King said, “is to unite beyond class lines. The Negro ‘haves’ must join hands with the Negro ‘have-nots.’ [applause] And armed with the compassionate traveler’s check, they must journey into that other country of their brother’s denial and hurt and exploitation. [applause] And this is what you have done. You’ve revealed here that you recognize…that the no D is as significant as the PhD, and the man who has been to no-house is as significant as the man who has been to Morehouse. [applause]”
King spoke as both a religious moralist and a political analyst, and with increasing satisfaction, for the members of his audience appreciated his every nuance. They were also very fired up. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a situation like this and this lets me know that we are ready for action,” he said, pledging SCLC’s financial and moral support. “You are doing many things here in this struggle,” but particularly, “you are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor.” He reminded his audience that the person who picks up garbage was as essential to the health of society as the physician, and he made a ringing declaration: “All labor [Ralph Jackson reiterated, “all labor”] has dignity.” Yet the nation had devalued the labor of the working poor and of African Americans:
You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. [applause] And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America. The vast majority of Negroes in our country are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. [applause] My friends, we are living as a people in a literal depression…. Now the problem is not only unemployment. Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? [applause] And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. [“That’s right.”] These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income. [applause]
The sanitation strike raised not just local issues about one benighted administration but a national problem of the unemployed and working poor across America; a victory in Memphis would be a victory for the nation. “You are here tonight to demand that Memphis will do something about the conditions that our brothers face as they work day in and day out for the well-being of the total community.” The poor had become invisible to most Americans, but, “You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor.”
People who had marched, stood on picket lines, been maced, beaten, and suffered privations for more than a month knew his next point very well, as King buttressed his speech with the biblical story of Dives, the rich man denied entrance to heaven. King left room for the better-off to identify with this parable, saying Dives went to hell not because he was rich but because he passed by Lazarus every day and refused to see him and recognize his plight. “Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth”—rather, his target was self-centered greed and lack of concern for others. As he did throughout his Poor People’s Campaign tour, King used this story to encourage the black middle class to see and stand with the poor. But he also used it to connect the racism blacks experienced at the local level to the insensitivity of the country as a whole: “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too is going to hell [applause].”
It was this sort of anger and audaciousness that made people feel they had a power behind them greater than armies. To cheers and cries of “Go ahead” and “Talk to us,” King said that God would some day indict the nation’s leaders, telling them that despite the nation’s technology, spaceships, highways, and massive wealth, they had ignored God’s commandments to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. “This may well be the indictment on America. And that same voice says in Memphis to the mayor [crowd says, “Yeah”], to the power structure, ‘If you do it unto the least of these, of my children, you do it unto me’ [loud applause].”
In his inimitable way, King combined scriptural teachings and the black Social Gospel with a direct political attack on the American power structure. He politicized issues of wealth and poverty that ministers usually left at the level of generalities. People in the crowd understood the difference. He reminded the leaders of America that God’s voice would render a judgment that it could never enter the kingdom of greatness by ignoring the poor. By speaking of God’s coming “indictment on America,” King brought a larger power to bear.
King did not leave social change to God, however, for he believed people themselves had to change their history and define their own needs. “You are highlighting the economic issue. You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights. That is a distinction.” The Memphis movement would prove once again that organized people could triumph over forces of oppression. History had already proved it. Twelve years earlier, for 381 days, “Fifty thousand strong, we substituted tired feet for tired souls,” drawing upon the “best in the American dream” to force a recalcitrant white ruling class to yield in Montgomery, in a movement that carried “the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy”—the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In Birmingham, too, black people defeated Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses with “a fire that no water could put out” and “literally subpoenaed the conscience of a large segment of the nation” to help win the 1964 Civil Rights Act, followed by the great march from Selma to Montgomery that helped to win the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Movement history provided King’s best argument that organized people could win their just demands.
According to King, the struggle for black equality had logically brought the Movement to Memphis and to a new direction: “With Selma and the voting rights bill one era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee? [applause]”
Through a series of questions, King brought into focus how poverty prevented people from exercising God-given, inalienable rights, and then he poured forth a litany of complaints that he had heard on the lips and seen on the faces of poor people in Watts, in Chicago, in Mississippi, in Alabama—all over the United States and in other parts of the world. He spoke in terms used regularly by sanitation workers, Rosa Parks, and King himself in his very first civil rights speech, in Montgomery. There comes a time, he said again in Memphis, when people get tired:
We are tired of being at the bottom [crowd replies, “Yes”]. We are tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. We are tired of our children having to attend overcrowded, inferior, quality-less schools. [applause] We are tired of having to live in dilapidated, substandard housing conditions [applause] where we don’t have wall-to-wall carpets but so often we end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. [applause and cheers] We are tired of smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. We are tired of walking the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate to get the basic necessities of life. [applause]
King also pointed out how poverty corroded black family life, saying, “We are tired of our men being emasculated so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white lady’s kitchen [applause], leaving us unable to be with our children and give them the time and attention that they need. We are tired.” King spoke to black women and men alike about the psychic pain they endured due to racism and poverty, but he added the master touch based on his own experiences that not many others could command—the certainty that there could be a better world, optimism mixed with outrage at oppression.
“And so in Memphis we have begun, and we are saying, ‘Now is the time’…to make real the promises of democracy,” to make an adequate income a part of American citizenship, to make city hall “take a position for that which is just and honest. Now is the time [applause] for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Now is the time.”
Shouts and clapping, laughter and cries of recognition nearly drowned him out, as King evoked a kind of jubilation in his listeners. Why? People like James Lawson and Andrew Young, who had heard King so many times, instantly recognized King’s stock phrases and rhetorical flourishes, yet they marveled at their effectiveness when he brought them into a struggle like the one in Memphis. With one foot planted on the Bible and the other on the Constitution, King had long ago perfected a powerful oratory that matched the timing and the rhythm and the feelings and the needs of the southern black working class. His rhetoric helped poor people get beyond feelings of despair, helplessness, and unworthiness encouraged by lifetimes of poverty and racism. King confirmed that black poverty resulted not from people’s lack of initiative or hard work, but rather from powerlessness inflicted by unjust structures of power. He convincingly argued, using history as his guide, that they could change all that.
Instead of closing his speech as he often did with grand generalities, glorious phrases out of the Bible, or the words of a hymn (“His truth is marching on”), he spoke directly to the issue at hand:
Now let me say a word to those of you who are on strike. You have been out now for a number of days, but don’t despair. [Voices say, “Oh no.”] Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice. [applause] The thing for you to do is stay together, and say to everybody in this community that you are going to stick it out to the end until every demand is met, and that you are gonna say, “We ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.” [cheers, loud applause]
After many years of preaching before unions, King spoke to workers as a labor leader as well as a Christian moral leader: “Let it be known everywhere that along with wages and all of the other securities that you are struggling for, you are also struggling for the right to organize and be recognized [applause].” Instead of Black Power, he spoke to them about union power. And what is power? He explained:
We can all get more together than we can apart; we can get more organized together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change [applause]. And we need power. What is power? Walter Reuther said once that ‘Power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes,’ when it wants to say, ‘No.’” That’s power. And I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say, “Yes,” even when they want to say, “No.” [applause, cheers]
King urged workers not to accept any paternalistic reassurances to “my men” from the mayor that he would solve their problems:
Don’t go back on the job until the demands are met. [cheers] Never forget that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed. Freedom is not some lavish dish that the power structure and the white forces in policy-making positions will voluntarily hand out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite. [applause] If we are going to get equality, if we are going to get adequate wages, we are going to have to struggle for it.
In this almost unscripted speech, King forged an interaction with his audience that drove his narrative toward action. King knew that his role in a situation like this was not just to inspire but also to direct people toward specific ways to organize, mobilize, create a spirit of resistance, and produce results. After this high-powered, emotional speech, the issue came down to, What should we do next? Amid cheering and applause, a new level of energy had been created—so much so that King could not end simply with rhetoric. He needed to take the Movement to a higher level. He paused for a moment and seemed to be thinking out loud. “You know what?” he asked the crowd. “You may have to escalate the struggle a bit.” Then he dropped a bombshell: “I tell you what you ought to do, and you are together here enough to do it: in a few days you ought to get together and just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis!” One man rose from the audience, rhythmically shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Pandemonium broke loose. King had invoked a latent power that black workers in the Deep South possessed because they did so much of the hard work, and they recognized it when they heard it. Now King helped them to envision what it might be like to use this power: “And you let that day come, and not a Negro in this city will go to any job downtown. When no Negro in domestic service will go to anybody’s house or anybody’s kitchen. When black students will not go to anybody’s school and black teachers….” His voice got lost amid another thunderous ovation from the crowd. People stood, cheering and yelling, clapping, dancing, singing, celebrating the very audacity of his idea: black people could shut down Memphis! Merely by withholding their labor, in good, nonviolent fashion.
Jerry Wurf sat close to King and watched in wonderment as all this unfolded. King’s “eyes lit up,” said Wurf, as he recognized the charged situation in Memphis and what it could portend for the Movement as a whole: “He had not seen this kind of a response to a situation for some time,” Wurf noted. “If you’ll recall Dr. King, starting in Chicago, had a series of discouraging experiences. And here was a very encouraging experience. And in a strange way he gave life to the strike and the strike gave him warmth and excitement and involvement—the two came together in a very beautiful way. Spontaneously he stood there and he looked about him. He had no intention of coming in to lead a march, but I was sitting next to him and talked about it and he just felt he couldn’t let this thing go.”
As King turned to confer with colleagues on the podium, a new set of considerations must have run through his mind. During the civil rights movement, no one had ever proposed a general strike of the whole black population, and general strikes had occurred in American labor history only during periods of very sharp confrontation and turmoil. In Seattle in 1919, San Francisco and Minneapolis in 1934, Oakland in 1946, workers had stopped entire cities from functioning. The general strike of slaves during the Civil War had led to a revolution that overturned an outmoded and unjust labor system, Du Bois had written, while general strikes of railroad and factory workers in the late nineteenth century had led to mass repression. These experiences suggested the almost revolutionary character of King’s proposal. Black workers in alliance with the community could shut down all of Memphis.
His rather stunning proposal placed King in his usual dilemma: now that he had envisioned such a path-breaking historical movement, people would of course want him to come back to lead it. And apparently he could not resist. When King sat down, Lawson recalled that he said, “I ought to come back and lead a march.” Andrew Young may have been cringing inside, but he instantaneously came to the same conclusion. Hastily, AFSCME and ministerial leaders conferred with King and his aides. King returned to the microphone to announce that he had agreed to return to lead such a protest on March 22. King pledged, “We will not go to schools, places of work or deal with merchants downtown,” and after the rally he made a statement to the press appealing to whites, saying, “I wish all my white brothers and sisters would aid us in our hour of need.”
IN JUST THIS way, King had found himself in so many jails. His life was not his own because he went where the people asked him to go, striker Taylor Rogers later said. In some cases—now in Memphis as in Montgomery—the struggle matched the vigor and purity of the moral vision he articulated. In a dialectical process, the Movement provided the context, the power, and the hope, and King articulated the vision. At that moment, King came to see the Memphis struggle as a “significant watershed for where the Movement had to go,” Lawson said. King had told him even before the mass meeting, “Jim, you all are doing in Memphis what I hope to do with the Poor People’s Campaign.” And whereas he lacked the troops for that campaign, in this campaign some 15,000 to 19,000 people stood before him ready to fight for the rights of the poor.
Bill Lucy viewed King’s response to the situation in Memphis as the work of a genius, based on “the incredible ability that King had to understand and interpret the issues and what was taking place.” With only “the most minimal of briefings,” he said, King had quickly understood that Memphis represented a shift from civil rights to economic justice for the working poor. It “was really about a new kind of people, people who worked forty hours a week and still lived in poverty, and he was able to arrange his presentation to demonstrate to the crowd that he understood this, and to give them a sense that their struggle was a legitimate struggle, that they had every right to carry on.”
As thousands of jubilant strikers and their supporters left Mason Temple after four hours of singing, speeches, and prophecy, something new had been born. Lucy’s “spirit of Memphis” became a tangible fact, a feeling that ran through thousands of people and could not now be easily quenched. Perhaps the movement emerging in Memphis, Lucy thought, could break the resistance of southern employers and politicians to unionization of the black working poor. Perhaps this moment could alter the distribution of wealth and power in the South as much as the civil rights struggle had begun to alter its political and social customs.
On March 19, the powers that be in Memphis tried to put the genie back in the bottle. The Commercial Appeal editorialized that King had once again cynically used a local movement for his own ends, as he “saw how many Negroes were aroused and quickly decided to attach himself to the local issue.” His pledge to return to Memphis, the paper announced, was aimed merely to create a march that would get him “a spot on the evening television broadcasts” and build him up as a preeminent national leader. King’s discovery of “ready made followers” led him to pronounce Memphis as the first real step of the Poor People’s Campaign out of egotistical opportunism. Councilman Bob James denounced King’s proposal for a general strike as “vicious and senseless” and “demagogic,” while FBI agents sent out memos calling his speech “a series of demagogic appeals to the baser emotions of the predominantly Negro audience.”
In an editorial two days later entitled, “King’s Eye on Washington,” the Commercial Appeal again accused King of simply using other people for his own gain and ominously warned him to remember that federal troops had shot and beaten unemployed Bonus Marchers in the nation’s capital during the Great Depression. The editorial also said that King’s Memphis campaign gave him publicity but would do nothing for the workers. Everyone seemed to agree, wrote Lieutenant Arkin of the MPD’s Red squad: King was simply using Memphis as “a handy starting point to make his pitch for bigger things.” King the manipulator—not the King who energized people and raised their vision of themselves and their country—that’s the one many white people in Memphis believed to be the real King. They did not see how King’s vision of a better world might encompass their interests as well as those of poor and working-class African Americans.
Others saw things differently. When he innovated and moved with the spirit of the times, that was King at his best, wrote journalist David Halberstam. This seemed to be another one of those moments. His speech had raised his own spirits and suddenly changed the trajectory of the Poor People’s Campaign. It had focused almost exclusively on the country’s poorest ghetto and rural residents, people with no jobs. Now King found himself highlighting the plight of the working poor, placing his campaign into the context of a classic labor struggle combined with a movement for black unity.
On a practical level, King’s speech awoke the national media to the importance of the strike. As Lawson put it, King was like “a megaphone for the movement”: where he went, the news media often followed. He was one of the few people who could bring national attention to local struggles just by giving a speech. Some in SNCC and other civil rights groups had long resented King for this, yet they also knew that the struggle for social change often hinged on media coverage. More than a month into the strike, “Nobody knew it except us and the city of Memphis,” Lucy recalled, but now the media began to give it attention, and many union and civil rights supporters across the country took note.
After March 18, AFL-CIO member unions sent increasing financial support, which totaled more than $100,000 by the strike’s conclusion, and they began to see that future union organizing in the South hung on the outcome of the Memphis strike. National media coverage also prompted some downtown businesspeople to wonder whether Loeb’s hard-line stance really served their interests. The civil rights movements in Montgomery, Nashville, and Birmingham—and now Memphis—had demonstrated the power of economic boycotts, and King’s entrance caused some whites to fear that negative publicity might hurt the city’s image of racial moderation and discourage northern investments. Support for Loeb’s unwavering position began to waver. Very few whites wanted to see Memphis at the center of a national campaign against poverty and for labor rights.
Yet many continued to hope that they might still find some blacks willing to jettison support for the strike—and indeed, not everyone in the black middle class supported King’s labor politics. Tri-State Defender columnist Nat D. Williams celebrated poor black strikers and better-off black preachers fighting for a new dispensation from white Memphis leaders, but he also noted “an undertone of criticism in some circles of Negroes” that wondered whether outside leaders such as Wilkins, Rustin, and King “actually did any good other than to focus an unfavorable national spotlight on Memphis.”
AFTER THE MARCH 18 mass meeting, King planned strategy late into the night at the Lorraine Motel with Abernathy, Young, Bernard LaFayette, Bevel, James Harrison, William Rutherford, Dorothy Cotton, and Reverend T. Y. Rogers from Atlanta. As if to top off his energizing evening, a traveling gospel choir of black teenagers who were staying at the hotel serenaded King and his colleagues. The next day, King left Memphis to begin a Poor People’s Campaign organizing trip into Mississippi and Alabama. Abernathy and Bevel stayed behind, as the FBI put it, to “confer with Negro ministers masterminding strike support activity.”
Memphis gave King hope, but his tour into Mississippi during the next few days would demonstrate depressingly just how dreadful conditions had become for rural blacks driven from their jobs in the cotton economy by mechanization, and how difficult it would be to rouse a movement to go to Washington. King looked forward to returning to Memphis on Friday, March 22, with every reason to believe he would help launch one of the most spectacular days of nonviolent protest in the history of the southern freedom movement.