The Martin Luther King Jr. who arrived in Memphis in 1968 was an activist whose mission had evolved from demanding the right to vote and to integrate public buses to demanding economic justice for poor people. In Memphis, King was advocating for more livable wages and better working conditions for city garbage and sanitation workers. It was the beginning of a larger agenda he was building out called the “Poor People’s Campaign.”
King was killed in Memphis before he had a chance to realize this new campaign’s potential. He would not live to see Mayor Henry Loeb finally acquiesce to the sanitation workers’ demands to raise their pay—an agreement hastened, no doubt, by King’s assassination. The pay bump was a modest fifteen cents above the $1.65-an-hour many of them were paid, which itself was just a nickel away from the federal minimum wage. King’s murder also forced Memphis to enact a labor union dues checkoff for city employees—a practice that is now being challenged nationally in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite the concessions made to the sanitation workers, not much improved financially for them, nor for African-American families around the majority-black city and surrounding county in the decades after. Poverty rates for black families have dropped overall, but Memphis today is still considered the poorest large metropolitan area in the country. The children of Shelby County, where Memphis sits, have actually become poorer since the 1980s, with black youth experiencing poverty at four times the rate of white youth. As MLK50.com editor and Memphis native Wendi C. Thomas recently wrote for CityLab, “In many ways, Memphis is still a city that has squandered King’s sacrifice.”
[For more on this story by BRENTIN MOCK, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...ards-justice/557210/]
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