Dr. King and the Memphis City Sanitation Workers Strike - 27:57
written by building bridges radio
at Tuesday, February 10, 2015
The current struggles of public sector workers rights in
Wisconsin and around the country has renewed interest in the battle to organize the Memphis City sanitation workers in 1968. This was part of
the upsurge of the civil rights movement of the 1960's and also of the
mass unionization
of public workers in that decade."Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign"
with
Michael K. Honey, Prof. of Ethnic, Gender, and Labor studies, University of Washington, Tacoma
Martin Luther King was in Memphis to add his voice to protests in support of striking sanitation workers - the civil rights movement paralleled with the struggles of organized labor. Professor Honey details the daily evolution of the
strike and what it meant to Memphis and the larger civil-rights movement. He chronicles the events that led up to that fateful day at the Lorraine Motel, and to larger social change. Honey's analysis of King's role is particularly telling. "King," he writes, "had qualities that allowed him to lead a mass movement that joined working-class people to the middle class through the black church" until his Crucifixion."
Plus Taylor Rogers, a past Pres. of the Memphis Sanitation Workers Union talks about the 1968 Strike which was Dr. King's last struggle and a selection from King's speech at a strike rally.
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