The garbage men were fed up - treated with contempt as they performed a filthy and unrewarding job, paid so badly that forty percent of them were on welfare, called "boy" by white supervisors.
1,100 sanitation workers had walked off the job after two of them their ranks died in a tragic accident, crushed by a garbage truck's compactor. And so he came to Memphis, in support of a strike by that city's African-American garbage men. His march on Washington five years earlier, he said, had not been for civil rights alone but "for jobs and income, because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people and poor people, generally, were confronting." So, in 1968, King was building what he called the Poor People's Campaign for better pay and affordable housing.īut he first had to prove that he could still be an effective leader. With his popularity in decline, an exhausted, stressed and depressed Martin Luther King turned his attention to economic injustice. The Washington Post charged that King had, quote, "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.īILL MOYERS: He said money spent on the war should go for social programs, and that angered many, including President Lyndon Johnson, some of his fellow civil rights leaders, and influential newspapers. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: A time comes when silence is betrayal. The glory days of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and the 1963 march on Washington were behind him, his Nobel peace prize already in the past.Ī year before, he had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. But in April 1968, as Martin Luther King walked out on that motel balcony, his reputation was under assault. We sanctify his memory now, name streets and schools after him, we've made his birthday a national holiday. King standing with colleagues on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the next day lying there mortally wounded, his aides pointing in the direction of the rifle shot.īILL MOYERS: Then we remember the crowds of mourners slowly moving through the streets of Atlanta on a hot sunny day, surrounding King's casket as it was carried on a mule-drawn farm wagon and the riots that burned across the nation in the wake of his death a stinging, misbegotten rebuke to his gospel of non-violence. Many of us still have the images etched in painful memory - Dr.
was assassinated - gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee.
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