In the 50 years since King’s death, the media and most historians have cast the Poor People’s Campaign as a failure, and Memphis has come to be remembered primarily as the site of his tragic assassination. Instead, as the people taking up the struggles to end poverty and create a living wage today point out, we should embrace King’s final effort as a necessary turn that we can emulate. In the Poor People’s Campaign, dispossessed people learned skills and crossed cultural boundaries, beginning a fight for economic justice that many continued for the rest of their lives.
In the Memphis strike, black workers declaring “I Am a Man” paved the way for AFSCME’s successful national campaign to unionize thousands of public employees, including many African Americans and women. The percentage of public employees who are unionized is now five times the percentage of private-sector employees. Unions look back on King as a labor hero as well as a prophetic advocate for the disinherited and the working poor. AFSCME’s “I Am 2018” campaign seeks to rekindle the memory of what happened 50 years ago and spark a nationwide movement to organize workers and poor people in the fight for racial and economic justice.
The national media love to focus on anniversaries, but 50 years after King’s death, we should remember that he dreamed of much more than simply winning the fight for civil and voting rights. We should remember, as former AFSCME secretary-treasurer (and Memphis organizer) William Lucy told me some years ago, that “Dr. King really highlighted the great contradiction…. If you relieve the civil-rights shackles or barriers, that does not necessarily guarantee that your economic situation will change. There is something wrong with the social structure. There is something wrong with the economic structure.” As King put it, when “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
It might also be time to dispense with the standard notion of King as a top-down leader and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the New Left as the bottom-up movements of that time. Movements require many kinds of agitators, organizers, and leaders. We should embrace the many different movements fighting for rights and freedom today—women’s rights, immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, peace and nonviolence—as well as people of all ethnicities. But we should also bring labor issues and union rights to the forefront of our concerns, as Coretta Scott King did after her husband’s death. Advocating for a federal holiday in his memory, she pointed out that it would be the first one to honor an American who “gave his life in a labor struggle.”