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The Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike |
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In March of 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr., went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a labor strike by municipal sanitation workers, all of whom were black. The strike was for union recognition, higher wages, fringe benefits, and safer working conditions. The strike was a bitter one, and white Memphis city officials had stood firm against the black strikers' economic demands.
During a King-led protest march in downtown Memphis on March 28, 1968, some of the demonstrators cast aside King's nonviolent principles and began breaking plate glass windows and looting stores. The Memphis police force responded with hostility toward all the marchers. It was the first time King and his fellow organizers had ever lost control of a protest march had it result in black, rather than white, violence. As the situation became more tense and uncontrollable, King's colleagues forced him to leave the march against his will in order to guarantee his personal safety.
The night of April 3, 1968, King addressed a black rally in Memphis supporting the sanitation strike. He concluded with a reference to his own mortality, suggesting that he might not live long enough to see the promised land of racial justice for which he and so many others had been working for so long. "I may not get there with you," he concluded his talk, "but we as a people will get to the promised land."
The following evening Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed by a bullet from a high-powered rifle as he stood on the balcony of his motel in Memphis. As the news spread throughout the nation, riots broke out in the African American sections of more than 130 cities, including Washington, D.C. During the weeklong course of the riots, 46 people were killed, all but five of whom were black. Some 2,600 fires were started that caused property damage of more than $100 million. State governors had to call out the national guard to quell the violence. In a number of larger cities, President Lyndon Johnson was forced to order in regular Army troops. Over 20,000 rioters were arrested. It was "the most concentrated week of racial violence Americans had ever known."
Memphis sanitation workers' strike, 1968 |
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