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King's Agenda for Working People Resonates 50 Years Later

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Fifty years ago this week, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech in Memphis, Tennessee. In the decades since his assassination, much of the focus on King’s life has centered on his civil rights legacy. But his final days in Memphis are a reminder that he was also a relentless champion for the dignity of work.

King was in Memphis in support of sanitation workers represented by AFSCME who were on strike after two members, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a garbage truck. The strikers sought recognition of their union, a pay increase, overtime pay, merit promotions, safer working conditions and equal treatment of black workers.

But King wasn’t a latecomer to the fight to raise the voices of working people. He had long before figured out that the movement for civil rights and the movement for workers’ rights were one and the same. In 1961, he explained this in a speech to the AFL-CIO:

This unity of purpose is not an historical coincident. Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few...