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MLK’s other work
Posted By katie allison granju
Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight against racial injustice is, of course, his greatest legacy. It overshadows some other very important work he had started in the period before his murder.
There’s a fascinating story from The Tennessean today about the two dozen Memphis sanitation workers who remain in the same jobs they were in when King marched with them in 1968 for better working conditions:
Forty years after King’s assassination, Broome and 24 of his co-workers from that time are still on the job. They are a living testament to the final, unfinished chapter in King’s crusade for equal rights: to end poverty through guaranteed jobs with decent wages.
Today, Broome and his colleagues are paid more and enjoy greater benefits than when they marched with King - in an era when they carried 55-gallon drums of trash on their heads for $1.70 an hour and had few rights as workers.
“People used to laugh at us,” Broome said. “They called us ‘walking buzzards’ because we picked up the trash.”
The sign, with its declaration, “I am a man,” remains a symbol of the workers’ deeper struggle to be treated with dignity and respect.
It is also a reminder of the night Broome heard King deliver his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, in which he exhorted the men to stand together.
At the historic Mason Temple on the night before he was killed, King told them, “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
By the late 1960s, King had helped secure historic victories in the fight for racial equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in government, employment and housing. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed.
King then turned to a new campaign for economic justice. He called for a bill of rights for poor people that would offer massive government job programs and guarantee livable wages.
He joined the Memphis sanitation workers on the picket line as an effort in that fight.
King argued that poverty was not a natural condition but resulted from bad economic policies, inadequate government investment and workers’ lack of bargaining power, said William Spriggs, chairman of Howard University’s economics department. Spriggs co-wrote a report released Wednesday about King’s solutions to end poverty.
“He understood that if you pay workers a low wage, then who will buy the products, and who will buy the houses?” Spriggs said. “His desire to help the workers was rooted in that understanding.”
The national campaign, however, never fully took off. After King was killed, it withered.
“What he was talking about would cost millions, even billions,” said King’s oldest son, Martin Luther King III. “He called it a ‘guaranteed annual income,’ what we call a ‘living wage.’ He was prophetic.
“It’s radical,” King’s son said. “That’s why it has not happened.”
The sanitation workers decided to strike Feb. 11, 1968, after weeks of trying unsuccessfully to resolve their grievances, which included a union contract, decent wages and merit promotion, regardless of race.
Some of their demands were even more basic: uniforms, regular breaks during the day and places to wash off the muck, maggots and filth that oozed onto them as they lifted the trash tubs.
Apr 4th, 2008
A Guaranteed Llivable Income would SAVE the billions now being wasted through lost human potential, lost business due to panhandling, crimes of desperation (drug-dealing, street prostitution, petty theft) and the criminal justice and social work resources required to deal with these, poor nutrition, stress-related illness, child neglect and family violence among the working poor who are losing the struggle to “put food on their families,” and contagious diseases of poverty such as TB which turn into public health menaces - to name only a few! It would also support local businesses, as each dollar would circulate several times within the community. However, a GLI might also result in an acute shortage of willing cannon fodder.