Guest editorial

Most people recognize Martin Luther King, Jr., as a civil rights leader who fought for equal rights for black Americans. Many, however, are not as aware of his fight for economic justice for the working poor.

When King went to Memphis, TN, on 3 April 1968 – one day before his assassination – he focused on protesting the economic injustices against black garbage collectors, who received significantly lower wages than whites. [To put this in context, the minimum wage was $1.25. I know because during the summer of 1968 I worked for this hourly wage at a peanut company in south Georgia. The blacks who worked at the same company doing the same work received only $1 an hour.]

On the first of February 1968, two black sanitation workers in Memphis were crushed to death by faulty equipment, and 22 black sewer workers had been sent home without pay due to a heavy rain storm, while their white supervisors were retained for the day and paid for not working. Such economic injustice and lack of workplace safety led to the February 17 strike of more than 1,100 of the possible 1,300 black sanitation workers.

They struck for job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition. The mayor was completely unsympathetic to all these demands, even with pressure from black and white civic groups in Memphis.

King spoke to the workers at a March 18 rally and returned on April 3 to plan a nonviolent protest march for April 8. The night before his death, he spoke eloquently about economic justice and human rights to the crowd at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple Church of God.

Here is one key comment from his speech: “… we’ve got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be — and force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering, sometimes going hungry . . . . For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory!”

Continuing, King referred to Jesus’ comments about the Good Samaritan. Here was a man of another race, he said, who decided to help a fellow traveler directly, not by hoping someone else would tend to the injured man. This Samaritan did not ask, “What happens to me if I help this man?” He asked the essential question, according to King: “What will happen to him if I do not help him?”

Today, at least 24 million Americans are jobless, and a national economic collapse – caused by a few people of greed and criminality – was narrowly avoided. Many in the middle class are falling into poverty through no fault of their own. There are those in power – political and financial – who would make the suffering suffer even more – cutting public assistance, reducing Medicare, proposing tax increases on the poor and the middle class, and many other punitive acts against minorities, the poor, the elderly, the sick, the young, and the middle class.

If Martin Luther King, Jr., were alive today, I imagine he would be in the midst of the Occupy Movement for economic justice and civil liberties. As he himself said, “Somehow the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones and whenever injustice is around, he must tell it.”

He found his fire. Have we found ours?