Title: Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign
Author: Michael K. Honey
Year of Publication: 2007
Thesis:
A local history of the Memphis Strike situated within the Poor People's Campaign. It emphasizes individual stories of many interviewees connected to the strike while examining King's rhetoric on the social gospel and his attempt to harmonize race and class issues together. It results in a more nuanced perspective on King (his work on the campaign seems more of a culmination than a huge shift for him) and an excellent explication of the chronological journey of a movement to gain practical concessions by Black sanitation workers. Ends by showing both how strikes continued after King's death and also the reactions by some corporations (moving their manufacturing was common).
Time: 1960s
Geography: Mississippi Delta/Memphis TN
Organization:
A Personal Preface
- Author's history as an activist
- “Ultimately, you cannot save yourself without saving others. Other-preservation is the first law of life,” King Said (page # forthcoming)
Introduction: Two Lives Lost
- Begins with death of Cole & Walker, two sanitary workers who got mashed into the hydraulic trash compactor - faulty equipment (begins the strike of 1,300 Black sanitation workers)
- No insurance $ - hired hourly & could not afford premiums. Company doesn't even cover burial expenses.
- African Americans roughly 200k of 500k total pop, 58% poverty rate (above average for the nation) & 80% men laborers / Black women working in domestic labor in white households / service economy
- Unions white & exclusive
I - Labor and Civil Rights
1. A Plantation in the City
- Segregation, disfranchisement, disease, anti-union, lynching, Klan activity, corporate & political corruption ot keep wages down (Black and white) vs. Black protest - newspapers, culture & music, labor organizing
- Shift in Cold War hobbles these movements (Anti-Communism as a front for labor repression & fomenting racial antagonism)
- Cold War setting, union failures to build coalitions
- Taft-Hartley Act weakens Wagner Act (anti-union legislation)
- Neither Truman & Dewey not behind unions (Truman seen as the lesser of two evils)
- ***Civil Rights as a union issue pushed out
- NAACP membership drops in mid-century, due to its anti-Communist stance alienating leftists (to what extent is this also due to outright violence?)
2. Dr. King, Labor, and the Civil Rights Movement
- Quote illustrating King's attempts to align movement for African American struggle and the labor struggle
- Draws a strong link between King & concerns with poverty early on (see quote from 1957 - "“I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which will take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”)
- Highlander Folk School & etc. and related to communism
- King pickets at Scripto factory in 1964
3. Struggles of the Working Poor
- Segregation, busing (from closer neighborhoods to father away neighborhoods), FHA & other programmatic exclusion, low-wage jobs that kept the city afloat, santation workers among them (initially with mules, then to trucks), & the general invisibility to white people of African Americans, despite their intimate relations.
- Migration out of the South (cotton production requires less human labor now)
- White bosses ALSO come from plantations, so little has changed in the mentality
- Working conditions are horrible - dangerous, no breaks
- Interwoven with specific people's stories
- T.O. Jones as fundraiser & activist (also inexperienced)
- Evers - also an activist (sues to desegregate buses & case is tossed because he owns a car)
- Threat of strikes mitigated by some mild reforms and belief that mayor Henry Loeb was working toward integration.
4. Standing at the Crossroads
- *King commits to anti-poverty, anti-war, and anti-racial oppression in 1967 SCLC Convention as he sees lack of forward movement - Birth of Poor People's Campaign
5. On Strike for Respect
- Loeb re-elected in 1968 to chagrin of Black community.
- Loeb against strikers - midnight negotiations amountn to him getting thwacked upside the head by his own wife as Black negotiators explain the reasons for their strike. Threaten bringing in civil rights folks.
6. Hambone's Meditations: The Failure of Community
- Syndicated, racist caricatures of Black people
- City council meets in secret at Fred Davis's house in Black community & negotiate strike break for modest raise; Loeb gets wind of it & shuts it down.
7. Testing the Social Gospel
- King advocates social gospel; white churches had driven out abolitionists. Religion seen "as a salve to individuals locked in poverty but not a basis for social action to end that poverty." (page # forthcoming)
II - Fighting for the Working Poor
8. Minister to the Valley: The Poor People's Campaign
9. Baptism by Fire
10. Ministers and Manhood
11. Convergence
12. Escalation: The Youth Movement
13. "All Labor has Dignity"
14. "Something Deadful"
III - Jericho Road is a Dangerous Road
15. Chaos in the Bluff City
16. "The Movement Lives or Dies in Memphis"
17. State of Siege
18. Shattered Dreams and Promised Lands
19. "A Crucifixion Event"
20. Reckonings
21. "We have Got the Victory"
Epilogue: How We Remember King
- Notes subsequent strikes supported by SCLC
- Union work does yield higher wages
- St. Joseph's hospital strike (where King dies) fails
- Political repression is strong
- Corporations' response to strike is to close up shop & leave
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
Main Individuals and Organizations
Bibliography
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Written interviews, newspapers, audio-video interviews, letters, newsletters, flyers, oral histories making up the larger part of this (see chapter: A Note on Sources), MLK FBI files while leaning on authoritative secondary sources - Garry, Branch, MkNight.
Historiography:
Keywords:
COME (Committee on the Move for Equality)
Invaders
AFSCME
CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) - strongest support from Black folk (See ch.1)
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
From Epilogue on Rustin:
"SCLC hired Bayard Rustin to pull the Movement together, then fired him for emphasizing building coalitions with unions and clergy for moderate demands."
Also:
"The shift to remembering King as a labor-rights and peace advocate began, even as corporate and political leaders continued to define him within a narrow framework as “civil rights leader.” Hearing, “I Have a Dream,” to the exclusion of everything else King had to say, must lead many schoolchildren to think King spent his life sleeping. But Memphis tells us another story. "
Notes: