Leid Stories--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Still Keeps Us On Task--01.15.19

2019-01-15

As keynote speaker at the National Conference for New Politics (held at Palmer House in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend in 1967), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. minced no words as he laid bare multipronged systems of oppression that activists in the United States and all over the world confront in the course of their advocacy work. Less than a year later, on April 4, 1968, King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of a black-owned Memphis motel that served as the local headquarters for...

Less than a year later, on April 4, 1968, King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of a black-owned Memphis motel that served as the local headquarters for planning and coordinating support for hundreds of black sanitation workers who went on strike over inequitable pay and dangerous working conditions.

On April 8, a silent march by King's widow, Coretta Scott King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and more than 40,000 people forced the city to concede to the sanitation workers' demands.

Leid Stories asks: Why the refusal, even by people of color, to acknowledge that King's life's work went beyond "civil rights?"

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