Martin Luther King Jr. and Economic Justice
Martin Luther King, Economic Justice, Workers’ Rights,
by Thomas Jackson
In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300
municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for
black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant
and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They
demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their
existence. That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in Atlanta to support
Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and racial