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The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign
W. W. Norton
January 2007
On Sale: January 15, 2007
640 pages
ISBN: 0393043398
EAN: 9780393043396
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
The definitive history of the epic struggle for economic
justice that became Martin Luther King Jr.'s last crusade. Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic "plantation
mentality" embodied in its good-old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb.
Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor
education, and low wages locked most black workers into
poverty. Then two sanitation workers were chewed up like
garbage in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a public
employee strike that brought to a boil long-simmering issues
of racial injustice. With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael
Honey brings to life the magnetic characters who clashed on
the Memphis battlefield: stalwart black workers; fiery black
ministers; volatile, young, black-power advocates;
idealistic organizers and tough-talking unionists; the first
black members of the Memphis city council; the white upper
crust who sought to prevent change or conflagration; and,
finally, the magisterial Martin Luther King Jr., undertaking
a Poor People's Campaign at the crossroads of his life,
vilified as a subversive, hounded by the FBI, and seeing in
the working poor of Memphis his hopes for a better America.
16 pages of illustrations.
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