Ann Bausum: Marching to the Mountaintop: How Poverty, Labor Fights and Civil Rights Set the Stage for Martin Luther King Jr's Final Hours

The publisher and author gratefully acknowledge the review of proofs for this book by historian Michael K. Honey. For more information on the topic, consult Professor Honey’s definitive, award-winning account of the history, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

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COVER: The cover illustration combines a view taken of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the day before his death with a scene of striking Memphis workers before the attempted protest of March 28, 1968. Endpapers replicate popular protest signs from Memphis civil rights events in 1968. Pickets march past armed troops on March 29, 1968 (title page). Garbage accumulates in the street of an African-American neighborhood in 1968 (table of contents).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBausum, Ann. Marching to the mountaintop : how poverty, labor fights, and civil rights set the stage for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final hours / by Ann Bausum. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-1-4263-0945-8 1. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968—Juvenile literature. 2. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968—Assassination—Juvenile literature. 3. Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tenn., 1968—Juvenile literature. 4. Labor movement—Tennessee—Memphis—History—20th century—Juvenile literature. 5. African Americans—Tennessee—Memphis—Social conditions—20th century—Juvenile literature. 6. Memphis (Tenn.)—Race relations—History—20th century—Juvenile literature. I. Title. E185.97.K5B38 2012 323.092–dc23 [B] 2011024661

Text copyright © 2012 Ann Bausum.

Compilation copyright © 2012 National Geographic Society.

All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents without written permission from the publisher is prohibited.

v3.1

Version: 2017-07-05

For the people of Memphis, and for blacks and whites everywhere who have fought against racism, including my fourth-grade teacher—Christine Warren—who was on the front lines of school integration in 1966-67. All that, and you helped me love to read, too! Thank you, Mrs. Warren! —AB

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Reverend James Lawson

Introduction

Cast of Characters

CHAPTER 1 Death in Memphis

CHAPTER 2 Strike!

CHAPTER 3 Impasse

CHAPTER 4 A War on Poverty

CHAPTER 5 Marching in Memphis

CHAPTER 6 Last Days

CHAPTER 7 Death in Memphis, Reprise

CHAPTER 8 Overcome

Afterword

Time Line

King’s Campaigns

Research Notes and Acknowledgments

Resource Guide

Bibliography

Illustrations Credits

Citations

About the Author

T here are very rare, peculiar moments in historywhen we humans are allowed to catch a glimpse at the vision of a fairer world, and when we experience the nobility and joy of being fully alive as children of life. This book, Marching to the Mountaintop , describes such a moment in the emergence of a nonviolent direct action movement (the intensified years in the journey of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1953-1973, and the garbage workers strike of Memphis 1968).

Ann Bausum has given us a beautiful and inspiring account capturing much of the drama of our struggle in a comprehensive fashion and also pointing us towards the larger frame of what is called the civil rights movement. I hope that you will drink deeply from the portrait of Dr. King—my Moses and colleague from 1955 to 1968. I urge you to also hear and feel the character, courage, and compassion of the 1,300 workers who had the temerity to insist “I am a man.”

I like to call the civil rights movement the second American revolution. The first one in 1776 excluded the human rights of women, Native Americans, millions of slaves, black people, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and others. The second one was largely nonviolent (a concept coined by Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of the science of nonviolent social change) and effectively caused our Constitution to be declared as including all residents of our land.

All through this book, you will see the sheer human dignity of ordinary people, younger and older, provoked by the example of the 1,300 workers and their wives and families. These working families did not allow the nature of their daily hard labor and its ethos of racism to blot out their humanity or their insistence that one day their work would lift them out of abject poverty. This quest for human dignity—equality, liberty, and justice for all—is the soul of the sanitation strike and the civil rights movement. After all, we humans have been birthed to be human—in the likeness of God. Nothing less can even begin to satisfy our lives.