Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

On the 3rd of April 1968, one of the most controversial political leaders in American history flew

into Memphis, Tennessee. He was there to offer his support to a strike, which had just entered

its 52nd day. The sanitation workers strike had become a source of bitter tension between black

activists and city officials. It also marked the key stage in the development of Martin Luther King's

Poor People's Campaign, intended to culminate with another march on Washington, D.C.

The work was very physical at the time. They'd write on the back of these sanitation trucks.

They'd go out in people's yards, pick up tubs full of maggots and garbage, and carry it on their heads,

take it to the back of a truck and push it up to a higher level, and someone else would pick it up

and throw it in a waist bin in the truck. That's Michael Honey, author of the Promised Land,

Martin Luther King, and the fight for economic justice. The people who did this kind of work that I'm

describing were all African-American. There were about 1,300 of them. The supervisors were almost

all white. The truck drivers were mostly white, I think, some black, but the people who did the

pick-up work and so forth were all black. It was considered not something a white worker would

ever do. What did King say to the sanitation workers that night?

There were a lot of painful things that had already happened, so two workers were killed

in the back of a sanitation truck because of faulty equipment. The workers went on strike

when they held demonstration downtown. The police attacked them with mace.

By the time King got there, it was six weeks into this, and the black ministers and churches had

joined hands with the black workers. It's one of the few times in the South where you see

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