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 worker's strike had become a source of bitter tension between black activists and city officials. It also marked a 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 ride it 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 way spin 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 pick up work and so forth were all black.

And it was considered not something a white worker would ever do.

What did King say to these 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.

...