Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

April 3rd, 50 years ago.

I just want to do God's will.

And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain.

And I've looked over and I've seen the promised land.

At the Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee,

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke those famous words.

He looked exhausted and seemed to collapse in his chair after he finished speaking.

The next day, he would be assassinated, shot while standing on the balcony of a hotel. But the path to King's assassination that day in Memphis actually began there months earlier.

Turential downpours. The sewers were overflowing and streets were flooded.

But Memphis still forced its sanitation workers, who were all black men, to go to work.

Two sanitation workers took shelter from the rain in the back of their garbage truck.

A switch malfunctioned. The compactor turned on and the men were killed.

The Public Works Department refused to compensate their families.

Several days after the deaths,

1,300 black sanitation workers walked off the job.

They demanded that the city of Memphis recognized their union, increased wages, and

improve their horrendous working conditions.

But the fight was about more than working conditions.

It was about racism and civil rights.

Strikers carried signs with a simple, powerful plea for dignity

that became an iconic image of the civil rights era. The sign said, I am a man. By mid-Feduary,

...