When the Black Political Class Betrayed Black Workers
Martin Luther King Jr died supporting striking black sanitation workers in the South. Less than a decade later, a black Atlanta mayor and King’s own father were attacking that same group of workers and breaking their strike. Black urban governance is meaningless without a commitment to strengthening the public sector and rejecting the logic of austerity.
Downtown Atlanta, GA, December 2007.Ron Reiring / Flickr
It was April 4, 1977 and Martin Luther King, Sr, in partnership with the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, was speaking to the local press. His words, coming nine years to the day after his son’s assassination in Memphis, are full of tragic irony.
King offered his backing to Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta, and urged striking sanitation workers from AFSCME Local 1644 to return to work: “Now, if you do everything to accommodate them, then I say, fire them.”
These mostly black workers were in the same sector and union as the ones Martin Luther King, Jr championed during his last campaign in Memphis in 1968. The response from the local black political class was not the one heard from figures like King, Jr in the late 1960s.
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