Freedom Facts and Firsts. Jessie Carney Smith
D. Abernathy, proceeded with the Poor People’s Campaign. Approximately five weeks after King’s assassination, Resurrection City was constructed for a multitude of protesters. The protest march for the poor departed from the Lorraine Motel, the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination, on May 2, 1968. Led by Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, teams of mules demonstrating the desperate plight of the rural poor pulled wagons full of people through Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama, as they proceeded to the nation’s capital. Tens of thousands gathered at Resurrection City. On May 12, 1968, Coretta Scott King led the National Welfare Rights Organization’s Mother’s Day mobilization. Staging a series of sit-ins and demonstrations at various government agencies, the protesters brought their concerns to the nation’s attention. Protesters conducted a spirited demonstration on June 19, which was organized by Sterling Tucker and led by Abernathy and Coretta Scott King. However, torrential rains, conflicts between residents, and the June 6 assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy took their toll on Resurrection City. On June 24, 1968, Resurrection City came to an ignominious finale when Capitol Police cleared the site. While the Poor People’s Campaign secured a few concessions from federal agencies, it cannot be considered successful. President Johnson ignored it and Congress closed its governmental coffers to the poor people’s economic demands as the Vietnam War sapped the federal tax base.
Linda T. Wynn
Rochester, New York, Race Riot (1964)
This racial disturbance took place between July 24 and 26, 1964, sending shock waves through a city known for successful corporations and institutions such as Eastman Kodak, Xerox, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. The riot underscored social and economic differences between black and white communities and immediately followed a similar outbreak in Harlem on July 18 the same year. The event that led to the riot was the arrest of a 19-year-old African American man at a Friday night street dance in the city’s Seventh Ward, in the area of Nassau Street and Joseph Avenue. Rumors spread that a child was attacked by a police dog and that a pregnant woman was hit by a police officer, and the crowd erupted into violence. Rochester Police Chief William Lombard attempted to get the crowd to disperse, but rioters overturned his car and threw objects at other police vehicles. By 3:30 A.M., on July 25, the crowd was estimated at 4,000, and a state of emergency was declared at 4:20 A.M. Despite a curfew and attempts by local African American leaders to discourage further violence, rioting in the city’s Third Ward continued until the National Guard arrived in the city on Sunday, July 26. By the time order was restored on Sunday evening, four people were dead, nearly 400 were reported injured, from 800 to 1,000 had been arrested, and property damage was estimated at over $1 million.
Fletcher F. Moon
Rodney King Riot (1991)
On March 3, 1991, following a high-speed chase, African American motorist Rodney King was subdued with extreme force and arrested by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The broadcast of a videotape by George Holliday of the King beating galvanized international attention on police brutality in Los Angeles. In a subsequent court trial, however, a predominantly white jury found the four officers not guilty of charges filed against them. The verdict ignited one of the worst race riots in the history of the United States. Later, the federal government indicted the officers on charges that they had violated King’s civil rights. Two of the officers were convicted and incarcerated. In response to this chain of events, Mayor Tom Bradley created an independent commission to investigate the LAPD. In July 1991, the Christopher Commission released its findings. Documenting the systematic use of excessive force and racial harassment in the department, the report called for structural reforms and the resignation of Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates. The Christopher Commission found that minority communities in Los Angeles held the view that they were often treated differently from whites and that law enforcement officials engaged in the use of excessive force. Appalling and well-suited to the medium of television, the Rodney King beating only accentuated the image of police brutality. However, the beating in March 1991 and the attendant videotape produced sufficient violence and mayhem to alarm the national community. More than two decades after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the ensuing riots across the nation, the acquittal of Rodney King’s assailants after videotape showed police beating him as he lay handcuffed on the ground caused reverberations of protest throughout America.
Linda T. Wynn
Sanitation Workers’ Strike (1968)
The 1968 strike of sanitation workers in Memphis will forever be remembered in the context of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., who had come to the city in support of these workers. After the King assassination on April 4, his widow, Coretta Scott King, courageously led another protest march in Memphis on April 8, one day before the funeral for her husband in Atlanta. National and union negotiators from the U.S. Department of Labor and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) finally reached agreement with Memphis officials to end the strike one week later. African American sanitation workers in Memphis had endured racial discrimination in pay, staffing patterns, and other negative employment conditions for a number of years. Problems escalated after two black workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death when a garbage truck malfunctioned on February 1. Newly elected Mayor Henry Loeb had refused to replace worn-out equipment or pay overtime, and workers were forced to supplement their substandard wages with welfare and food stamps. The deaths of the two men galvanized other workers to press for fair treatment, but city officials still refused to make changes, so over 1,000 sanitation workers went on strike as of February 12.
Problems escalated after two black workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death when a garbage truck malfunctioned.
AFSCME officials met with Loeb, who refused to recognize the union and issued a back-to-work order effective February 15. After Memphis ministers also met unsuccessfully with the mayor, the NAACP endorsed the strike. Demonstrations continued into March, and the Reverend James Lawson, veteran activist and associate of King, helped create the Community on the Move for Equality (COME) to continue protests in support of the sanitation workers. King arrived on March 18, where he addressed over 25,000 strike supporters; he planned to return on March 22 to lead a city-wide protest. A snowstorm caused organizers to reschedule the event for March 28. The march began peacefully but ended after some demonstrators became violent. Memphis police attacked retreating demonstrators with clubs and tear gas, and a black teenager was shot and killed by a police officer. Loeb declared martial law and brought in the National Guard, but striking workers continued their protest with signs reading, “I Am a Man.”
King made his second and final trip to the city on April 3. At the evening rally in the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, King delivered his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” The assassination of King at the Lorraine Motel on April 4 sparked violence nationwide. Lawson and other leaders attempted to calm the local African American community, but Loeb imposed a 7 P.M. curfew and added state police units to the National Guard soldiers already in the city. After the April 8 march led by Coretta Scott King and the intervention of U.S. Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds, who had been sent to Memphis by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a resolution of the strike was finally reached on April 16, 1968.
Fletcher F. Moon
Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March (1965)
In an attempt to bring the flagrant system of racial discrimination to the attention of the American nation, in 1965 leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) targeted Selma, Alabama, to focus on the disenfranchisement of black voters. This was not the first time that black activists worked to gain access to the voting booth for blacks in Dallas County, Alabama. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, members of the Dallas County Voters