The Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike: King’s Last Cause For Economic Justice

It was a call for help from activists that took the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis in March 1968. Days later he would be fatally shot by James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

But before the motel, the shooting, the riots and the mourning, there was the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.

King broke away from his work on the Poor People’s Campaign to travel from Atlanta to Tennessee and help energize the strikers — his last cause for economic justice.