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Across the street from my childhood home in Washington, D.C., is one of first significant achievements by African Americans after slavery—Freedman’s Memorial in Lincoln Park. This statue—Abraham Lincoln standing over a formerly enslaved person kneeling at Lincoln’s feet—was the first memorial to the assassinated president. African Americans raised all the funds to build it.
My brothers and our childhood friends used the statue and its memorial plaque as a home plate for baseball and a safe zone for tag. Growing up in the nation’s capital, in a family in which my mother was a librarian and my father a clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court, reading and learning history was valued. Sundays were often spent riding the Mount Pleasant streetcar line to the end, while viewing the marble buildings and monuments. But I never recall my parents mentioning the significance of this piece of Black history right outside our front door across East Capitol Street.
In one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s monumental speeches, he “discovered” something hidden in plain sight. Even though it had always been in front of him during his struggles for civil rights, he had never tackled African Americans’ labor and economic history in quite this way.
50 Years Ago Tomorrow
On March 18, 1968—50 years ago tomorrow—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered this “dignity of labor” speech (a sermon really) at the historic Mason Temple in Memphis, two and a half weeks before his death, on the occasion of the garbage worker’s strike. It bears the marks of his own discovery of the dignity of work that was always right before his eyes.
In the message, Dr. King reflected on his accomplishments in civil rights: voting rights and desegregation of public transportation, accommodations, and eating places. But these achievements had gained new meaning for him. He’d come to realize from the plight of these garbage workers—the working poor—that all along, the struggle had been about economic injustice beneath a cruel veneer of racial prejudice. In a “vast ocean of material prosperity,” America harbored millions of working poor “perishing on a lonely island of poverty.” Indeed, his recently launched Poor People’s Campaign had located the people who epitomized the campaign’s cause: underpaid sanitation workers. These workers were prevented from unionizing or earning a living wage by a city mayor who didn’t want to pay more or provide benefits—a mayor willing to create a public health crisis and let trash pile up in the streets to get his way.
To an all-Black packed house, Dr. King didn’t shy away from the class differences within the Black community, rooted in the educated versus the uneducated, the affluent religious groups and the poor ones. Even among African Americans, some jobs “counted” more than others. Educated African Americans were viewed as having “made it.” Meanwhile manual laborers—like the striking garbage workers—were not held in as high esteem. Dr. King was clear: even garbage workers and street sweepers possess dignity and do important work.
So rather than merely arguing for the dignity of all work in a generic way, Dr. King brought culturally specific nuance to the discussion. African Americans had long been debating how to address the problem of labor stolen for generations through slavery, employment discrimination, and the denial of educational opportunity. This debate had been framed by Dr. King’s predecessors, W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. These leaders held vastly different views on what types of work would best build an economic base for the African-American community in an unjust American system.
DuBois—the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, one of Dr. King’s intellectual forefathers, and co-founder of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—coined the phrase “the talented tenth.” He was referring to the one-in-ten who would emerge from the educated Black community to lead the fight for equal rights—the knowledge workers. DuBois argued forcefully against Washington, whose Atlanta Compromise advocated vocational education and manual labor, not higher education, as a preferred pathway to African-American progress. So Dr. King’s sermon, in recognizing the dignity of all work before an audience of professionals and garbage workers, united both positions of the historic conflict by arguing for the need to focus on economic justice and human rights. After all, these issues influence where one ends up in the workforce in the first place.
Dr. King then concluded with a call to action that some considered even more disturbing than his opposition to the Vietnam War: inflict economic consequences on the city of Memphis, through a strike, as a means of exercising power against the forces of government. This was a radical shift in the movement of nonviolent protest. Moving from the “dignity of all labor” to the rights of all workers took Dr. King to a different place. For him, a theology of work had become a theology of the worker and his right to a living wage. And the collective bargaining of civil-rights protests to change unjust laws became quite another matter when the target became not just lawmakers, but employers.
Though hard to fully appreciate today, when unions are at their weakest point with fewer members than ever in American history, this call for a general strike was a dramatic tactical shift in the civil rights movement. Sure enough, it had profound consequences. In Dr. King’s final speech, on April 3, he returned to Mason Temple in Memphis to support the garbage workers. (He was assassinated the next day.) We’re often reminded of his prophetic words about his own death when he declared that he had “been to the mountaintop . . . seen the promised land . . . and I may not get there with you.” But the central thrust of that “mountaintop” speech was a detailed strategy for leveraging strikes and product boycotts to bring economic power to the plight of garbage workers and underpaid workers everywhere.
Our Call Today
This brings us to one of the central questions that we face today as Christians in America. What is the purpose of our work in light of national and global inequities in wealth today? Has God allowed America to reach historically unprecedented levels of wealth so that we might serve others in more globally significant ways? Is our wealth-creating work primarily for us? How does our Savior’s standard of service to the hungry, the naked, the immigrant, the sick, and the imprisoned apply to the power American Christians have to serve the least of these?
Has God allowed America to reach historically unprecedented levels of wealth so that we might serve others in more globally significant ways?
That statue in Lincoln Park shows a well-dressed Lincoln standing over a naked man in chains. Frederick Douglass delivered the speech dedicating this monument in 1876, describing Lincoln as the first “martyr president of the United States,” words long since forgotten. And those assembled leaders, dignitaries, senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices were all dead and gone when Dr. King championed the dignity of work nearly 90 years later. And today, Dr. King himself has been dead 50 years.
But his “dignity of labor” sermon, exhorting us to “let justice roll down like water and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24), will live on—for God’s unchanging Word commands us, blessed by the Father, to leverage our work for others.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
