What some do not remember are King’s latter years that fill the gap between when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that strengthened existing anti-discrimination laws including those protecting voting rights, and 1968, the year King was assassinated.
After winning rights for blacks across the nation, it sometimes is assumed that King was done campaigning. In fact, however, after the victory for civil rights, King started focusing on class based issues in America.
“He was always about working for all people, not just black people. He was someone who was against oppression, discrimination, marginalization and the disinfranchisement of any person,” Tracey Patton, the Director of African American Diaspora Studies and associate professor at UW, said.
In the time span between his civil rights campaign and his assassination, King gave a speech on the Vietnam War, and was involved with the Poor People’s Campaign and a sanitation strike in Memphis.
“He used a very much inclusive approach to fighting issues of discrimination by looking at what other leaders around the world had done to also fight for civil rights,” Patton said.
In his speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” King criticized the American government saying that the U.S. was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
King applied these criticisms of the Vietnam War to a critique of the U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s. According to FAIR, “King said, the U.S. was ‘on the wrong side of a world revolution.’ King questioned ‘our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,’ and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions ‘of the shirtless and barefoot people’ in the Third World, instead of supporting them.”
One of King’s largest projects came about in his last years. The project was titled the Poor People’s Campaign and his intention was to have a multi-cultural mass of poor people descend on Washington D.C. and set up tents.
The goal of this campaign was to have congress pass anti-poverty legislation. Along his journey of recruiting, Dr. King made a fatal stop in Memphis.
Dr. King’s visit to Memphis was in support of a local sanitation strike. T. O. Jones, according to The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, started the strike. Jones was a sanitation worker who was fired for his union activities.
King aligned himself with the workers’ mission to address the issue of their poverty and the unfair treatment they were receiving.
According to the same source, “40 percent of [the workers] qualified for welfare to supplement their meager salaries. They received virtually no health care benefits, pensions, or vacations, worked in filthy conditions, and lacked such simple amenities as a place to eat and shower.”
“It [the civil rights movement] branched out into white America, impoverished America which includes all races of people, and that’s when he honestly became the bigger threat,” Patton said.
King thought the plight of these workers also aligned well with his Poor People’s Campaign. Unfortunately, King never made it to Washington, D.C. to see the tent city that he had been such a big part of organizing because he was assassinated on the evening of April 4, 1968.
