Author Archive
Peter Heltzel
Resurrection City: For a Living Wage
Monday, April 4th, 2011
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the world stopped for a moment. Shaken, confused but searching for a way to continue the fight, civil rights leaders decided to continue King’s Poor People’s Campaign by building a tent city in the National Mall in Washington DC. People from around the country converged on the nation’s capital to bear communal witness to the ravages of poverty and homelessness. They called it “Resurrection City,” a parable of a truly loving, equal, and just community.
King is remembered as a civil rights leader, but he died fighting for a living wage for sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. On March 18, 1968, just weeks before he was killed, King proclaimed in a speech to the striking workers, “You are reminding, not only Memphis, but … the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.”
