Final 'Fall of King' discussion focuses on 1968 sanitation workers strike, Black Lives Matter movement

LORAIN — In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. was watched by the FBI while he held a focus on reparations and economic disparity, Imam Paul Hasan said. In the last iteration of The Fall of King series at Lorain Public Library Hasan discussed 1968 before King's assassination April 4. A year before his death, King delivered "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence" at Riverside Church in New York City. There, he condemned the ongoing war, attacking it on moral and economic grounds. He was under surveillance by the FBI — at the direction of J. Edgar Hoover — and William Sullivan led the investigation into King, the Nation of Islam and other organizations. At the time, King was accused of having ties to the communist party, Hasan said — due to ties with Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levinson and others. Rustin, one of King's advisers and an organizer in the civil rights movement, helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and organize other movements, but had past ties to communism. Rustin was arrested for "moral cause" early in his career with the SCC and other organizations, leading to his being publicly outed as gay — and confined much of his activism to behind-the-scenes roles, according to the National Museum of African American History. Levinson, a lawyer, was introduced to King by Rustin in the 1950s, and continued to advise him until his death, and then worked with Coretta Scott King on the Poor People's Campaign in the summer of 1968. King's focus in 1968 was economic parity and reparations, Hasan said, with speeches focusing on the injustice of the Vietnam War. In the weeks before King's assassination, he'd been called on to help Memphis sanitation workers. Two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck on Feb. 1, 1968. Less than two weeks later, Black men from the city's Public Works department went on strike. James Lawson, who'd long worked with King, helped organize nonviolent marches and other actions to bring attention to the sanitation workers' plight. A local militant group, the Memphis Invaders, were not taken well by the SCLC, Hasan said, but King met with the group and promised resources and agreed to work with them on a march together, after the first one organized in support of the sanitation workers' strike became violent and ended in police following demonstrators back to a church and releasing tear gas inside the sanctuary, according to the King Institute at Stanford University. On March 18, King addressed about 25,000 workers and other supporters, suggesting a citywide work stoppage. And the night before King was killed, he again spoke to those workers as part of his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech. King had become a revolutionary by then, Hasan said, talking no longer about integration, but economics, reparations, pooling resources and working together. The evening of April 4, 1968, King was standing on the balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when he was shot and killed. As news traveled around the country, cities burned, Hasan said. But King's death was not the end of the movement. His wife, Coretta Scott King, led thousands in a march in Memphis days later, honoring her husband and supporting the city's sanitation workers whose plight had brought him there. Hasan doesn't think there will be another figure like Martin Luther King Jr., but he told the handful gathered at the library Friday afternoon it wasn't necessary. The Black Lives Matter movement was born out of the deaths of Black men like Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old killed by a Florida man in 2012; Philando Castile, 32, shot and killed by a Minneapolis-St. Paul area police officer in 2016; George Floyd, 46, murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020; and Andre Hill, 47, shot and killed by a Columbus police officer. And the movement is unique, Hasan said, as people took to the streets without prompting. "They were white, Asian, they saw something and took it to another level. This is from the inspiration of Malcolm and Martin and Fannie (Lou Hamer) and the ones we don't even know who made the ultimate sacrifice," he said. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.