Fight for $15 Inspired by MLK and Memphis

         While the fight for economic justice has been campaigned for decades, the Fight for $15 movement has galvanized recent protests. Most recently, the movement is leading a strike and cites their inspiration for such an act on the Sanitation Worker’s Strike in Memphis that occurred fifty years ago. They cite this inspiration due to paralleled desires, “respect and a decent wage”, by black communities between both movements despite their fifty years of separation (Greenhouse). This fifty years of separation, with the same goals, highlights how economic racism in the US is an issue that exists to this day. In class, we have been examining how white supremacists use different methods to prevent social and economic mobility of black communities. While some of these methods discussed in class are no longer practiced, such as lynching, the effects of these practices have impacted today’s black workers.

            The Fight for $15 movement leaders are interested in the concept of “poor” and how Martin Luther King Jr. championed these people who have been removed from political discourse. They cite how MLK joined the Poor People’s Campaign—highlighting another reason the movement was inspired by Memphis at this time since unfair wages keep workers “poor” (Greenhouse). The plight of low socio-economic African Americans in the South, Memphis included in this, has a long history. When black people began realizing the American Dream for themselves, white people disliked this and removed black people’s ability to achieve this through terror. After the abolition of slavery, white people used tactics like lynching, disenfranchisement, and segregation to maintain the economic status quo of white people above black people. Ida B. Wells details atrocities like these through “The Red Record” where black families experiencing upward mobility were targeted for lynching. This historical background is important to today’s movement because it demonstrates one reason why many African Americans are stuck in lower socioeconomic jobs, like the fast food industry which is the focus of the Fight for $15 group, since racial terror was used to keep black people economically disadvantaged.

            While the strike in the Fight for $15 movement is concentrated in the South, leaders are encouraging the entire nation to follow Memphis’ lead. African American fast food workers across the nation are kept in economic servitude, highlighting how little equal economic mobility improvement America has made for certain social classes within the black community. While the minimum wage problem does not affect the entire black community, it disproportionately effects people of color and highlights the class divide within the black community that exists to this day. Ministers, fast food workers, and advocacy leaders will protest this economic, racial injustice in the form of a strike, but also a protest. Symbolically chosen, the protest route will follow the steps of the 1968 strike from Clayborn Temple to Memphis City Hall (Greenhouse). Overall, the Fight for $15 movement in Memphis is evoking the historic events of MLK and the Sanitation Worker’s Strike from 50 years ago to remind America that the racial and economic inequalities are still a very real problem in this country.

Source:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/01/fight-for-15-movement-plans-fast-food-workers-strike-across-south