It was 50 years ago today that two black sanitation workers in Memphis were crushed to death on the job. Soon after, hundreds of their brothers went on strike demanding the recognition of their union and fair pay, and to assert their own basic humanity. The strike commanded the attention of the nation and became a driving force of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign.

Standing with working people fighting for a strong union was King’s final public act before his assassination. “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,” he told the sanitation workers the night before he was shot dead.

Each day of the two-month 1968 strike, workers marched from Clayborn Temple to Memphis city jall. They stared down mace and teargas, police dogs and the barrels of shotguns, all while wearing signs that proudly declared: “I AM A MAN.”

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On Monday, on the 50th anniversary of the strike, some of those strikers will march that same path again, alongside thousands of fast-food workers across the mid-south who are walking off their jobs demanding $15, union rights and respect on the job, regardless of race.

We’ll be part of that march. One of us is an original Memphis striker, who listened to King give his famous “Mountaintop” speech the day before his death, and who works for the Memphis sanitation department to this day. The other is the daughter of a St Louis sanitation worker who works at McDonald’s to support her sons and hold on to her family home.

The fast-food workers in the Fight for $15 striking today are making the same demands sanitation workers made 50 years ago – higher pay, the right to a union, and dignity on the job. At the time, sanitation workers weren’t paid enough to support our families and we were treated as less than human by our bosses. We needed change and so we decided to go on strike.

The $15 an hour that fast-food workers are calling for today is roughly the same amount, when adjusted for inflation, the sanitation workers demanded 50 years ago. Fast-food workers are disproportionately people of color, and we’re not paid nearly enough – in many respects, we are the sanitation workers of today.

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Today, 50 years after Dr King launched the Poor People’s Campaign, there are 60% more Americans living in poverty and a staggering 64 million working people paid less than $15 an hour – including more than half of African Americans and Latinos. This isn’t an accident. It’s the result of big corporations ensuring working people don’t have a union to fight back – and elected officials who side with corporations in the fight for better wages and union rights.

Take St Louis, for example. In 2016, fast-food workers who are part of the Fight for $15 led a successful effort to increase the city’s minimum wage to $10.10. Before the law could be put into effect, white politicians operating at the behest of restaurant industry lobbyists passed a pre-emption law overturning the increase, costing 30,000 workers desperately-needed raises.

The solution now – as it was in 1968 – is strong worker organizations. Unions give people the power to stand up to racist politicians who work hand in hand with corporations and keep people of color locked in poverty. Unionized black workers make a third more than their non-union counterparts, according for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and are more likely to have basic benefits like health insurance and employer-sponsored retirement plans.

King understood unions are a critical component of the fight for racial and economic justice. He knew that attacks on unions were attacks on working people of all colors.

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“We are saying that we are determined to be men,” he told the Memphis strikers the day before he died. “We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that if we are God’s children we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”

Today, sanitation and fast-food workers in Memphis are doing more than just commemorating a strike from long ago. Yes, we remember. But we also fight. So we no longer have to live like we are being forced to live.

The Rev Cleophus Smith works at the Department of Sanitation in Memphis. Bettie Douglas works at a McDonald’s in St Louis

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