Unequal: A Story of America: Chapters 11–13

On this stormy afternoon, they were exhausted and cold after a grueling day on the job—the last thing they wanted was to get soaked, too.

The next morning, the city’s garbage workers bristled with anger over Coe’s and Walker’s deaths.

Loeb didn’t do much to hide his contempt for Black people; when he met with them in his office, he made it known that he had a loaded shotgun under his desk.

Most people who encountered King personally commented on his inner calm, his generosity, and his uncompromising belief in nonviolence.

King’s resonant voice soared over the crowd, rising and falling as he implored Memphis’s Black citizens to see the connections between the strike and the larger struggle for equality.

King’s resonant voice soared over the crowd, rising and falling as he implored Memphis’s Black citizens to see the connections between the strike and the larger struggle for equality.

“You are reminding, not only Memphis,” he intoned, “but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America. The vast majority of Negroes in our country are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

“You are reminding, not only Memphis,” he intoned, “but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America. The vast majority of Negroes in our country are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

A large group of men wore placards that read I AM A MAN.

A photograph of their solemn march became an indelible image of the Civil Rights Movement.

By nightfall, Mayor Loeb called in all-white units of the Tennessee National Guard, who patrolled the debris- strewn streets with bayonets and armored vehicles.

Mayor Loeb seized on the negative publicity to try to force the strikers back to work without having to make a single concession to their demands.

King hadn’t been feeling well that day amid the torrential downpour.

He spoke of the movement’s reach into economic arenas, but he dwelled as well on his own mortality.
True, he didn’t speak in quite the eulogistic tone of his February 1968 sermon, “Drum Major Instinct.”

Delivered at his Atlanta church exactly two months before his assassination, King’s homily dwelled extensively on his death and what he’d like said at his funeral.

He took the audience right along with him. “I may not get there with you,” he said, his voice echoing in a rousing crescendo. “But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

At 6:00 PM local, King bantered on the motel balcony with Jesse Jackson, just beneath him in the parking lot.

In the fifty years since the sanitation strike, Memphis had become a sprawling metropolis that had made huge steps forward in civil rights.

Memphis was also one of the poorest large cities in America, a place where 80 percent of Black people, including most of the city’s children, lived in dire conditions. It was clear that King’s hopes for the next phase in the Civil Rights Movement—an end to Black poverty—had not materialized.

“We’ve got to hold it up until every child is lifted in love. We’ve got to hold it up until every job is a living-wage job, until every person in poverty has guaranteed subsistence.”

Throughout September and October of 2016, more and more players in the National Football League “took a knee" in solidarity with Kaepernick and Reid, and as part of a growing nationwide movement against racism and police brutality.

Peter Norman, the white Australian silver medalist, sported a pin with the insignia of the Olympic Committee for Human Rights.

“We want Black power!”
Carmichael’s words resonated powerfully with Black people. For Carmichael, Black power meant self-determination and self-respect in a nation that seemed to oppose every effort at racial equality.

Clay’s boxing prowess earned him accolades and prize fights, but his brash, uncompromising rejection of white supremacy electrified Black audiences around the country—and around the globe.

Clay’s boxing prowess earned him accolades and prize fights, but his brash, uncompromising rejection of white supremacy electrified Black audiences around the country—and around the globe.

Ali refused to sign up for the army draft, arguing that he had no personal quarrel with the Viet Cong, the Communist insurgents battling the American-supported government in Vietnam.

“Ali was young, gifted, and black,” John Carlos said. “And he was proud of all three of those attributes. He was a gift from God to this society.”

Ever since Martin Luther King’s murder in Memphis six months earlier, a backlash against the quest for racial equality was brewing.

One of Nixon’s lieutenants said, “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.”

But the rewards that came with Olympic stardom—highly paid endorsements, job offers, and athletic fame—eluded Carlos and Smith.

“I heard a lot of things said during these meetings," he said, “which sounded almost verbatim like the things that were said in the '50s and '60s and '70s to prevent the integration of schools in Richmond and around the country."

In 2019, parents in Howard County hotly debated the superintendent’s plan to reshuffle the student population among different high schools as a way of providing equal opportunities for all kids in the district. Parents of students at the county’s mostly white, affluent high school weren’t having it.

The NAACP chapter president listened intently to Ruth’s story.

“From that point on, my life changed profoundly,” Ruth said. The time had come, she believed, to stir the pot in Boston and to bring America’s Civil Rights Movement home.

She still lived in her childhood home, in the white Irish enclave of South Boston, where residents were fiercely loyal to their neighborhood and deeply distrustful of outsiders.

Hicks shared the outlook of her constituents in “Southie.” There was no way she would ask them to bus their white children to Roxbury—or to invite Black students from Roxbury into Southie—just to satisfy the NAACP.

“Public schools,” according to Carter, “controlled by white middle-class parents and teachers, had become instruments for blocking rather than facilitating the upward mobility of blacks.”

“The schools. The housing. The government. All of this is a part of the structural racism which is still very much in place.”
In Boston, where the vast majority of students are now children of color, the effects are still glaring.

Some schools are so hyper-segregated that education experts refer to them as “apartheid schools”—referring to the extreme system of racial separation in South Africa before 1991.

According to one of our national myths, when the Civil Rights Movement defeated Jim Crow in the South, racism in America came to an end. While individual people might still be racist, the story goes, our society treats all people equally, and the old racial roadblocks—segregated schools, poll taxes, and open displays of bigotry—are a thing of the past.