The year Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, 1968, was a big year for a cause Rev. King championed: the labor movement.

King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to campaign with unionizing sanitation workers. In April, he would be shot and killed.

His death reverberated across the county. But the success of the sanitation workers in Memphis would have direct consequences for Baltimore and Maryland, where thousands of public sector workers were seeking to unionize.

Jane Berger, PhD, is an Associate Professor of History at Moravian University. She is also author of “A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement.”

(Photo from the AFRO American Newspapers Archives.)

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