Project Description

Honoring the Legacy: Learning it, Living it was an event created and hosted by Kirby Middle School students at their local library in Memphis, TN. Scheduled on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the project sought to engage students and community members around issues of the civil rights movement, particularly in reference to the sanitation strike that took place in their hometown in 1968.

On February 12, 1968, 1,300 African-American sanitation workers in Memphis staged a walk out. Though there had been a long history of grievances, the strike was started as a response to a January 31, 1968, incident in which 22 black sanitation workers were sent home without pay due to inclement weather, while all the white workers were allowed to remain at work. When the city of Memphis refused to negotiate with the 1,300 striking workers, King and other civil rights leaders were asked to visit Memphis. In mid-March, King stopped in Memphis and spoke to over 15,000 people at Mason Temple, later leading a march in support of the striking workers. As King led the crowd, a few protestors smashed the windows of a storefront. The violence spread, and soon countless others had taken up sticks and were breaking windows and looting stores. Police moved in to disperse the crowd, but several threw stones at the police; the police responded with tear gas and nightsticks. At least one of the marchers was shot and killed. King was extremely distressed by the violence that had erupted during the march and became determined not to let violence prevail. Thus, another march was scheduled for April 8, 1968. On April 3, King delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.  After the speech, he returned to the Lorraine Motel, where he was later shot and killed.

The day-long event, Honoring the Legacy: Learning it, Living it, included several presentations and facilitated dialogues. Guest speaker David Madlock, associate director of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, made a presentation of the PBS special Eyes on the Prize.  Afterwards, he facilitated a dialogue concerning the civil rights movement. Taylor Rogers, a participant in the 1968 sanitation worker’s strike answered questions and shared his experiences as a sanitation worker during the strike, covering the labor concerns, family pressures, and community-wide effects of the event. Hester Moore performed excerpts from her one woman show, 16 ‘n’ 68, which is about a teenager living in Memphis in 1968. The play chronicles the story of a teenager who left school to participate in the strike and was confronted with violence and verbal insults for the first time.

Honoring the Legacy: Learning it, Living it was organized by Carolyn Matthews, a teacher in the school district.  Students from her classes also created a mural about the strike for the school by painting a picture and gluing pieces of garbage from their homes to a wall in the middle school.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities

Students prepared for Honoring the Legacy: Learning it, Living it by studying the American civil rights movement, focusing especially on the events that happened in their hometown. They researched Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; analyzed the events that led up to the 1968 Workers’ Sanitation Strike; and read Mississippi Trial, 1965, a fictional account of events surrounding Emmett Till’s trial.

During the day-long event, Dr. Madlock spoke about the cultural and political atmosphere in which Till’s trial took place, and asked students to respond to questions about how they would have acted in similar circumstances. For example, he asked students what they would do if they were sanitation workers with families to take care of, who were being discriminated against in their place of work. Would they participate in the strike, or would they continue to work under those conditions in order to put food on the table? After Hester Moore’s presentation of her one woman show, she invited students up from the audience to role play. She had them march, as if protesting in the strike, and was quick to point out every time one student bumped into one another. This illustrated the difficulty the strikers had in restraining their anger during their protest, and Moore reminded the students that they were forced to stay calm, knowing that if they broke out into violence, the police would violently step in.

Kirby Middle School’s collaboration with their local library, East Shelby Branch Library, also allowed community members to participate. The presentations took place in their meeting room, and librarians arranged to have a special table set up displaying related books from their collection. The library staff was so impressed with the event, said teacher Carolyn Matthews, that they offered the students more support for the future. Matthews hopes to collaborate with the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change for the school’s next program, which will be about lynching and cover not only the physical damages, but the social and economic ones as well. Students will also have the opportunity to share their creative writing.