However, as King pointed out, the great disjuncture of the 1960s grew out of the government's failure to fully implement integration, which left a younger generation of black workers severely marginalized. Raised to work in heavy laboring jobs and handicapped by inadequate segregated schooling, they had almost no chance to get into the white-collar clerical and management jobs expanding during that era. Unemployed young black males formed a smoldering base for rebellion that struck inner cities across the United States from 1964 through 1968. The draft siphoned off many of them to the war in Vietnam, where they died in disproportionate numbers. African-American women increasingly did double duty as wage workers and heads of households, as families fell apart under a growing crisis affecting the black working class.

More black women entered factory production, and a growing movement of black workers in the mid-1960s challenged employment discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet most African-Americans still had no place to go for work but into unskilled, low-wage jobs in the expanding service economy. Thus, in 1968 King recognized that the strike of 1,300 black sanitation workers in Memphis represented the rising struggle of the working poor, whose ranks included black women domestic and service workers as well as black men. He told Memphis strikers, "You are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages." As black sanitation workers challenged the plantation mentality of the white Mississippi Delta under the slogan "I Am a Man," King decided to make Memphis the starting place for his Poor People's Campaign--a move to demand systemic, radical reform and to divert federal spending from the Vietnam War to programs to create jobs and income and eradicate poverty in America and the world.

Memphis sanitation workers did win their strike. And their success opened the way to unionization of the working poor in government jobs across the country, a major area in which unions have expanded for the past thirty-plus years. King's death forced the intransigent, segregationist mayor of Memphis to allow a strike settlement, which may have benefited the city's black middle class most of all. As sanitation worker Taylor Rogers points out, today in Memphis "city hall is full of blacks, even to the mayor," and organized public workers who vote helped to put them there. Blacks with city and county jobs and in clerical positions as well, he says, "wouldn't be in the position they're in now if it had not been for King comin' here and dyin'."

Within the factories, civil rights unionism succeeded in battering down many of the walls of employment discrimination. Clarence Coe recalled that by the time he and his cohort left Firestone in the early 1980s, "we were virtually equal. If you qualified for something, you just about [always] get it." Lonnie Roland said, "It was different, like night and day." Yet the assassination of King and Bobby Kennedy undercut the multiclass, multiracial alliance and expansive agenda for economic and social justice that King sought. Although the black middle class expanded, from the 1970s onward massive destruction of industrial employment gutted unions and the economic base for black communities in Memphis and across the country.

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