NYT: A Campaign With Echoes From 1968

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/nyregion/16about.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

By JIM DWYER

Jesse Epps will be in New York on Thursday afternoon to speak about the future, carrying a credential from history.

He spent the late afternoon of April 4, 1968, in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, talking with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about a march in support of the city’s sanitation workers, who were striking for wages that would permit them to get off welfare and live in homes with indoor toilets.

Just a week before, an earlier march turned into a bedlam, with stores looted, the crowd gassed, and Dr. King hustled into a car by aides. For Dr. King, the event had been an embarrassing, dispiriting rout. He came back to Memphis to salvage the strikers’ cause and his reputation.

Seated in that $13-a-day room, Mr. Epps assured Dr. King that this time all the churches in town were rallying behind the strikers. “We talked about the fact that the safety and security had come a long way from where we had begun,” said Mr. Epps, a labor organizer who had been sent to Memphis by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

They wound up their meeting, and Dr. King declined an invitation to dine with Mr. Epps. He was already due at the home of a minister for supper. He washed up, knotted a fresh tie. A few of his people were in the parking lot outside, so he stepped onto the balcony outside Room 306 to tell them about the dinner plans. A single shot brought him down.

The echoes of that instant have carried 40 years. They can be heard around New York in the most casual of conversations about national politics, 2008: among strangers in a subway car, friends at dinner, people on their jobs.

FULL story at link.