From the Publisher Seek the Peace and Prosperity of the City in which I have placed you. Jeremiah 29:7 "Come, you who are blessed by my father, take your inheritance. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. Truly, I tell you, whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
problem for everybody living in Memphis.
The death of Dr. King resulted in Buford Ellington, then the Governor of Tennessee, calling out the National Guard to aid the City of Memphis Police Department, which was trying to restore order to a city overcome with grief, anger, and fear. The National Guard had troop transport trucks parked at the end of Reese at Walnut Grove. Their presence gave this eight-year-old a sense of comfort as Mathew 25: 34, 35, 36, 40 well as confusion: what could have happened in my city that would require the army to be positioned at the end of my street? It was clearly a coming of age moment for me, turn 60 this week, and I was eight years old when Dr. as the innocence of my childhood was shattered to the Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4th, realities of a broken world. 1968. I lived on North Reese between Poplar and Walnut Grove. I remember the fear that came into our house that The Protestant Work Ethic teaches that just as priesthood day. We lived two blocks from East High School, and the (or “calling” from God) was essential to a healthy society protests had reached the neighborhoods just north of governed by God’s law, that all work was a vocation or East High School. Dr. King had come to Memphis to fight calling from God essential to the well-being and growth of for the equal treatment of the African American sanitation a community. I have jokingly asked for years, “would you workers. The Sanitation Workers’ Strike had started on rather live in a city without brain surgeons or a city without February 12th after two black sanitation workers had garbage collectors and police officers.” The Protestant been killed by taking cover from the cold and rain in the Work Ethic requires us to appreciate the calling of “less back of a garbage truck, because they were not allowed in skilled jobs” just as much as we appreciate the “most the building like their white counterparts. skilled jobs.” In fact, it is the work of the “less skilled”, essential workers that allows the work of the “most skilled” The Sanitation Workers’ Strike made living in the city to exist. unbearable - as the weeks went by, the trash piled up. I remember how difficult it was to do my chores - which Dr. King came to Memphis to support the essential involved taking the trash out - but now there was no place sanitation workers, whose job was clearly what most to put the garbage, and it piled up in the front curb. This would consider less than desirable, but, if honest, one of was before the widespread use of plastic garbage bags, the most essential jobs for a city to be habitable. The night and in fact this was one of the many issues that the before the march in Memphis, Dr. King preached his last sanitation workers were striking over. Garbage at that time sermon, "I've Been to the Mountaintop." Dr. King preached was placed outside your home loosely in metal garbage as if he knew that he was about to give his life for the Civil cans. The sanitation workers would dump the trash into Rights Movement. their tubs and then carry the tubs to the truck with wet, open garbage often spilling over the top or seeping out In the body of his sermon, he preached from the 10th of the rusted bottoms of the tubs onto the workers. The chapter of Luke, The Parable of the Good Samaritan: “The Sanitation Workers’ Strike now made this problem a Priest and Levy asked, ‘If I stop and help this man what will
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JULY / AUGUST 2020
