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"In the driving rain they marched, sanitation workers, 40 years later," ABC's Claire Shipman (embargoed link) observed from Memphis, "the same group Martin Luther King was in Memphis to fight for the day he was shot." She called "a day of pilgrimages to and from that fated and bitter slice of America's history, the Lorraine Motel." On CBS, Bill Whitaker sat down with Elmore Nickelberry, now 76, who was one of those striking trash collectors. Nickelberry explained why the pickets used the slogan I Am A Man--because his municipal supervisors "treated me like I was a boy. 'Come here boy! Why don't you get on that truck boy?" Nickelberry wept as a he recounted visiting a history class at a local elementary school where two little children, one white, one black, asked whether he marched with King. "I said I sure did. He said: 'Could I have your autograph, please?'"
ABC's Steve Osunsami suggested that some of King's campaign for economic justice has born fruit in forty years: "There is now a definable black middle class and a whole generation of black children who have never had to live the struggle of the 1960s." Nevertheless, "four decades later there are still large disparities." Osunsami talked to Jesse Jackson, an aide to King who was at his side when he was assassinated: "We are freer but less equal…first class jails and second class schools."
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