In the early months of 1968 King visited Memphis, Tennessee several times to support a strike by the city’s black sanitation workers. Meanwhile black militants, angered by what they considered slow progress, were turning away from him and his principle of non-violence. In an essay not published until long after his death he maintained that the civil rights movement was compelling America ‘to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism and materialism’. In 1967 he announced the founding of the Poor People’s Campaign to press the federal government into more effective action against poverty. In 1964 King won the Nobel Peace prize and as the decade drew on he widened his concerns to include the problem of poverty, among whites as well as blacks, and opposition to the Vietnam War. From Georgia originally, he was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and both his father and his maternal grandfather were Baptist ministers. He had first come to public attention as an inspiring leader during the Alabama bus boycott which began in 1955, when he was twenty-six. His spellbinding ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to a huge crowd in Washington DC in 1963 was admired all over the world. In a country with a history of great oratory Martin Luther King stands high.
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