The tragedy for black workers is hard to fathom. Just as black workers finally implemented Brown on the factory floor, employers began to shut their enterprises. RCA television came to Memphis for cheap and quiescent labor but found neither among its assertive, interracial and mostly female workers. It moved production to Mexico and Taiwan. Firestone also subsequently closed its doors, and jobs at International Harvester shrank after a multinational company took it over. American deindustrialization decimated unions and working-class black leadership and undermined church, civic, political, community and family life. Trickle-down Reaganomics in the 1980s gave tax breaks to the rich and unleashed plagues of unemployment, crack cocaine, teen violence and pregnancy, soaring incarceration rates, homelessness and hopelessness in poor black communities. The loss of unionized industrial jobs cut off one of the few historic avenues for upward mobility for the black working class, and those jobs continue to be lost in today's "Bush league" economy.

King warned of this coming catastrophe in many speeches to union members during the 1960s, saying the right-wing agenda was to destroy the gains of both labor and civil rights movements in order to reduce employers' wage costs and foster the political ascendancy of big business. The problem of either no jobs or jobs at poverty wages "is international in scope. And it is getting worse," he said in Memphis. This problem remains the crux of the American failure to implement the vision of equality that inspired so many people after the historic Brown decision.

The disaster of industrial decline, accentuated by mechanization and union and job loss in the Mississippi Delta agricultural economy, hit particularly hard in black Memphis. Today a black mayor, former School Superintendent Willie Herrenton, runs Memphis, but the city has the unfortunate distinction of ranking third nationally among large metropolitan areas in the percentage of people living in poverty, at over 15 percent. In one overwhelmingly black South Memphis ZIP code, 98 percent of children live in poverty and half the households receive less than $9,000 in annual income, with single women heading some 75 percent of those households. African-Americans in Memphis still disproportionately lack access to good education, decent jobs, sufficient healthcare, adequate housing and other assets that are seen as part of the American dream.

The deficits in education are as bad as in employment. African-Americans have elected black school board leaders and the schools are officially desegregated, but whites have fled in large numbers to the suburbs and private schools. The tax base for city schools has weakened, and the State of Tennessee has nearly gone bankrupt because of its regressive tax system and loss of federal funding, while the federal government's increased demands for testing without sufficient funding have had a demoralizing effect. If Brown has triumphed in terms of the law, real desegregation has not. Good public schooling remains as elusive as ever for most black children (and poorer whites) in Memphis.

Today one can almost hear the echoes of King's speech in Kansas. If he were alive to commemorate Brown's fiftieth anniversary, King would again remind us that failure to implement school desegregation is only one marker of an even more profound failure to make equality real for masses of African-American and other workers and poor people. He would still denounce conservative calls for blacks to make it on their own under capitalism. He would still remind us that "it's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he should lift himself up by his own bootstraps." He would still link our educational deficits to our rampant racial-economic inequality, and to the conditions of the working poor, who "make wages so low they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation."

King would still call on us to be "maladjusted." As he told people in Kansas, "I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence."

King's economic justice perspective should remain a crucial measure of the distance we have regressed or moved forward since Brown. But we should remember, too, as King also taught us, that movements for change are built on hope. Building a broad movement in which workers and the poor play a central role remains an urgent task to create hope for a future of racial justice. And in fact, the kinds of global coalitions and movements for justice and union rights that King envisioned have begun to take shape. The many marvelous histories of freedom struggles and civil rights unionism written in recent years should also emblazon upon our memories the understanding that even in seemingly hopeless circumstances, people can do great things to change their lives. As King told strikers in Memphis, "We can all get more together than we can apart...and this is the way we gain power."

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Michael Honey holds the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair of Labor Studies at the University of Washington and teaches at the University of Washington in Tacoma. His writings include Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (California) and Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Illinois).

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