By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

The world remembers Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for leading the fight for human dignity for black Americans during the civil rights era.

For District Council 37 members, Dr. King's murder in Memphis on April 4, 1968, holds special meaning, because he was there supporting a strike by the city's sanitation workers, and they were part of DC 37's parent union, AFSCME.

The American labor movement was Dr. King's most powerful ally in the civil rights struggle. Days after the assassination, thousands of unionists traveled to Memphis, vowing to carry on the April 8 march King had been organizing.

Over 500 DC 37 members participated in the solemn, peaceful protest, which took on the character of a funeral cortege as the loss of Dr. King sank into the nation's collective conscience.

"Anger and fear"
To commemorate Dr. King's death 34 years ago this month, Executive Director Lillian Roberts and three other unionists shared their reflections with PEP.

"This was an explosion, an earth-shaking event for us all," said Marty Morgenstern, a former SSEU Local 371 president, who is the director of Personnel Administration for the state of California.

What struck him as he marched, said Mr. Morgenstern, "was how young and nasty the National Guardsmen were with their sharpened bayonets aimed at us. I felt they were not there to protect us." There was "a lot of anger and fear, fear of the authorities in the South and what they could do. Fear of what would come next."

"When I heard King was assassinated, I cried," said Norman O. Davis, secretary of the DC 37 Retirees Association, who was a Laborer and Local 924 member back then. "No one had championed the working man, the guy with dirt on his shoes, and here comes this world renowned Nobel Prize winner to Memphis to defend bottom-of-the-barrel workers, to fight for their right to organize."

"It was a somber and sincere state of mind we shared as we reflected on the man and his work," said Ms. Roberts.

"There tremendous anxiety about how the movement would continue without his leadership," said Local 371's John Talbutt, who marched with his wife. "People said the movement would not recover from this blow, and they were right. The Vietnam War, workers' rights and civil rights - no one has represented these causes as well as Dr. King."

All agree that Dr. King's death is an irreparable loss. "It ranks with the loss of Lincoln and Gandhi in terms of the possibilities had they not been killed," Mr. Talbutt said.

Dr. King broadened the Freedom Movement that dismantled America's Jim Crow apartheid system into a struggle for worldwide peace and economic justice. He was 39 when he met his untimely death on a mission for black workers, for the labor movement, for the poor and for the nation.

"I sit here today because Dr. King raised our consciousness about each other as people and the heights to which we could climb," said Ms. Roberts. "His legacy of people being measured by the content of character is central to our movement's progress."

The Memphis sanitation workers won their strike on April 16, 1968. Let us never forget that Martin Luther King died fighting for their rights.