Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic plantation mentality . Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education and low wages locked most black workers into poverty. Then, two dustmen were chewed up like rubbish in the back of a faulty lorry, igniting a public employee strike that brought to the boil long-simmering issues of racial injustice. With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael Honey brings to life the characters who clashed on the Memphis battlefield: stalwart black workers; fiery black ministers; volatile black-power advocates; idealistic organisers and tough-talking unionists; the first black members of the Memphis city council; the whites who sought to prevent change; and the magisterial Martin Luther King Jr, at the crossroads of his life, vilified as a subversive, hounded by the FBI and seeing in the working poor of Memphis his hopes for a better America.