By Bill Keisling
Forty-five years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King stepped out onto a balcony of a budget hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, and was gunned down.
What was Dr. King doing in Memphis?
He was there to support striking sanitation workers and garbage collectors, who’d been long victimized by racial and economic inequality. The garbage collectors were attempting to join AFSCME, the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees.
So it was both sad and ironic, on the eve of the anniversary of King’s death, when Harrisburg’s first African American mayor, Linda Thompson, announced plans to seek bids to privatize the beleaguered city’s sanitation and garbage collection operations.
The mayor’s announcement means scores of older garbage collectors, unionized in AFSCME, may soon be laid off in Harrisburg. They’ll be the latest victims of a deepening economic crisis (some say crime) that has only been addressed in a shallow fashion.
There’s no doubt the city is broke. It’s been hobbled by 30 years of fast and loose bond financing that’s run up upwards of $2 billion in bond debt against the city and its schools.
So things aren’t looking so good from the mayor’s city hall office, whose address happens to be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., City Government Center, located just off a street once named Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
