Waging what one of his aides termed a “war on sleep”, Martin Luther King Jr spent the last months of his life trying to organise the Poor People’s Campaign: a new inter-racial, class-based movement among the poor, in which he hoped black preachers would play a key galvanising role.
Fighting insuperable odds to bring this vision to reality, King also found himself sucked into the struggle of striking sanitation workers in Memphis – and discovered that workers, ministers, unionists and…