Memphis '68, Revisited

Just for a moment, imagine that you are Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

You get a call from Memphis, Tenn. Over a thousand public employees, doing difficult, sometimes dangerous work, are at risk of losing their jobs.

These workers are members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The local leadership and most of the members are African Americans. The union offers them a chance for a decent life for themselves and their families.

But the white elected officials who have power over the lives of more than a thousand workers have other ideas. They want these employees to do their jobs for even less than they're making now. And they don't want an African American-led, African American-majority union to have the have the right to negotiate the wages, benefits and working conditions of public employees.

What are you going to do?

If you've studied the history of the southern Civil Rights Movement, you probably assume we're describing the 1968 sanitation workers' strike. It's a familiar history. Dr. King goes to Memphis to march with the sanitation workers. On the night of April 3, he speaks at Mason Temple and says, "Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants."

The next morning, standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Dr. King is assassinated.

But this is 2005. At issue is the creation of the largest for-profit private prison in the United States.

The seven white Republicans on the racially-divided Shelby County Commission, who hold a one-vote majority over the six African-American Democrats, are trying to privatize and expand the Shelby County Jail and the Shelby County Correctional Center, popularly known as the "penal farm."

The county commission originally received bids from three companies, including Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the world's largest for-profit private prison corporation. One of the other companies, Correctional Services Corporation, dropped out. To sweeten its bid, CCA has offered to make a $30 million up-front cash payment to Shelby County.

It's no wonder CCA needed a sweetener. In the past year alone, there were riots at three of CCA's facilities in Mississippi, Colorado and Oklahoma. A woman prisoner at the CCA-managed Metro Detention Center in Nashville was beaten to death.

According to a 2003 report by Grassroots Leadership, CCA "has been buffeted by numerous lawsuits and scandals involving allegations of failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners; failure to control violence in its prisons; substandard conditions that have resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings; criminal activity on the part of some CCA employees, including the sale of illegal drugs to prisoners; and escapes, which in the case of at least two facilities include inadvertent releases of prisoners who were supposed to remain in custody."

Given these incidents and many others in Tennessee and elsewhere, CCA knows it's facing a hard sell. But the corporation has some unusual allies.

One is Thurgood Marshall, Jr., son of the great U.S. Supreme Court Justice, architect of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision that undid legal segregation. The younger Marshall, a member of the Corrections Corporation of America board of directors, was in Memphis recently to promote private prisons.

Another is Benjamin L. Hooks, board chair of Mississippi-based MINACT, Inc., which operates Job Corps centers across the country. According to CCA, if they are awarded a contract to privatize the two facilities, MINACT will provide academic and vocational programs. Hooks, president of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, served for over 20 years as the executive director of the NAACP and is the former chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.