How the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike Changed the Labor Movement

This article is from Headway, an initiative from The New York Times exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress. Headway looks for promising solutions, notable experiments and lessons from what has been tried.

Jack Walker is a union man. He drives a garbage truck in Memphis, where his route can take him barreling past shotgun-style houses along the Mississippi River and down the narrow alleyways near the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He is aware, always, of how . . .