The garbage workers had to wrestle with tubs and cans of all shapes and sizes, some so heavy it took two or three men to lift them. In the sweltering Memphis summers, the containers were prime breeding grounds for maggots that tumbled onto the workers.

"You'd have to tie a rag around your head to keep them from going down your back. That's rough work, but you couldn't say anything or they'd fire you," Warren said. "We were men, but they treated us like boys."

Pay ranged from $1.65 to $1.85 an hour for garbage crew members, just above the federal minimum wage of $1.60. Workers got no breaks or overtime pay and could be sent home without full pay when it rained. White supervisors drew full pay, rain or shine.

Looking back on the indignities endured by the workers still brings tears to Warren's eyes, but the pain is softened by memories of organizing the strike and taking to the streets under the banner "I Am A Man."

"I had a sign on my front and my back," he said, "and I was walking around saying, 'I am a man. I ain't going to be quiet no more."'

King was cut down April 4 by a rifle slug that tore through his jaw and spine as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. James Earl Ray, a petty criminal and prison escapee, pleaded guilty to the murder. He died in prison in 1998.

After King's death, with the National Guard patrolling the streets, worried Memphis residents began calling for an end to racial hostilities.

"In the beginning, there was chaos," said Fred Davis, one of three newly elected blacks on the 13-member city council in 1968. "But it brought people together who had never talked to each other to try to deal with a community problem."

Twelve days after King's death, the strike ended with the city council recognizing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees as the workers' union. The workers got a pay raise of 15 cents an hour, promotions based on seniority and the right to file on-the-job grievances.

Though King's killer was not from Memphis, the city was seen by much of the rest of the world as a cultural backwater responsible for the murder.

"People in Memphis have always been pretty sensitive of what outsiders think," said history professor Charles Crawford of the University of Memphis. "It caused a deliberate change, maybe not in the true feelings of a lot of people, but at least in the expressions of them ... The black community could see the collapsing of resistance to their aspirations."

The National Civil Rights Museum opened at the Lorraine in 1991 after private citizens saved it from foreclosure and demolition. It is now a tourist attraction and a shrine to the civil rights movement.

"Most people say (the assassination) set the city back hugely in terms of economic development and tourism and all that," said Honey, the author, who is also a professor of labor and civil rights studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

"They're now trying to turn that minus into a plus by acknowledging what happened and trying to highlight the history of the black freedom movement."

For many people, Memphis has become "kind of hallowed ground," Honey added. "It's a place where important things happened and people want to connect to that."