What Is the I Am A Man Plaza in Memphis?

I Am A Man Plaza is a small public memorial in downtown Memphis, standing beside Clayborn Temple on Hernando Street. It marks the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, the labor action that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in the final weeks of his life. The plaza takes its name from the placard the striking workers carried.

Where exactly is it?

The plaza sits at the corner of Hernando Street and Pontotoc Avenue, directly adjacent to Clayborn Temple, on the southern edge of downtown Memphis near the FedExForum and the South Main district. It occupies what had been a surface lot beside the church.

Because it is outdoors and unticketed, it functions less as an attraction and more as a piece of civic ground — a place people pass on foot between downtown and South Main, and a site that hosts organized gatherings on anniversaries tied to the strike and to King’s death.

What does “I Am A Man” actually mean here?

The phrase comes from the signs carried by striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis in February and March of 1968. It was a direct assertion of dignity and citizenship, aimed at a city government that had long treated Black municipal laborers as replaceable and beneath basic safety standards.

The photographer Ernest Withers documented the strike marches, and his images of the placards are among the most reproduced photographs of the civil rights era. The Withers Collection Museum and Gallery, built around his archive, holds much of that photographic record and describes the strike marches as central to his body of work.

What was the 1968 sanitation strike, briefly?

On February 1, 1968, two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck compactor while sheltering from rain, work they were doing because the city denied Black sanitation crews shelter or overtime pay afforded to white employees. Their deaths, and the city’s refusal to compensate their families adequately, triggered a strike by more than 1,300 sanitation workers demanding union recognition, safety reforms and fair wages.

Clayborn Temple served as the strike’s organizing headquarters and the starting point for the daily marches downtown. The Tennessee Historical Commission and the National Park Service both document the church’s role in the strike as a matter of historical record, not local legend.

King came to Memphis in support of the strike in late March and again in early April 1968. He was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, an event the National Civil Rights Museum addresses directly through the preserved motel rooms and adjoining exhibits. Days later, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, led a silent march through Memphis in solidarity with the strikers, and the city settled with the sanitation workers’ union shortly afterward.

What is physically at the plaza today?

The plaza’s central feature is a wall inscribed with the words “I AM A MAN,” rendered in the same stark block lettering as the original strike placards. The design is spare rather than monumental: a wall, paved ground, and open space for people to stand rather than a statue to view from a distance.

It was developed as part of the city’s MLK50 commemoration around the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination in 2018, a project undertaken by the city of Memphis in coordination with preservation and civic partners working on Clayborn Temple’s own restoration. Readers wanting exact dates, hours of any associated programming, or current condition of the site should confirm through the City of Memphis’s own public records, since outdoor memorials of this kind are subject to maintenance schedules and occasional closures that a guide cannot track in real time.

How does the plaza relate to Clayborn Temple itself?

The plaza cannot really be separated from the building next to it. Clayborn Temple is a standing church that predates the strike by decades and has its own listing and restoration history, covered in detail on what Clayborn Temple is and what happened there in 1968. The plaza reads as an extension of that building’s ground — a public-facing marker for a site whose interior has, at various points, been under restoration and not routinely open.

Together, the two sites form a small cluster of 1968 history within a few blocks of downtown, alongside Mason Temple, where King delivered his final speech on the night before he was killed, and the Lorraine Motel itself.

Is there an admission fee or set visiting hours?

No. The plaza is an outdoor public space, not a ticketed institution, so there is no entry fee and no fixed opening hour in the way a museum has one. It can be viewed from the street at any time, though as with any outdoor civic memorial, visibility and access can be affected by nearby construction, events, or maintenance work — details worth confirming through the city’s own public notices rather than assuming from a guidebook.

How does this fit with the rest of Memphis’s civil rights sites?

Memphis holds an unusually concentrated set of sites tied to a single event and its causes: the Lorraine Motel and the museum built around it, Mason Temple, Clayborn Temple, and now this plaza, all within walking distance of one another downtown. None of them are presented, by the institutions that run them, as attractions in the conventional sense — the National Civil Rights Museum’s own materials frame the collection as a record to be studied, not a spectacle.

The plaza follows that same logic on a smaller scale. It has no admission desk and no interpretive center of its own; its purpose is to mark ground where something specific happened, and to let the inscription do the explaining.

What should a visitor or resident actually do with this information?

For a visitor building a downtown itinerary, the plaza works best as a stop folded into a walk that also takes in Clayborn Temple’s exterior, the National Civil Rights Museum, and South Main — not as a destination requiring its own separate trip. The Memphis guide hub and the landmarks and sights archive cover how these downtown sites connect on foot.

For residents, the plaza is a reminder that Memphis’s labor history and civil rights history are the same history — the strike was, at its core, a fight over municipal working conditions, not only a moral cause. That thread runs through how the city still discusses public employment and inequality today, subjects covered more broadly in the Living in Memphis hub. Anyone planning transport to reach downtown sites on foot or by trolley can check the Getting Around archive for how the downtown core connects to the rest of the city.

Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.

Featured image: Photo by Warren LeMay from Chicago, IL, United States, source, CC BY-SA 2.0