User Reviews

I saw this film as part of a training seminar for a labor union. I believe the purpose was to show the affect that unions can have to raise people up.

However, as someone born after the civil rights movement I have to say that this movie showed me a side of things I never would have dreamed existed.

I had heard and read of the things that African Americans had to endure, but to see it with my own eyes was heart wrenching. To see a sign designating a drinking fountain as "whites only" was something I could not comprehend.

To see a sanitation worker, who was treated as barely human, ridiculed, beaten, chastised and humbled march with a sign reading simply "I AM A MAN" left me without words.

This movie was humbling, moving, uplifting and depressing all at once. Yet, that was America then. That was the struggle. Having seen this film I have a new respect and understanding of what the people of the time endured.

This film should be required viewing in all schools.

At The River I Stand examines the events leading up to the Memphis sanitation workers strike, Dr. Martin Luther Kings's involvement in the strike, and his subsequent assassination in Memphis. At a pivotal point in the Poor People's Campaign, while planning a massive march on Washington for fair wages, Dr. King weighed the advise of his most trusted advisers and determined that his involvement in the Memphis garbage workers' campaign was necessary.

The story is one much deeper than Dr. King's personal demise, one that has continuing repercussions today. This is an excellent film that adds greatly to our limited understanding of the events of that time.

Most Americans and even many historians forget the reason why Dr. King came to Memphis; this documentary tells the story of the sanitation workers' strike in 1968.

Ignored by the labor unions, the white power structure, and even their fellow citizens, these workers walked off the job in early 1968 over poor working conditions and poor wages.

The support of the women, children, and others in the African American community of Memphis is demonstrated in this film; without this support, the workers' cause would not have gone on for as long as it did.

The filmmakers, like most good storytellers, chose an antagonist (Mayor Henry Loeb) and used the workers, not Dr. King, as their protagonists.

The film is narrated (ably by Paul Winfield) in the present tense, although it was made in 1993; the 'modern' interviews, filmed that same year, give great perspective and commentary to the narration's reportage. The filmmakers used footage that had been collected at that time to show the events of 1968, and the interviews 25 years later mesh seamlessly.

The true 'star' of this documentary is the sanitation workers who did the job no one else wanted to do but had the courage to stand up and say to the world, "I AM a man!"