Memphis sanitation workers’ strike

Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, 64-day labor conflict in the winter and spring of 1968 that brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to Memphis, Tennessee. The striking workers sought higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to form a union. At the height of the conflict, King, members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and local leaders led thousands of Black protesters and strike supporters on a march down Beale Street in downtown Memphis. The strike reflected King’s efforts through the Poor People’s Campaign to build an interracial coalition based on shared economic interests and to link economic injustice with racial injustice. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, and the strike ended 12 days later, with the city government agreeing to recognize the union and increase the workers’ wages.

Racial division and poor working conditions

Memphis had long been a destination for poor African American migrants from the Mississippi Delta seeking economic opportunity. As Black men sought manufacturing jobs in the city, they were forced to compete with white workers. The labor unions were segregated, and when white laborers demanded wage increases, they usually restricted those demands to the white workforce only. In the 1950s and ’60s the Memphis Public Works Department employed many Black workers, but the pay was low (less than $2 per hour), the conditions were poor, and opportunities for advancement were few—largely because of racial division and open discrimination by white supervisors. More than 40 percent of the Black workers qualified for welfare even though many held second jobs, and they received virtually no health care benefits, pensions, or vacations. Working conditions were often unsafe and unhygienic, requiring workers to carry leaky garbage tubs that spilled maggots and trash on them. Black workers were not allowed to shower at the sanitation depots, forcing them to walk home or ride the bus in their stinking and unsanitary clothes.

As early as 1963, when 32 men participated in an impromptu walkout, the sanitation workers began asking the city to recognize their union, without success. The main catalysts for the workers’ 1968 strike included frustration over “rainy day” policies that sent Black workers home during rainstorms while white workers continued to get paid and dismay over the preventable deaths of two Black workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, on February 1. The two had taken shelter in their truck’s compactor during a rainstorm, and a malfunctioning compressing piston jammed them into the compactor, crushing them. T.O. Jones—a union organizer who led the 1963 walkout and was fired for his union activities—had already asked the city to stop using this particular truck, saying it was too old and worn out. The state’s workers’ compensation program did not cover Cole and Walker, so their families were left destitute. The city offered the families their sympathy and a paltry $500 to put toward funeral expenses.

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assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Memphis sanitation workers strike

The strike for wage increases and union recognition

Fellow workers blamed Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb for the deaths. It was not the first time the city’s sanitation workers had died because of outmoded equipment. On February 11 between 700 and 900 Black men gathered at the Memphis Labor Temple to express their grievances. Jones and preachers from their ranks led the meeting. Afterward, some of the attendees started calling their friends, urging them not to report to work in the morning. On February 12, of the 1,300 Black Memphis public works employees, roughly 930 of the sanitation workers and 214 of the 230 sewage and drainage workers did not show up.

As the strike went on, the workers refined their list of demands. Besides union recognition, it included a 10 percent wage increase, fair promotion policies, sick leave, pension programs, and health insurance. In response, Loeb claimed that they were being duped by leaders of AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), who were supporting their campaign and whom he referred to as “outsiders.”

The workers stepped up their efforts during the weeks that followed. On February 22 some 700 of them attended a meeting of the City Council’s public works committee, while ministers gave speeches and led freedom songs. They refused to leave until the committee agreed to support them, which it ultimately did. The City Council voted to approve the recommendations of the committee, but Mayor Loeb declined to affirm the vote, insisting that he alone held the power to recognize the union. This failure to secure a deal inspired a march to City Hall on February 23 that ended with police attacking peaceful protesters with mace and tear gas.

Martin Luther King, Jr., comes to Memphis

The next day 150 Black ministers met to form an organization to support the strikers and began inviting national civil rights leaders to town. The Rev. James Lawson reached out to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. NAACP president Roy Wilkins and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin came to Memphis on March 14, addressing a crowd of some 10,000. In his speech to the assembled supporters, Rustin asked, “If you can’t get a decent salary for men who are working, in the name of God, how the hell are you going to get rid of poverty?” King, who recognized the shared interests between his planned Poor People’s Campaign and the striking sanitation workers, arrived four days later on March 18. More than 15,000 people turned out to hear King speak. He provided encouragement and pledged to return to lead a massive march to support the workers, saying:

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So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say this to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth.…All labor has dignity.

As promised, King returned to Memphis on March 28 to join Lawson in leading a march in support of the strike. Violence erupted early in the demonstration: looting broke out, and police shot and killed 16-year-old Larry Payne. King was reluctantly spirited away to safety. Dozens of others were injured as police deployed tear gas and wielded batons while pursuing demonstrators who sheltered inside the Clayborn Temple. Blame for the outbreak of violence, which marred King’s reputation for nonviolent protest, was placed by many on the Black Organizing Project (better known as the Invaders), a local Black Panther Party-inspired organization. The next day strikers returned to their daily demonstrations carrying placards that read “I Am a Man,” signs commanding observers to recognize the strikers’ humanity. Reporters asked King if he would be able to keep the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign demonstration in Washington peaceful. He met with representatives of the Invaders, who claimed not to have instigated the violence and with whom King agreed to coordinate efforts as plans began for a follow-up march.

King returned to Memphis on April 3. That night, at the encouragement of the minister Ralph Abernathy, he addressed several thousand supporters who had come out despite bad weather. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he said, in a now famous moment. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” It would be King’s last public speech; the following day, King was shot to death on the balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel.

Fury and anguish over the assassination ignited riots across the country. Memphis was in turmoil. Amid all this, on April 5 a biracial contingent of ministers met with Loeb. The meeting had already been on the calendar, but it took on new importance after King’s death. They praised him as an “eminent preacher of peace” and “advocate of the power of nonviolent love.”

Resolution and legacy

On April 8 between 20,000 and 40,000 people peacefully marched on the streets of Memphis, including Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, Coretta Scott King, and civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and John Lewis. Union members and supporters alike carried signs reading, “Honor King: End Racism” and “Union Justice Now!” Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson pressured the city government to recognize the union and sent James Reynolds, his undersecretary of labor, to help mediate and resolve the strike.

On April 16 the city agreed to give the Black sanitation workers raises and recognize their union. AFSCME soon became the largest union local in the city. Through their union, striking workers agreed to receive Social Security payments in lieu of a pension. Ultimately, that decision left sanitation workers less financially secure than other city employees who were enrolled in the city’s pension plan. In an attempt to redress this disparity, in 2017 the Memphis City Council voted to provide tax-free grants of $70,000 to surviving city workers who had participated in the 1968 strike. Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland described the council’s decision this way:

The 1968 sanitation workers showed us how courage can change a city. Our current solid waste workers show us how service makes a city work. It’s only right that today, as we near the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s death in our city, we take this meaningful step to do right by them all.

On April 29, 2011, eight of the surviving strikers met with U.S. Pres. Barack Obama at the White House prior to Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis’s induction of the 1,300 Memphis sanitation strikers into the U.S. Department of Labor Hall of Fame. In a White House statement, Obama and the Labor Department honored the men for their “fight on behalf of all workers for safe conditions, respect in the workplace, and a better life for themselves and their families.” In 2018 the city of Memphis opened I Am a Man Plaza, a public civil rights memorial park and sculpture that sit adjacent to Clayborn Temple, where demonstrators not only fled from police attacks on March 18, 1968, but where striking sanitation workers also met to accept the terms that ended their strike. The temple and plaza are a stop on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, a collection of landmark sites that trace the history of the American civil rights movement.