By Lynn Burnett
The following story is based primarily on Michael K. Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign.
February 1, 1968: it was a cold, rainy day in Memphis, Tennessee. Two of the city’s 1,100 garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been at work all day. They were cold, exhausted, and covered in grime. The garbage collectors not only moved trash cans, they had to pick up all the garbage off the streets or on the lawns of the areas they covered, loading it into bins which they carried on their shoulders or on top of their heads. The bins were old and often had holes in them, and when it rained, the workers would get covered in grimy, trash-saturated water. They were not provided with showers at work, forcing them to return home to their families covered in filth. It was dirty, low paying work: and in the Tennessee of 1968, that meant work fit only for Black people.
The work was also backbreaking. If residents had cut down trees on their properties, it was up to the garbage workers to chop them up and haul them away. Memphis had no standardized trashcans at the time: people just loaded their garbage into large barrels, which they were not required to take to the curb. White residents took the hard labor of the Black garbage collectors for granted, and often thoughtlessly left the lids off the garbage barrels, which then quickly filled up with rain. The workers would get in trouble if they poured the garbage-saturated rainwater out on a White person’s property in order to lift the barrels, or if they rolled the barrels across their lawns. And so, they had little choice but to lift these enormously heavy, water-laden containers. Such work led to many injuries.
The families of the garbage collectors lived in poverty. Many of them had formerly been sharecroppers in Mississippi, who had hoped that they could escape the backbreaking labor of the plantations by escaping across the Mississippi border to Memphis. Job discrimination, however, forced them into only the lowest forms of employment. Although away from the plantations, the sanitation workers in Memphis found that many of their supervisors were White men who had once been plantation supervisors… perhaps hired because of their “expertise” at managing Black labor. These supervisors had a plantation mentality, which included expecting their workers to work from sunup to sundown. The garbage collectors only got paid for an eight-hour day, but the work often took longer, and they were required to finish it or be fired. In conditions of rain, it could take up to twelve hours.
Conditions worsened further in January of 1968, when Henry Loeb became the new mayor of Memphis. Loeb had run a campaign based on enforcing “law and order.” Although most people today think of Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign when they hear that phrase, the roots of “law and order” rhetoric came from the Jim Crow South. In the White South, civil rights protestors were regularly described as a disorderly threat to “peaceful race relations,” and those who broke the Jim Crow laws in sit-ins and freedom rides were condemned as law-breaking criminals. By the mid-sixties, public figures would be denounced for using explicitly racist language, and early law and order rhetoric was used as a way to signal an anti-civil rights message to White voters while also being able to deny any racist intentions. Over 90 percent of White Memphians voted for Loeb, while virtually no African Americans did. Like Richard Nixon, Loeb calculated that if he could win enough of the White vote by using non-explicitly racist appeals, he could ignore Blacks entirely. Which is exactly what he proceeded to do.
Loeb combined his law-and-order message with a message of fiscal responsibility, vowing to slash taxes by cutting back on city costs. Once again, this was race-neutral language that was used to hold back the progress of Black communities: for Loeb, “fiscal responsibility” included reducing the amount of garbage collectors, which meant that less men had to do the same amount of labor, meaning more overtime work that the garbage collectors would not get paid for. For Mayor Loeb, cutting costs also meant refusing to repair broken vehicles. The garbage collectors constantly warned the city that many of their trucks had bad brakes, which could be especially dangerous in stormy weather. Some trucks needed to be replaced entirely. Whereas previous administrations would at least discuss these concerns with the garbage collectors, Mayor Loeb decided to totally ignore them. Completely unconcerned with getting Black votes, he balanced the city’s budget on the backs of the city’s poorest and least politically powerful members.
Given all of these conditions, the two garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were exhausted. As the truck drove, they would normally ride on the sides, jumping off at each house to collect the trash. On February 1, however, with the cold rain blasting down on them, they needed to take cover. There was only enough room in the front of the truck for the driver, and they couldn’t even get a brief respite from the storm by taking shelter under an overhang somewhere because White residents would issue complaints about Black workers lounging about in their neighborhoods. Such “lounging” in White areas was a fireable offense. And so, Echol Cole and Robert Walker decided to take cover in the back of the old, dilapidated garbage truck. As the truck drove to the next destination, the trash compactor malfunctioned and suddenly turned on. The driver slammed on the brakes and rushed to stop it, but Walker and Cole were already being pulled into the compactor. One of them was about to jump free when the compactor caught his raincoat and pulled him in.
The Garbage Collectors Get Organized
Fury rippled through the community of garbage workers. Henry Loeb had been mayor from 1960 to 1963 as well – before being defeated in his first re-election bid – and these workers had dark memories of his unwillingness to invest in the repairs necessary to keep them safe. Two men had also died during Loeb’s first term, in accidents that would have been prevented if the mayor had valued Black life enough to invest in minor repairs. In the week that followed the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker, the anger amongst the garbage workers intensified when they discovered that the city had offered almost no compensation to the families of the deceased men, leaving their wives and children destitute. During that same week, drainage and sewage workers – who, along with the garbage collectors, made up the cities sanitation division – found out that their paychecks had been slashed after they had been told to go home because of a storm, despite the fact that they had been assured they would receive a full paycheck. For workers who lived week-to-week, an unexpected day without pay could mean not being able to put food on the table.
On Sunday, February 11, an infuriated 900 Black men crammed into the Memphis Labor Temple to express their grievances. Most had never attended a union meeting before, because they were afraid they would get fired if they attempted to unionize. A man named T.O. Jones stepped forward to address them. Jones had been born in Memphis in 1924, joined the Navy as a young man, and had worked in the Oakland shipyards after completing his military service. While in the shipyards, he had experienced the power of unions to provide workers with better wages and working conditions. When Jones returned to Memphis and became a garbage worker in 1959, he tried to convince his fellow workers to unionize. Despite his determination, he met with little success. In 1963, Jones was finally able to bring a few dozen men together to discuss unionization… but Mayor Loeb, then in his first term, sent informers to infiltrate the meeting. Everyone who attended was promptly fired.
After the firings, T.O. Jones reached out to local attorneys, union leaders, and ministers, who convinced Loeb to allow the men to return to work. Jones, however, decided not to return. Understanding that he would just lose his job again if he continued to organize, he began working as a janitor and focused his energies on organizing the garbage collectors from the outside. Jones began holding secret meetings to protect the identities of the workers, and spent years meeting one-on-one with them in the hopes of convincing each individual to support unionization. He borrowed money so that he could have more time to organize, went deeply into debt, and destroyed his relationship with his wife in the process. Unable to fire him, politicians offered to pay Jones off to stop his organizing, but he refused. By the time that Echol Cole and Robert Walker were killed, Jones had been trying to unionize the garbage collectors for almost a decade. He had sacrificed everything. In the process, he had also gained the trust and respect of the garbage workers. Now, T.O. Jones laid out their demands.
The workers wanted old and unsafe equipment fixed or replaced, Jones said to the 900 men, so that they would no longer have to fear that yet another worker would be killed. They wanted assurances that they would still get paid on rainy days, so they could predict their incomes and reliably feed and shelter their families. They wanted the right to unionize without fear of being fired, so that they could protect themselves and fight for decent working conditions. They wanted access to job promotions within the city’s sanitation division, which were currently available only to Whites. And they wanted a modest raise.
When the crowd approved these demands, Jones rushed from the Labor Temple to meet with the director of Public Works, who managed all jobs that involved keeping the city clean. The director ignored the demands completely: following the fiscal responsibility narrative of Mayor Loeb, he told Jones that the budget was out of balance, and that nothing could be done. He refused to negotiate in any way whatsoever. When the garbage collectors – who were waiting at the Labor Temple for a response – heard that their concerns had been so casually dismissed despite their very lives being at stake, their fury boiled over. Men who were previously too frightened to unionize now spontaneously decided to strike. They felt their conditions were so bad that they had little to lose. When a minister who was present asked if they were actually prepared to sustain a strike, one of the men exclaimed that it didn’t matter: “We don’t have anything no how.”
What followed was a sort of “Montgomery moment.” Twelve years earlier, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and less recognized leaders like E.D. Nixon and Jo Anne Robinson had anxiously waited during that first morning of the famous boycott to see if Black Montgomerians would actually stay off of the buses. Now, the garbage collectors anxiously waited to see how many people would actually refuse to go to work. The response was incredible: out of workforce of 1,300 men, only 75 showed up to work on the first day of the strike. Half of these were men who simply hadn’t gotten the word that a strike was on, and many of them walked away from work halfway through the day. Only thirty men showed up on the second day. Those who stayed immediately became social outcasts: many Black Memphians were connected to the garbage collectors through their churches and communities, and they understood how hard they worked and how bad their conditions were. One man’s wife even left him because he refused to join the strike… an action she interpreted as a selfish unwillingness to stand up for the Black community.
For the garbage workers, this felt like an inspiring and successful start. Virtually all of them had joined the strike, and they had gained widespread community support. However, more experienced labor organizers were concerned that the garbage workers were setting themselves up for failure. They were striking during the month of February, when seasonal agricultural work was dropping off in the surrounding areas. Unemployed agricultural workers could easily be enticed to replace the garbage collectors, especially if they were migrant laborers who wouldn’t be subjected to community pressure to support the strike. February was also cold, meaning that if garbage didn’t get collected, it would take a while for it to start to smell. A strike during the hot summer months, when uncollected garbage would quickly start to stink up entire neighborhoods, would have created much more public pressure to negotiate with the garbage collectors in order to end the strike quickly.
Among those who were concerned was Jerry Wurf, the president of America’s largest union for public employees – the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union – or AFSCME, which was headquartered in Washington, D.C. Jones had built a relationship with Wurf during his nine years of trying to organize the Memphis garbage workers, and Wurf had pledged his support. Jerry Wurf was a Jewish man who had grown up on the Lower East Side during the Great Depression, and was a fierce fighter for social justice and one of the nation’s most dynamic union leaders. Not only had the AFSCME supported successful strikes by sanitation workers in other cities under his leadership, Wurf had also desegregated the union, and supported people of color and religious minorities in taking on leadership roles. He was exactly the type of outside support the Memphis garbage workers needed if they were going to succeed. However, the spontaneous nature of the strike in Memphis broke all of Wurf’s rules for an effective strike. It was not well timed. It was the product not of strategy, but was compulsive. Most importantly, the financial backing the strikers would require to pay for the needs of their families had not been prepared for, meaning that the garbage workers would very quickly feel the burning economic need to return to work.
Wurf was concerned that if AFSCME sank money and resources into a failed strike, that it would damage the union’s reputation and jeopardize its effectiveness as a whole. However, when the high level of solidarity and determination amongst the garbage workers became clear, Wurf felt compelled to support them despite the risks to the larger labor struggle. He immediately sent an interracial team of advisors to Memphis. And so, thanks to groundwork laid by T.O. Jones over many years of what often seemed like fruitless labor, the Memphis garbage collectors quickly found themselves backed up by one of the nation’s major unions. They also quickly found themselves welcomed into a large union hall where they could hold their daily mass meetings: Memphis had a Firestone Tire factory that was highly organized by the United Rubber Workers union, which opened their space to the garbage workers.
Thus, on the third day of the strike – Tuesday, February 13 – AFSCME officials from Washington D.C. met with Mayor Loeb to negotiate on the workers behalf, while 1,300 sanitation workers attended a mass meeting at the union hall of the United Rubber Workers. The negotiations with the mayor broke down quickly: the garbage workers were breaking the law by striking, Loeb exclaimed, and he refused to negotiate with lawbreakers. He left the meeting and informed the press of his position of no compromise. In response, the workers decided to march five miles to City Hall. They flooded into the City Council chambers – built to hold no more than 400 people – while the Council was in session. They demanded to speak with the mayor themselves.
Mayor Loeb appeared. A wealthy White man from the Jim Crow South, he was accustomed to giving orders to Black people. He expected to be obeyed. Loeb now commanded the garbage collectors to get back to work. And then something happened that he had never experienced: the Black workers laughed in his face. The mayor was shocked. He screamed at them: “Go back to work!” The boos of the workers echoed through City Hall. Infuriated, the mayor hardened his position… and the workers became even more determined.
The White Media Responds
Whereas Black Memphians learned about the strike through their churches, communities, and personal connections with the garbage workers, White Memphians relied on White-dominated newspapers that dismissed Black voices. In fact, both of Memphis’s two major, White newspapers – the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar – failed to interview the garbage workers entirely, and instead based their reporting on racist assumptions. White Memphians treated the Black population very well, the papers asserted… a claim that was itself a denial of Black voices, as a way of assuaging White feelings. Given that local race relations had been “just fine,” some “troublemakers” must have come along to stir up the previously contented Black population. On the first day of the strike, the White media identified the “troublemaker” as T.O. Jones, who was blamed for starting the strike… despite the fact that it was the workers as a nearly unanimous whole who had decided on the action. Then, when the AFSCME got involved, the media began reporting that a big union based in Washington, D.C. was the cause of the strike… even though it was Jones who had contacted the AFSCME, and even though the AFSCME had felt dubious about supporting the garbage workers. White Memphians tended to uncritically assume that their news sources were accurate, and therefore had no understanding of why the garbage collectors were striking, and why their garbage wasn’t being collected. They easily fell prey to a false narrative.
As union representatives continued their attempts to negotiate with Mayor Loeb, the mayor spun a narrative that the strike was really about the crafty AFSCME officials taking advantage of gullible Black workers. This union, the mayor claimed, understood that if the garbage workers in Memphis were unionized, those workers would have to pay union dues. This “outsider” union, in other words, was really just after the worker’s money. Of course, it was true that union members would have to pay union dues if they wanted an effective union: after all, it was only those dues that allowed for unions to pay for the needs of worker’s families during a strike or to rent a union hall. The local papers failed to ask any garbage workers how they felt about unionization and paying union dues, and simply accepted the mayor’s false and politicized words as truth.
Mayor Loeb also opened all of the negotiations with the union up to the media, which turned the meetings away from being honest discussions and instead into performances for the public. The union representatives were tough men who had worked in mines and steel mills; they possessed a working-class swagger and a fiery way of negotiating that came off as overly aggressive on camera. The mayor strategically kept his cool during these televised meetings, and used the presence of the media to promote his message of law and order and to prove that he would not compromise with these “outsiders.”
Within days, a headline in the Commercial Appeal read: “Memphis is Being Used.” The article echoed the mayor’s narrative: “Make no mistake about it. Memphis was a carefully selected target for the garbage strike.” A cartoon portrayed a fat union leader standing on a pile of garbage with a sign reading: “The Right to Strike is Above Public Health.” The strikers were portrayed as loud, angry, lazy Black people demanding things from hard-working White people… even as television stations showed footage of strikers picketing in the cold rain day after day, and lying their bodies down on hard, oily streets to prevent garbage trucks from moving. The White press never explained why Black workers would make such obvious sacrifices. None of this was a surprise to African Americans: even when it came to Martin Luther King himself, the images the White southern media used were always of him looking angry; and certainly not looking peaceful, calm and composed. The White media – in Memphis and throughout much of the nation – enforced the mentality of segregation and Black dehumanization, on a daily basis.
Civil Rights Organizations Get Involved
On the evening of February 15, with negotiations with the mayor going nowhere, AFSCME officials made one last effort. They arranged to meet privately with Mayor Loeb in his home, and warned the mayor that his position of no compromise was only making the workers more determined. Indeed, the mayor’s hardline position had gained the attention of other unions, which now sought to support the garbage workers as well. To bring this point home, the AFSCME representatives brought with them the president of the United Rubber Workers, as well as a representative from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Collectively, they represented a huge working class population. These men all emphasized to the mayor that a slight raise for the garbage workers, and a commitment to fix their equipment, was a miniscule expenditure for the city. He could end the strike now… or it was going to escalate.
For Loeb, however, the racial and class hierarchies he believed in were at stake. The garbage workers were also asking for access to promotions within the sanitation division that he thought should be available to Whites only. If Loeb caved on that, it would chip away at the racial hierarchy in other professions as well. And if he agreed to raise the wages for the garbage workers, he worried that it would be an incentive for more African Americans and working class people to demand raises –and to unionize – as well. Mayor Loeb rightfully understood that if he didn’t take a hardline stance on this, that it would upset the business leaders of Memphis, who would worry that their employees would be incentivized to fight for better conditions. If Loeb wanted the support of the city’s elite, he needed to hold a hard line. He therefore refused to budge. The union representatives then gave him one last warning: so far, this had only been a labor dispute, they said. But if the mayor didn’t end this now, civil rights organizations were going to get involved. The Black population of Memphis was up in arms over the treatment of the garbage workers, and the mayor could easily find himself with a movement on his hands.
Indeed, the very next day – Friday, February 16 – the Memphis NAACP chapter held a press conference and charged the city with “racial discrimination in the treatment of the sanitation workers.” The chapter had a long history of supporting direct, nonviolent action, including a strong involvement in the sit-in movement. They now endorsed the strike. On Saturday, February 17, the first truly mass meeting was held. No longer was it only the striking sanitation workers meeting in a union hall: Black ministers and civil rights leaders gave speeches alongside labor leaders, to an audience of 2000 people. On Sunday the 18th, anxious Memphis City Council members met secretly in an effort to prevent the relatively small labor dispute from escalating into a major social conflict. They endorsed giving the workers a small raise if they returned to work… but when the mayor found out, he condemned the Council, and they backed down. On Monday the 19th, after it had been made absolutely clear that negotiations with the mayor and City Council were impossible, the AFSCME and the NAACP began a formal alliance. The NAACP called for a boycott of downtown businesses, in order to put pressure on business owners… who would then put pressure on the mayor to end the strike. Things had, indeed, escalated. But they were also just getting started.
Showdown at City Hall
On Thursday, Feb. 22, Fred Davis – one of Memphis’s three Black City Council members – arranged to hold a hearing where the Council could discuss the strike with the garbage workers, union leaders, and supportive ministers. The hope was to find a way for the City Council to bring an end to the strike. Soon, the room designed for 400 was overflowing with 700 strikers. “Do you want a union?!”, one of them yelled, and the rest shouted back, “YES!” If they had ever truly doubted it, the Council was now forced to witness that unionization was not being forced on the workers, but was something they were demanding. Some of the workers then began to heckle the Black Council members: Why hadn’t they spoken out in support of the strike? Why hadn’t they stood up to the mayor? Fred Davis responded that he had to represent both White and Black Memphians. One of the ministers confronted him: “You can’t do it. You’re with us or not.”
Concerned about the rising tension in the room, one of the Council members proposed moving the meeting to a larger auditorium. The much-respected local civil rights leader O.Z. Evers, however, stood up and urged the men to “stay until Council recognizes the union and recognizes they can overrule the Mayor.” Sensing the energy in the crowd, union leaders took the microphone and insisted that they would not leave until the Council acknowledged that they had the power and the commitment to support the workers. The strikers began to sing freedom songs, ministers called their churches, and soon enough food was arriving – spread out across tables where city lawyers normally sat – to feed the 700 strikers who refused to leave City Hall. As police began surrounding the building, City Council members huddled, recognizing that they needed to do something to prevent a major social conflict. They promised the workers that they would spend the evening drawing up a resolution allowing for union recognition, and would present it to the City Council for a vote the following day. They would use their power to go around the mayor. The strikers cheered. They left City Hall, looking forward to the next morning.
The leading headline the next day, however, read: “Committee Gives In to Sit-In of Strikers, but Loeb Holds Firm.” The article condemned the Council for giving in to “a belligerent show of force,” and exclaimed that “Mr. Loeb’s stand is what will maintain law and order.” An accompanying cartoon portrayed the garbage workers as dark, dirty, sinister figures sitting atop piles of stinking trash. The City Council members, realizing that they would face a massive political backlash of angry White voters, quickly changed the resolution they were going to vote on: instead of a resolution on union recognition for the garbage workers, the resolution recognized Mayor Loeb as the sole decision maker on all matters regarding the strike.
That afternoon, a thousand garbage workers and their supporters – feeling in a celebratory mood – gathered in an auditorium to watch the Council members sign the resolution… with no knowledge that it had been changed. When the resolution was read, and the majority of Council members quickly signed it, the workers were shocked. For a moment, they sat in stunned silence. Police quickly appeared and whisked the Council members away as the workers rose to their feet in anger. A Black Air Force veteran held up the cartoon from the morning paper and shouted to the audience, “This is what they think of you!”, and then, “You’ll get only what you’re strong enough to take!” Others shouted that it was time to reach out to Black Power militants: “If they want trouble, we’ll give them trouble!” At that point, a pivotal member of the civil rights movement rushed forward. James Lawson – who had trained the students who led the sit ins and freedom rides and who had helped to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – urged the crowd to sit down for a moment. Now a local minister, Lawson said to the crowd: “Lets look at this for a few minutes and see what we’re going to do next.” They decided to march to a nearby church to hold a mass meeting and plan their response.
Led by T.O. Jones, the crowd poured out of the auditorium and onto the street, ready to march. Outside, however, they encountered hundreds of police who blocked their path. They were told they lacked a marching permit. James Lawson immediately got on the phone with the police director, and warned him that these men were angry and needed to blow off some steam if they were realistically going to remain nonviolent. A march would help them do that, while denying the march would add fuel to the fire. Other civil rights leaders rushed to the mayor’s office to warn him that he needed to allow this march to prevent a riot. To his credit, Mayor Loeb ordered the police to allow the march to go forward.
The police ordered the enormous crowd to take up no more than one lane of traffic… but once the march began, it predictably spilled out onto the whole street. Once it did, a long line of police cars quickly appeared, driving bumper-to-bumper, each one with five officers armed with rifles and holding their billy clubs ready. The line of cars began pushing up against the crowd, aggressively trying to force them back into one lane. James Lawson – a veteran of violent police attacks – warned those around him to keep their cool: the police were trying to provoke the marchers in order to create an excuse for a crackdown. Suddenly, there was a scream: one of the police cars, slowly moving alongside the crowd, had come to rest on a woman’s foot. When the car didn’t move, the crowd rushed over, collectively trying to lift the vehicle off her foot… an action the police later described as attacking the car.
It was at this point that orders were given for officers to don their gas masks. In a move that was clearly premeditated, police cars suddenly appeared from the side streets along the march. Officers poured out of the cars, spraying mace into the eyes and up the noses of whoever they could reach, beating them with their batons, and shoving them off of the street. Total panic ensued as the marchers fell to the ground, blinded, struggling to breath, their skin peeling off and burning with excruciating pain. Mace was a chemical that had originally been developed for war, and it was now being used on completely peaceful protestors who were simply fighting for humane working conditions. A number of ministers had been trying to de-escalate the energy of the march by politely conversing with nearby officers; those officers now suddenly turned on them. As people in the crowd ran screaming in all directions, Civil Rights Commissioner Jacques Wilmore – who was there in an official capacity to observe the march – looked on in shock: he noted that one of the Black police officers, with a look of profound shame on his face, was purposefully spraying mace into the air instead of at his community members. When an officer approached him, Wilmore showed the officer his government badge… and was maced anyway. In Wilmore’s words, “The police officer just saw the color of my skin… he just operated automatically, at that moment the enemy was anybody with a black face.” Even Black shoppers coming out of stores found themselves attacked.
As hundreds of beaten, bleeding and half blinded African Americans fled back into their communities, a collective sense of horror rippled through Black Memphis. It was a turning point. An immediate, intense sense of unity spread throughout the entire Black community that transcended class, age, and any religious or political differences. The strike of the garbage workers had now become the major, social upheaval that union representatives had warned the mayor he would be wise to prevent.
Headlines the next day revealed the chasm between White and Black Memphians: newspapers claimed the police had used “extreme restraint” and “self control.” After all, one paper wrote, “They had guns, but they didn’t shoot.” The mayor praised the police for maintaining “law and order.”
The Youth, The Invaders, and Black Power
In the wake of the attack, the garbage workers adopted the iconic civil rights slogan, “I AM a Man,” and began twice-daily marches – once in the morning and once in the afternoon – to City Hall holding those iconic signs. The signs were an assertion of their dignity and humanity; a way of saying that Black lives mattered. City officials warned the strikers that any union representatives or workers speaking out on behalf of the strike would now be arrested. In response, 150 ministers gathered to create the Community on the Move for Equality (COME), to be led by James Lawson. With the workers and union leaders no longer able to speak publicly in support of the strike, Lawson and this new ministerial organization now took on the role of public leadership. The organization included a full half of the city’s Black ministers, and they urged their congregations to boycott downtown stores. Memphis was forty percent Black, and the impact of the boycott was soon painfully felt. Pickets of downtown stores were organized as well, driving away many White customers who felt uncomfortable walking through the racially tense atmosphere.
Other community members took a different sort of action. By this time, the strike was a month old, and the mayor had been able to hire 317 workers. Most were outsiders, but 62 were men who had broken with the strike. On Saturday, March 2, two of these strikebreakers were assaulted, and another had a Molotov cocktail thrown through the window of his home. Bricks shattered the windows of businesses associated with Mayor Loeb. Dozens of piles of trash were poured out onto the streets and lit on fire, forcing the fire department to make fifty-two runs on Saturday night alone.
In the week that followed, such actions escalated. The police attacks had radicalized the youth, and many of them were on fire with indignation. On March 5, the garbage workers once again flooded into the City Council, and when they refused to leave, 121 people were arrested. Masses of Black youth marched to City Hall, linking arms and blocking the police from taking the workers away. When they eventually opened a corridor in the crowd for the arrested workers to pass through, the youth cheered for their elders, proud of them for fighting so hard for their dignity. In such an atmosphere, school felt irrelevant, and many Black high school students began skipping classes and organizing their own marches to City Hall. Some of those marches looked like the marches of their elders, with the youth singing freedom songs… but in others, students marched through the city, symbolically overturning trash cans; or marched through downtown chanting “Black Power!” Some youth roamed the city looking for police cars, smashing their windows and in some cases totally destroying them.
Many of these youth, burning with a desire to take action, were drawn to a street gang called The Invaders. The Invaders sported Afros and African amulets, listened to the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix, and experimented with hallucinogens for fun and for political and spiritual expansion. They had chosen their name because they felt that White Memphians treated Black people as if they were dangerous, alien beings. The Invaders emphasized Black unity, and sought to build bridges between youth who were fighting over different turfs in the Black ghettos of Memphis. They wore jackets with their logo emblazoned on them; these jackets soon became hip amongst Black students, even if they weren’t members of the gang.
The Invaders were influenced by local, Black Power-inspired community organizers like Charles Cabbage, who had studied history at Morehouse College. Like other Black Power activists, Cabbage had been drawn to the anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa and Asia who were breaking free from the chains of European colonialism during the same years that the civil rights movement was igniting in the United States. Like most Black freedom fighters – including luminaries from Du Bois to King – Cabbage viewed the Black freedom struggle in the United States as one manifestation of a larger; long-standing assault on global White supremacy. By 1968, Cabbage had concluded that a full-scale revolution was necessary in the United States, just as it was in the lands colonized by Europeans. Like some other Black Power revolutionaries, Cabbage and his comrades believed that only the most oppressed people would be willing to take the ultimate risks to organize total revolution. Cabbage had therefore abandoned his original attempt to organize Black college students and had returned to organize the Black ghettos of Memphis. Cabbage emphasized ideas inspired by anticolonial freedom fighters, including that oppressed people can only regain their full sense of dignity if they attack their oppressors head on. Cabbage believed that nonviolence could only bring about limited change, and that even then, oppressive forces would only cave in to nonviolent action if they perceived that if they did not, more violent, revolutionary actions would be taken. As the strike of the garbage workers became increasingly intense, Charles Cabbage and The Invaders started to view themselves as representing a more pervasive, violent threat that lurked in the background if strategies of nonviolence failed. It was only that threat, they believed, which would force White Memphians to compromise.
In the midst of these developments, two visionary freedom fighters arrived in town. One was Roy Wilkins, the president of the NAACP. Wilkins had spent a lifetime in the struggle: he had first traveled through Memphis in 1929… investigating African American working conditions. He now told the audience that when you work over forty hours a week and get paid so little that you still depend on welfare to survive, “that you ought to stay here and fight until hell freezes over.” The other speaker was Martin Luther King’s great mentor, and the master organizer of the March on Washington: Bayard Rustin. Rustin was renowned as one of the greatest strategists of nonviolent resistance not only in the nation, but in the world, and he had famously been sent down to Montgomery to support the young Martin Luther King navigate the boycott that initiated the movement.
Rustin had always urged King to build strong connections between the labor movement and the fight for racial justice. He now told the crowd that Memphis embodied the labor/civil rights unity that he and King had always fought for. Memphis was an example of where the movement needed to go from here, in order to fulfill the ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and a truly robust democracy. Rustin told the crowd of 9,000: “This becomes the symbol of the movement to get rid of poverty… this fight is going to be won because the black people in this community and the trade unions stand together.” Rustin added, “I am sure your papers do not report and debate the truth of what’s happening here,” but “people who believe in justice and democracy are behind you.”
Indeed they were. On March 17, White Memphians woke up to a newspaper headline that shocked them: “King to Lend Vocal Support at Rally.” A man many of them greatly feared was going to be arriving in town the very next day: Martin Luther King.
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Bibliography
This story was based primarily on Michael K. Honey’s profoundly moving book, Going Down Jericho Road. I’m grateful for his generous feedback on this piece. Other works consulted include:
Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68. (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2006.)
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).
Jackson, Thomas F. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Additional Resources
For teachers: Facing History lesson on the Memphis Strike.
From Invaders member John Burl Smith: I Met With Martin Luther King Minuted Before He Was Murdered.
NPR interview with Michael K. Honey, historian of the Memphis Strike and Martin Luther King’s final stand.
From NPR’s StoryCorps: Standing With Dr. King in Memphis.
Remembering Baxter Leach, one of the last surviving sanitation workers who passed in August, 2019.
From the New York Times, July 2017: Decades Later, Memphis to Compensate Black Sanitation Workers of 1968.
From the New York Times: How Dr. King Changed a Sanitation Workers Life.
From the AFSCME: a chronology of the strike.
Washington Post commemoration of the strike, 50 years later.
The Smithsonian commemoration of the strike, 50 years later.
Wayne State University exhibit of the strike.
Plaza dedicated to the strike erected in downtown Memphis for it’s 50th anniversary.
NAACP honors the 14 surviving sanitation workers at 50th anniversary of the strike.
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland writing about the 50 anniversary of the strike.