Today marks an important anniversary, a date that reminds us that out of struggle comes progress. On April 16, 1968, the city of Memphis relented and recognized the Memphis sanitation workers' right to organize a union. We know all too well the costs of that struggle; today let us remember it achieved an important victory.
The strike started in February of 1968, as I discussed on the anniversary of its beginning. Worker T.O. Jones had tried to organize the hundreds of African American workers suffering under dangerous and demeaning work conditions with little economic security. The deaths of two workers on the job spurred the workers to begin a spontaneous strike that pulled in leaders of the labor and Civil Rights movements to Memphis. Dr. Martin Luther King saw the strike as an example of the fight for economic justice his Poor People's Campaign was fighting and he came to Memphis to support what would become his final campaign.
AFSCME has a timeline of the events that followed, but for the purposes of this diary, I will say that the struggle was great, tense, and at times violent.
On April 3, Dr. King delivered his final speech, a rousing call for progress and economic justice with the strikers as the focal point. He was killed on April 4, triggering a nationwide outpouring of grief and rage. With more strength and courage than I can imagine, Coretta Scott King led a march through Memphis in support of the strikers. The following day, she buried her husband.
The world's eyes were fixed on Memphis in the hours and days after Dr. King's assassination. Pressure mounted on Mayor Henry Loeb to end the strike, and after several days of stubborn rhetoric, he relented.
T.O. Jones, the man who had worked for eight years to unionize the sanitation workers, who had himself been the target of an incredible amount of threats and physical abuse, tearfully summed up the mood upon ratification of the new union contract.
We have been aggrieved many times, we have lost many things. But we have got the victory.
Today, the Memphis strike is part of the lexicon of American politics. AFSCME proudly places the strike in a central place in the union's history, as its website indicates. The union's depiction of this part of its history puts workers in the forefront of the history of the civil rights movement, and civil rights activists in the forefront of the labor movement. As David Roediger has discussed, such a relationship was not always possible in American history, but it is part of the dream Dr. King explicitly hoped for in the weeks before his death.
The union is not alone in depicting the Memphis strike as a crucial uniting of the labor movement and the civil rights movement. When speaking to the AFSCME National Convention in August 2006, Barack Obama invoked memories of the strike in his vision of 21st-century activism:
In the middle of the last century, on the restless streets of Memphis, it was a group of AFSCME sanitation workers who took up this charge. For years they had served their city without complaint, picking up other people's trash for little pay and even less respect. Passers-by would call them "walking buzzards," and in the segregated South, most were forced to use separate drinking fountains and bathrooms.
But as the civil rights movement gained steam and they watched the marches and saw the boycotts and heard about the passage of voting rights, the workers in Memphis decided that they'd had enough, and in 1968, over 1,000 went on strike.
Their demands were simple. Recognition of their union. The right to bargain. A few cents more an hour.
But the opposition was fierce. Their vigils were met with handcuffs. Their protests turned back with mace. One march was interrupted by police gunfire and tear gas, and when the smoke cleared, 280 had been arrested, 60 were wounded, and one 16-year old boy lay dead.
And still, the city would not give in.
Now, the workers could have gone home, or they could've gone back to work, or they could've waited for someone else to help them, but they didn't. They kept marching. They drew ministers and high school students and civil rights activists to their cause, and at the beginning of the third straight month, Dr. King himself came down to Memphis.
At this point, the story of the sanitation workers merges with the larger saga of the Civil Rights Movement. On April 3rd, we know that King gave his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" sermon. On April 4th, he was shot and killed by James Earl Ray as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. And on April 8th, a day before he was buried, his wife Coretta led the sanitation workers on one final march through the city of Memphis - a march that would culminate in the union contract that the workers had sought for so long.
This is the legacy you inherit today. It's a legacy of courage, a legacy of action, a legacy of achieving the greatest triumphs amidst the greatest odds. It's a story as American as any - that at the edge of despair, in the shadow of hopelessness, ordinary people make the extraordinary decision that if we stand together, we rise together.
What those workers made real in Memphis - and what we have to make real today - is the idea that in this country, we value the labor of every American. That we're willing to respect that labor and reward it with a few basic guarantees - wages that can raise a family, health care if we get sick, a retirement that's dignified, working conditions that are safe.
Today, forty years after the strike, its imagery has been embrace by a politician who may be our next president. Though demonized by the municipal government in Memphis, and investigated by the police and FBI, the power of the movement in the streets has influenced those seeking power in the halls of Washington.
Despite AFSCME's efforts and this rhetoric, much work remains to ensure "wages that can raise a family, health care if we get sick, a retirement that's dignified, working conditions that are safe." Today, people of color continue to make up a disproportionate amount of the labor force handling Americans' waste. Though most communities do not have equipment as dangerous as the truck that killed, the work remains fettered with hazards. Too often we keep the people who do this important work out of sight and out of mind. It is altogether too common that the waste facilities we use taxpayer money to build and manage, whether they are garbage incinerators, sanitary landfills, hazardous waste dumps, or recycling sorting facilities, are placed in communities of color where not only the workers who handle the hazards of disposal are affected, but the sounds, smells, and toxins that may be released affect neighboring residents. Though the strike in Memphis addressed several concerns, many of the injustices that led to the strike are common aspects of the American landscape, years after all of the strikers have retired, and many -- including T.O. Jones, who died too young in 1981 -- have passed away.
The injustices are still in place, but one change over the past forty years is a recognition of how widespread those injustices are. Fourteen years after Memphis, an African-American community in Warren County, North Carolina decided it would not stand for a PCB dump to be placed next to their homes and they laid down on the road in front of bulldozers to prevent the digging. These Americans made history as the first people in the United States to be arrested preventing the construction of a dump.
The residents of Afton, North Carolina failed to prevent the dump's siting, but in the months and years that followed, the environmental justice movement emerged to fight back against the decades of discrimination that made shunting the dirty work of garbage collection to blacks "normal" in Memphis. As I argued when we observed Dr. King's birthday in January, the rhetoric and tactics used in the Memphis strike influenced the activism of the environmental justice movement. Though that movement has evolved and grown over the past twenty years, it owes debts to the sanitation workers who decided that enough was enough in February of 1968 and fought two hard months to win the right to organize forty years ago today. Let us remember their struggle and sacrifice, and let us try to use their example to make our own communities more just today and in the days ahead.
If the story of the Memphis strikers at all moves you, I urge you to read Michael Honey's magnificent recent book Going Down Jericho Road for a far more vivid and detailed history of the strike and its significance than I could manage here.
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