HOW WE REMEMBER KING
They say that freedom is a constant struggle,
Oh Lord, we’ve struggled so long, we must be free.
—Freedom movement anthem
IN MEMPHIS, WORKERS AND MINISTERS, POOR PEOPLE AND THE middle class, unionists and civil rights leaders had reached what Reverend James Lawson called a “threshold moment,” connecting struggles for black freedom and economic justice and creating the labor and civil rights alliance that Martin Luther King had long tried to build. In its wake, public employees became the leading force for union expansion in America, and dozens of sanitation strikes by black workers swept the nation. AFSCME, with SCLC support, won recognition in St. Petersburg and Miami, where workers adopted the “I Am A Man” slogan. Black women hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina—in what Time magazine called “echoes of Memphis”—struck for 113 days in 1969, supported by Coretta Scott King and SCLC, against intransigent white politicians who were backed by Nixon administration appointees. Hospital workers obtained recognition but failed to get dues checkoff, and their local floundered.
In Memphis itself, AFSCME’s Local 1733 likewise remained on tenuous grounds. Sanitation workers nearly struck again in the summer of 1968 in order to get Loeb’s obstinate administration finally to implement its “Memorandum of Agreement,” and workers at John Gaston Hospital did strike for forty-nine days in the fall to get recognition and a memo of understanding, supported again by COME and another boycott of the downtown. AFSCME did not get on secure terms with the city until the summer of 1969, when Jesse Epps threatened to “spread the misery” of economic boycotts to the suburbs. He took suburban housewives on a tour of the inner-city homes of impoverished sanitation workers. Appalled at the poverty they witnessed, affluent white women joined with black women to take out ads, write letters, and personally pressure dismissive white men in the city government finally to sign a three-year agreement that gave Memphis one of the highest hourly rates for sanitation workers in the South.
However, the sanitation workers had only opened up the beginnings of a long and difficult battle over union rights and black representation within the city. In the fall of 1969, black workers at St. Joseph’s Hospital (where King died) went on strike for recognition and dues checkoff, placing Bishop Durick and others in the difficult position of now opposing AFSCME. The union, the NAACP, and COME joined forces again in a campaign for a contract at St. Joseph’s, coupled with demands that the school board and more supervisory positions be opened up to blacks. The movement conducted yet another economic boycott of downtown Memphis and an even more disruptive school boycott by some 65,000 black students, now joined by more than 600 black teachers. They virtually closed some of the schools on successive “Black Mondays,” and students smashed windows in some of the schools. Sanitation workers walked off the job and 2,000 demonstrators faced off with the police in a downtown battle on November 10. Students—as well Reverends Lawson, Jackson, Abernathy, Blackburn, Bell, and Bevel, along with Father Milton Guthrie and many others—ended up in jail.
The NAACP ultimately dropped its support for St. Joseph’s strikers, who lost, but the movement opened up the school board to black representation, and Maxine Smith soon became its first African American member.
The fault lines between unions and the NAACP remained. In subsequent years, labor and civil rights forces sometimes joined together, other times not.
Across the South, black sanitation workers responded to the Memphis strike of 1968 by organizing and going on strike, but in Memphis itself, AFSCME went through numerous leadership struggles that almost destroyed it. The union’s national office asked T. O. Jones to take an organizing job in Florida and then fired him when he did—effectively removing him as president of Local 1733. Jones never obtained a full-time union job again, and he died virtually a pauper on April 12, 1989. He continued to encourage every worker he met to do something to change his or her life; shortly before his death, he asked a reporter to pass on this message to the next generation: “Tell the guys to stay with the union. The union, that’s the best salvation.” Jesse Epps for a time became AFSCME’s regional and local director, but he, Ralph Jackson, and other ministers came under intense legal scrutiny for how they had handled 1968 strike-support funds of some $340,000 (nearly half of which had been contributed by unions and the rest by individuals). Zealous prosecutors pressed allegations of misallocation of funds and accounting errors, forcing Epps to leave Memphis. The momentary black unity that had occurred in the aftermath of King’s death wavered.
The Invaders, both perpetrators and victims in a recurring cycle of violence, fell out completely with the movement for worker rights. Charles Cabbage and other Invaders made armed and threatening demands for funds when COME decided to become a permanent organization in the summer of 1968. Although COME had paid $3,000 for Invader legal costs, Cabbage’s group threatened to blow up the AFSCME office if it did not provide more funds. The Invaders took over one COME meeting, where Jesse Epps denounced them as “leeches,” but AFSCME members outnumbered them at the next meeting. They also tried to get funds from SCLC when it held its convention in Memphis in August 1968. The Invaders played almost no role in subsequent labor and school walkouts, as the police continued to hammer the young activists. They charged John Henry Ferguson with five separate crimes, and the courts handed him a six-year prison sentence for his disruption of Carver High School during the strike. Cabbage was sentenced to prison for draft refusal and for weapons charges left over from the strike, while John Burl Smith, Charles Ballard, and Lance (Sweet Willie Wine) Watson all received jail sentences related to the strike. Petty holdups, the wounding of a police officer, and the accidental shooting death of a black youth by Invaders put thirty-five of them in jail or under indictment by the winter of 1970. It was a time of intense political repression against New Left, Black Power, and antiwar activists during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. From the perspective of John Burl Smith, who served five years in prison for charges related to the Memphis movement, King’s death opened the way to increased state-sponsored terror, as COINTELPRO, in his words, “replaced the KKK.”
The aftermath of King’s death did not lead to an era of increased understanding across racial lines in the United States or in Memphis, where a war opened up between the police and the black community. Lieutenant Arkin and his superiors in the intelligence division of the Memphis Police Department had apparently learned very little. In reviewing the 1968 strike, Arkin noted that police had arrested 897 people over two months—almost all of them black Memphians—but then he concluded that Memphis had been chosen as a “target city” by outsiders. Arkin proposed as a solution that the city purchase more helicopters, mace, and riot helmets. The angry attitude of white police officers became very public in October 1971, when a mob of them beat sixteen-year-old Elton Hayes to death when he tried to evade them in a speeding car, triggering twenty-three police suspensions and ten days of riots. The NAACP’s campaign against unnecessary police use of deadly force took up much of its time and energy.
King’s Poor People’s Campaign proved to be one of the most disconcerting defeats for social change movements in the wake of the Memphis strike. The march of the poor began from the Lorraine Motel on May 2, with Mrs. King leading the way, as mule teams symbolizing the plight of the rural poor pulled wagons through places King had visited in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and on to Washington. Thousands of poor people—including Cabbage, T. O. Jones and his son Jesse, and other Memphians—gathered at the “Resurrection City” encampment in the capital, and Mrs. King led the National Welfare Rights Organization’s Mother’s Day mobilization on May 12. Delegations visited Congress and departments of government, demanding jobs or income for the poor, and protesters held a large, spirited national demonstration on June 19 (“Juneteenth,” a day celebrating emancipation from slavery in the South). But massive rains and organizational chaos engulfed the group’s encampment; gang members robbed its residents; Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and poor whites and blacks found it difficult to get along; and government officials hardened their hearts to black economic demands as the Vietnam War sapped the federal tax base.
SCLC hired Bayard Rustin to pull the Movement together, then fired him for emphasizing building coalitions with unions and clergy for moderate demands. No one could provide as credible a leader to the mass media as King; nor could support from unions, churches, Hollywood actors, and college students create a genuine poor people’s movement. Capitol police ultimately routed the poor with tear gas and billy clubs and burned down Resurrection City in the middle of the night. The Poor People’s Campaign left the capital as “a defeated army,” said SCLC Executive Director William Rutherford.
In the midst of this dispiriting campaign, an assassin shot down Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 6, the night he virtually secured the Democratic presidential nomination in his California Democratic primary victory. Many African Americans and peace advocates had by now transferred their hopes from King to Kennedy—now a leading opponent of the Vietnam War, and the man who had suggested King bring the poor to the nation’s capital in the first place. The premature deaths of Walter and May Reuther in a plane crash on May 9, 1970, and Jerry Wurf’s death in 1981 made the enormity of King’s loss to the Movement even more apparent. The King family suffered more tragedy too, as Martin’s brother, A. D., drowned in a swimming pool and a deranged young black man walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church and shot their mother, Alberta Williams King, dead while she was playing the organ in July 1974. This left Daddy King with no wife and nine fatherless grandchildren.
Despite many setbacks, unionism continued to sweep through the ranks of public employees across the country. In Memphis, discontent and activism among low-wage workers became widespread, and hospital workers, city clerks, car inspectors, jailers, and penal-farm workers created seventeen different AFSCME chapters by the mid-1970s. Black women especially came into the forefront of union, welfare rights, and community organizing. Ortha B. Strong Jones at John Gaston Hospital said she and other black nurses organized because they saw the union as “somebody that we could lean on” and that would speak out for them.
James Robinson, chapter chairperson for the sanitation workers; Taylor Rogers, Local 1733’s unpaid president; and James Smith, its paid director, led a relatively stable Local 1733 for the next twenty years. In 1976, AFSCME was the largest union in Memphis and in the state of Tennessee, with some 7,000 members. Its success had the ripple effect that Memphis business leaders had long feared: firemen, police officers, and teachers formed their own organizations, and all of them went on strike in 1977–78, inflicting far more damage on the city’s public order than the sanitation workers’ strike. Ironically, the police, who had been such vicious opponents of the 1968 Memphis movement, benefited most from desegregation and unionization, gaining increased wages and bargaining power as more and more blacks and women joined the force.
Local 1733 and the Movement veterans of 1968 led the way to increased black voter registration and political action and replaced Republican Representative Dan Kuykendall in 1974 with Harold Ford, the first black congressman elected in the Deep South since Reconstruction. The union helped to elect many others, and, for a time, according to Bill Lucy, “As a political instrument, the union was unmatched.” Willie Herenton, who marched with the union in 1968 as a young teacher, in 1978 became the city’s first black school superintendent. In 1991, he became the city’s first black mayor (albeit without AFSCME’s endorsement). Whites voted solidly against black candidates until Herenton’s second term, but then they began to vote for him in significant numbers. A new black leadership class, including black women, had emerged from the cauldron of the 1968 mass movement.
But despite public-employee union success, inflation, wage stagnation, and fiscal crises began to undermine both city governments and organized labor. Big industries such as Firestone closed their doors just as black workers like Clarence Coe had finally won equal access to all jobs. The alliance of middle-class black political leaders and unions representing the black working poor increasingly split apart. In April 1977, when 1,300 black sanitation workers went on strike in Atlanta, black Mayor Maynard Jackson fired and replaced them, supported by Martin Luther King, Sr., and even SCLC. Under a reign of fiscal austerity, black mayors felt increasingly compelled to make their alliances with white business leaders and the corporate power structure, instead of unions.
As King had warned, conservative forces now rolled back many of the gains of the labor and civil rights movements. Ronald Reagan, already the “acknowledged master of the imagic art” of television by the time he became California governor in 1966, increasingly made the Right respectable to white workers as well as the middle and business classes as President in the 1980s. The escalating rightward shift devastated efforts to organize the working poor, and plant closings, mechanization, floods of drugs into poor communities, and capitalism’s globalization all undercut working-class and minority communities and unions. The loss of unionized workplaces such as Firestone, International Harvester, and RCA destroyed much of the black industrial working class in Memphis and other cities. When black women at Memphis Furniture Company in 1980 went on strike for union recognition and dues checkoff, supported by Mrs. King and SCLC, they won, but soon the company simply closed up shop. It was symptomatic of a new era in which employers shifted their capital and their plants to labor markets even cheaper than the South’s, thus gutting unions.
Schisms between the black poor and the better-off intensified: as the percentage of people in the educated black middle class grew, the percentage of people in the black working poor grew even more. Poverty encompassed 58 percent of the Memphis black community in the 1960s; thirty years later, the figure was only about 10 percent less, and de facto school segregation had worsened. Southern cities such as Memphis and New Orleans remained among the poorest in the nation. Black migrants had once left the plantation districts of West Tennessee for jobs in the Memphis sanitation division, but now middle-class blacks and whites moved into the old sharecropping districts and turned them into upscale “exurbs,” fleeing the failing schools and declining tax base in the city.
Center-right politics replaced King’s Negro–labor–liberal coalition, and religion shifted away from the Social Gospel’s vision of uplift for workers and the poor and back to traditional individualistic appeals for personal salvation. Anne Braden of Kentucky, a white woman who spent her life fighting racism, concluded in 1968 that either white southerners would begin to make effective coalitions with blacks, or “the battle in the South will continue to be black against white, instead of what it should be and what we can make it: a battle of people against poverty and injustice.” Unfortunately, greed, God, and guns undermined coalition politics, as the tenor of American life swung wildly away from King’s vision of a beloved community.
THE POWER OF Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision and what happened in Memphis in 1968 is now a matter of historical memory. AFSCME and community advocates saved the Lorraine Motel from destruction and turned it into the National Civil Rights Museum, where tourists and students alike can learn from the history of the freedom movement. For forty years after King’s death, sanitation workers came out every year to keep their own memory of King and the Movement alive. They still carried picket signs reading, “Honor King: End Racism,” and “I Am A Man,” marching on April 4 to the downtown on the well-worn route from Clayborn Temple. Across the nation, union and economic-justice advocates adopted April 4 as a day of action for immigrant and worker rights, and on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, recordings of King’s prophetic “Silence Is Betrayal” speech against the Vietnam War rang out across the country.
The shift to remembering King as a labor-rights and peace advocate began, even as corporate and political leaders continued to define him within a narrow framework as “civil rights leader.” Hearing, “I Have a Dream,” to the exclusion of everything else King had to say, must lead many schoolchildren to think King spent his life sleeping. But Memphis tells us another story.
In Memphis—in a confusing, dispiriting time much like our own—King found what he needed: an organized, energized movement among those who worked full-time jobs at part-time wages. They had gone beyond the struggle for civil rights to the struggle for human rights, King said, and this gave him hope that a nonviolent movement of the working poor could prevail. James Lawson believed the Memphis strike left a great legacy to the present, as he went on to pastor a large Methodist church in Los Angeles and become one of that community’s strongest advocates of unionization for immigrants and the poor. “A dogged coalition builder,” according to the Los Angeles Times, Lawson held fast to King’s goal of creating a mass movement to end poverty: “I don’t see going it alone as a viable option for change in America.”
For Memphis sanitation workers, the meaning of 1968 and King’s sacrifice remained clear. Striker Willie Sain, who later became a minister himself, said King came almost as an emissary from God, a Moses figure who enabled the workers and their allies to win. King broke the media blackout of the strike, energized the community, and came into a new role as a labor leader that he played to perfection.
Taylor Rogers said King had merely followed the model of the Good Samaritan, just as he had urged others to do. “Even if it had been poor white workers, King would have done the same thing. That’s just the kind of person he was…. All his staff thought it was outrageous of him to stop and come to Memphis. But he went where he was needed, where he could help poor people…. He didn’t get all accomplished he wanted accomplished, but I don’t think he died in vain. Because what he came here to do, that was settled.”
FIVE YEARS AFTER King’s death, an African American TV news reporter named Ed Harris, whom police had sprayed with mace in 1968, asked an unnamed sanitation worker for his reflections on 1968. “I don’t think we can show enough appreciation for what Dr. King give,” he said. Implicitly, he believed the strike would have been lost without Dr. King, and for him the benefits of victory were very tangible. Before, he had worked six days a week; now he worked five. Before, he had worked as long as it took to bring in the garbage with no extra pay; now he worked eight-hour shifts. Before, he had had no breaks; now he had at least two fifteen-minute breaks and time for lunch. Before, white supervisors would fire black men on a whim; now they “can’t ’buse your round anymore.” With a union, his wages and benefits had steadily improved, even as the city mechanized away many sanitation jobs.
With King’s help, workers had changed themselves and their relationship to whites: “See, when he was here in the strike, every man wanted to stand up and be a man. And that was the whole story. We wasn’t counted as men before then. Every man be counted as a man now. It’s no more ‘boy’…. It’s no more of that Uncle Tom now…. You be treated like a man.”
The struggle itself changes people, King had told his staff when he launched the Poor People’s Campaign, and that is why people had to continue to fight, despite the obstacles: “If I didn’t have hope, I couldn’t go on.”
Those involved in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike remembered it as a moment in history that changed everything, because it opened people’s eyes to the injustices of poverty and racism, and it gave them hope for a different world. Memphis thus became one of the most important stops on a long road to freedom that people have traveled for generations, and still do.