[Union organizers] think they’re peddling better wages and working conditions, but essentially they’re offering dignity. And sometimes the worker who doesn’t articulate this very easily has more awareness than the professional organizer. The civil rights struggle, the equality struggle or whatever you want to call it, is just one part of this continuing struggle for dignity.
—Jerry Wurf
“A PEBBLE DROPPED INTO A CALM POOL,” WHOSE “RESULTING rings have created fantastic national problems,” is the way President Lyndon Johnson’s emissary, James Reynolds, described the Memphis strike. Memphis had never been a calm pool, but in any case, Reynolds could not swim out of it until he stopped the strike’s ripple effects on the nation. He kept negotiators up all night on Palm Sunday. At dawn, Loeb went home to bed, while Jerry Wurf and his men prepared for the April 8 mass march. Sitting on the speakers’ podium Monday afternoon, P. J. Ciampa dropped off to sleep, “like a drug addict…. I’d wake up and, you know, I’d feel like I wanted to scream.”
Loeb lifted martial law following King’s funeral on Tuesday, April 9, but on Wednesday, “Mayor Loeb beamed as he showed visitors the stacks of telegrams and mail he has received since Sunday,” a Commercial Appeal reporter wrote. Loeb claimed to have received 1,000 letters and 3,803 telegrams, all but 100 of which supported his hard line against unions. Businessmen at the Sertoma Club gave him a standing ovation on Friday when he announced that ninety-six sanitation trucks were picking up the garbage.
A front-page Wall Street Journal article, titled, “Critics Say the City Where King Died Clings to Old Racial Outlook,” declared that the white power structure in Memphis, “as in many cities, is out of touch but doesn’t know it.” Boss Crump had turned Memphis into an “adolescent city” barren of grown-up leadership, said Myra Dreifus. The City Council majority met on Wednesday, April 10, but still refused to intervene—they feared their “manhood” was on the line against the union, said Councilman J. O. Patterson. Disgusted, he called on all thirteen council members to resign and be replaced in a special election.
“The will to do the type of things that had been so needed in Memphis for so long” now existed for the first time, but no one had the “keys to make things work,” insisted Reverend John Aldridge. White Baptists, the predominant religious group, remained silent. The Memphis Committee on Community Relations ran a full-page ad and mailed it to 600 ministers, calling for “100 Days of Love And Prayer.” But “the tragedy…is that we preach one thing and live another,” Reverend Starks responded.
New outbreaks of violence erupted in several cities after King’s funeral, and President Johnson prodded Congress until the Senate passed the 1968 Civil Rights Act by a single vote. On April 11, the House passed it too—the last major civil rights bill of the 1960s. Title 8 of the law made it a crime to deny blacks the right to buy or rent in 80 percent of the nation’s real estate—a response to King’s open-housing campaign in Chicago—and the law also gave federal authorities more power to prosecute killers of civil rights workers and further codified American Indian rights. But the housing section had weak enforcement powers, and law-and-order advocates attached a provision, making it a federal crime to travel or broadcast interstate with the intent to start a riot. A clause protected union organizers from the anti-riot provision, but the law did nothing to enhance the rights of workers, such as those in Memphis, to organize a union.
President Johnson scheduled an address to Congress to propose accelerated antipoverty programs and a tax to pay for them. It would have been a significant response to the Poor People’s Campaign, but Johnson had already raised taxes to pay for the Vietnam War, and he quickly canceled the speech and dropped the proposal due to congressional opposition. One hundred House Republicans had split from the conservative wing of their party to join 150 Democrats in passing the Civil Rights Act, but only one Deep South Democrat, Richard Fulton of Tennessee, had voted for it. Georgia Democratic Governor Lester Maddox conjectured that Communists had killed King just to get the law passed (Dan Kuykendall said the same thing). Other potential reforms in the wake of King’s death stalled. Only hours before King’s death, Mississippi Senator James Eastland had blocked a proposed gun-registration law, one that might have enabled authorities to identify quickly who had purchased the rifle used to kill King. The National Rifle Association, meeting from April 6 to 11, pressured Congress not to pass a registration law; only after another tragic assassination of a public figure, Robert F. Kennedy, would it do so.
In Memphis, on the day after King’s funeral, workers resumed daily meetings at the United Rubber Workers union hall and marches from Clayborn Temple through downtown shopping districts. James Lawson announced plans for another massive demonstration and for intensified boycotts of particular businesses, and he demanded increased black employment and civilian review over police, who he said had invaded homes without warrants, brutalized people, and even stolen their money during curfew. “Now all Negroes know, from business executives and doctors on down, how the poorer people have been harassed for decades,” he remarked. On April 12, Reverend Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn, president of the Progressive Baptist Convention (which King had long supported), spoke to 600 people at Mason Temple, telling them the “violence of hatred” could not be erased without “a radical change in the hearts of this nation.”
Despite these calls for change, “We weren’t having any luck at all with the mayor, and the city council had washed its hands of the problem,” said Bill Lucy. President Johnson’s man, Reynolds, found the mayor and his advisers irrevocably opposed to a settlement. This “group of wellbred, educated Southern gentlemen,” from places such as Duke and Harvard and Yale, scorned the “tough little Jewish irascible Northerner” Jerry Wurf and regarded uneducated black garbage workers with disdain, said Reynolds. “There was a certain condescension on the part of the spokesmen for the city that they would even sit there and talk to these people…. They had their finger in the dike and if they gave way…the government employees union was going to mushroom and it would be all over the country.”
For their part, black workers had a “sullen but deep hurt” after King’s death, and Reynolds feared they would walk out and the city would blow up. “The local union leadership was frightfully inept,” Reynolds said, and unable to effectively confront Loeb’s advisers in negotiations. Reynolds resorted to speaking with the groups separately, and he only brought Wurf and Loeb together periodically. Frustration built up among the workers: “There was nothing that Mr. Wurf could go back to the Rev. Lawson and these people who were meeting in the churches every night and so forth, and say, ‘Well, the mayor has agreed to this or that.’ There was nothing.”
According to Reynolds, Wurf “took a good deal of what I would regard as abuse” from the mayor, and only his exercise of restraint kept the workers from walking out. At one point, however, Wurf himself concluded, “There is no point in going on with this.” But Reynolds, whom Wurf called “the best trouble shooter on labor affairs in the United States,” would not let him quit. He kept negotiators meeting through Easter weekend and beyond.
“BUSINESS NEVER CLOSES until somebody gets killed,” W. C. Handy had written in his “Beale Street Blues.” After King’s death, half a dozen conventions canceled meetings in Memphis, and on Saturday, April 13, the biggest shopping day before Easter Sunday, some 200 black women intensified the pressure on merchants. Led by Dorothy Evans (a black teacher reputed to be one of the best-dressed women in Memphis), Cornelia Crenshaw, and Tarlese Matthews (strike activist and owner of a beauty shop), they picketed the downtown stores and told shoppers to leave. Black women had increasingly taken charge of AFSCME support work, and they now intensified boycott pressures on white merchants. The Commercial Appeal quoted a businessman as saying sales remained “brisk,” but it wasn’t true. Editor Frank Ahlgren later said merchants had been hiding the boycott’s true impact for weeks; on April 14, the newspaper revealed the loss of more than a third of downtown shoppers over the previous month. The story’s headline read, “City Must Bear Costly Loss of Goodwill, Money.”
Hotel rooms sat empty and tourists avoided the city as though it once again had a yellow fever epidemic. Minuscule audiences came to downtown showings of The Graduate, a film packing movie theaters everywhere else. “The riot has knocked hell out” of Memphis, a businessman admitted. Memphis lost taxes on liquor and other goods not sold, while overtime pay for the police had totaled $300,000 since February 12. The city may have sustained up to $1 million in property losses over the course of the strike, according to later police estimates, and many downtown businesses never recovered.
The Invaders said violence would do more than marches to get the establishment’s attention, and so did boycotts: Memphis did care, particularly about profits and losses. Jesse Epps threatened to spread the boycott misery by picketing suburban shopping centers. Much more threatening, Time magazine on April 12 replaced the city’s reputation as the country’s cleanest city with the label, “a southern backwater” and described it as a “decaying Mississippi River town.” Congressman Dan Kuykendall, seemingly more incensed about Time’s comment than about King’s death, called this “a vicious character attack upon the people of Memphis and its entire business community.” The Memphis Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club, both of which had systematically excluded blacks, now feared the city would lose northern investments.
Ned Cook, Allen Morgan, Lewis McKee, and a number of other white businesspeople urged Loeb to settle the strike, while some condemned him for being so shortsighted and inflexible. A group of lawyers and businessmen who had worked on Loeb’s election campaign went to the mayor and told him, according to Councilman J. L. Netters, “Man, get this thing settled. If you don’t do it, you won’t have our support.”
The Commercial Appeal began to present the strikers in a more favorable light, featuring striker O. D. Wilson, who had six kids but turned over to the police a tourist’s lost wallet containing a cashier’s check for more than $8,000. My children “aren’t that hungry” as to spend other people’s money, he said. Both daily papers endorsed the federal Civil Rights Act in King’s honor, perhaps feeling some sense of guilt. James Lawson told Time magazine that the newspapers “have attacked and vilified Martin Luther King. They have to share responsibility for his death.” On Monday, April 15, the Press-Scimitar editorially recognized the importance of the “I Am A Man” slogan and black workers’ quest for dignity. The media had shifted toward a pragmatic strike settlement after March 28, and editors at both major newspapers in the city now thought that the longer the mayor stalled, the likelier that more violence could occur.
The Memphis Police Department and the FBI, like the newspapers, feared increased violence in the streets. Loeb received daily death threats, and police reported rumors that Lawson, Ralph Jackson, or Billy Kyles might be assassinated. Anonymous callers made bomb threats to city hall and the county courthouse, while one especially ridiculous rumor claimed that Reverend Jackson had dynamite stored in his church. Someone else sent him an anonymous postcard picturing King at “A Training School for Communists,” with a cryptic note, “Ask the men to go back to work. They are wrong.” And inside the Memphis movement, Wurf said, “Factionalism of all kinds”—hostilities, resentments, and quarrels—worsened after King’s death. Charles Cabbage, John Burl Smith, Edwina Harrell, and Charles Ballard attended COME strategy committee meetings, but Cabbage’s talk of “controlled violence” rankled the ministers. And the Invaders and BOP still wanted money for community organizing projects.
John T. Fisher had said that the only power Lawson had was the power to disrupt, and Lawson and others remained willing to use it. SCLC President Ralph Abernathy, at a rally at Metropolitan Baptist Church on April 15, threatened to initiate “some of the most militant nonviolent steps we’ve ever taken”: protesters would block trucks, march through upper-class white areas at night, expand the economic boycott to the suburbs, and close the whole downtown. “I want to call on those Negro scabs who are driving those garbage trucks to leave the keys in the trucks and refuse to work,” he said. SCLC leaders hinted at sabotage and mass arrests, and AFSCME leaders warned that a hard struggle lay ahead.
However, negotiators reached a tentative agreement with Loeb that very night. Loeb privately conceded, “After Dr. King was killed, I thought we simply had to get this thing behind us…in the country’s interest and for many other reasons.” One of those reasons might have been concern that northern businesses and the federal government could take their business elsewhere—the same kind of pressures that had forced Boss Crump to leave the CIO alone. James Reynolds, who had been getting phone calls from President Johnson demanding to know when the strike would be settled, did not openly threaten the mayor, but economic pressure was there, and he found ingenious ways to get around Loeb’s opposition. Some years later, Bill Lucy facetiously commented of Reynolds, “I think we would still be negotiating had it not been for him.”
Reynolds arranged to have a federal credit union available to accept union dues; this provided “an independent, employee-run system over which the mayor had no control,” said Lucy. “Our members could have their dues deducted, and there was nothing the mayor could do about it.” Reynolds also convinced Loeb to let the City Council sign an agreement with the union and thereby take the blame for union recognition, and the agreement did not make AFSCME the exclusive bargaining agent for the sanitation workers. Pay raises had never been the major issue for the sanitation workers, but the city now balked at giving any money for higher wages. Frank Miles approached industrialist Abe Plough, who owned a huge pharmaceutical company that had viciously fought unionization but failed to stop it in the 1930s. Plough now enjoyed unprecedented profits and anonymously donated close to $60,000 to pay for immediate raises for sanitation workers. This proved to be the key to finalizing a settlement. Reynolds said he had never seen such a thing in all his years of negotiations.
The wage agreement raised pay by 10 cents an hour by May 1 for laborers, crew chiefs, and drivers, and another 5 cents an hour by September 1; Loeb had originally offered an 8-cent raise. To sustain the wage increases, the city would propose a garbage tax that most affected poorer whites and blacks, and it would cause residents to blame the union rather than the mayor for the costs of a settlement. Loeb had already cut garbage collection from twice to once a week, and it would stay that way.
After eleven days of nonstop discussions, Reynolds had found a set of compromises and also a way to let Loeb escape direct responsibility for the settlement. He recalled, “You know the mayor didn’t change his attitude…. He didn’t capitulate one bit.”
ON THE MORNING of April 16, a tentative deal was at hand. But Lucy recalled, “As we were going over the final agreement there was one more last stumbling block: T. O. Jones decided not to sign. He wasn’t bothered by any particular point: he simply wanted to escalate the demands.” T. O. Jones thought the union had watered down its objectives. It was true, Ciampa admitted, that the union “took a beating” on this first agreement—but it could not hope to do any better. Tensions surfaced between Jones and national staff members as they conversed in private. Lucy recalled, only half-jokingly, “While I advised him how nice life would be for him on another planet, Ciampa suggested to him numerous forms of torture he would never forget. Jones decided to sign.”
AFSCME promptly took the proposal before members of the COME strategy committee and black church leaders who had gathered at the Peabody Hotel. Wurf told them, “This has been your fight as well as our fight. We think that this should be recommended to the men for approval. If, however, you don’t think it should be, you are welcome…to say what you will. We want you to.” He and his organizers left the room so they could discuss it freely. For a union to give such veto power to people outside the union was unprecedented, but Wurf knew that without broad support from the black community, he could not have a victory. The black leaders quickly approved.
It was the workers who remained the ultimate decision-makers, though. AFSCME staff and strategy committee members together went over to Clayborn Temple, where Lawson was preparing strikers for a march downtown. Said Wurf, “We are here to tell you about some of the agreements we have reached with the city, less than half an hour ago. It is up to you to decide whether you like or don’t like the agreements and vote on them today.” Especially since city leaders had questioned whether workers really supported this strike or wanted this union, Wurf felt it had to be their decision. For the next half hour, AFSCME staff went through the provisions one by one.
This agreement, which took sixty-five days of struggle to achieve, sounded incredibly simple. But for years to come, it both empowered and limited the sanitation workers and thousands of other public workers in Memphis. As Reverend Jackson had insisted, the words on paper said the city “recognized” the union, which meant that workers had a right to make their own choices and not be dictated to by “the Great White Father,” as Jackson put it. No longer would anyone be fired for joining a union; workers could freely pay dues and carry on union activities at work. A year later, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled, in relation to another organizing campaign, that the First Amendment protected the right of public workers to join a union.
The agreement’s second point acknowledged that a dues-checkoff arrangement “is a matter exclusively between the employees and their credit union.” Dues checkoff remained crucial, for without it, the union would not survive. Since Tennessee, under the Taft-Hartley Act’s section 14(b), had outlawed the “union shop,” AFSCME could not require workers to belong to the union as a condition of employment. Nonunion workers could refuse to pay dues and still receive the same benefits as union members—so why should workers join, or pay dues? It was the “Catch-22” of southern right-to-work laws. The checkoff system at least made it possible to collect dues regularly from those who chose to be union members.
The third item simply maintained benefits that the workers already had. The fourth stated: “The City shall make promotions on the basis of seniority and competency.” White supremacy thus fell, in twelve simple words. When Lucy announced it, a great cheer went up. Industrial workers such as Clarence Coe at Firestone and George Holloway at International Harvester had risked their lives for equal promotion rights, in order to break the back of Jim Crow on the job. Now sanitation workers also had these rights. White supervisors kept their jobs, but blacks now had equal opportunity to compete for those jobs when supervisors retired.
In the meantime, any white boss could be challenged. The longest section of the agreement set up a detailed, step-by-step grievance procedure. Ed Gillis said, “Now I can go to the union and they’ll protect me. See…we have a chief steward out there. He speaks for us…. This is what the strike did for us.” The agreement spelled out steps to be taken, guidelines and timelines. Industrial workers such as Coe and Holloway used grievance procedures as a Bill of Rights, and sanitation workers now had the beginnings of one.
The agreement also contained a nondiscrimination clause, something CIO unions had pioneered in the 1940s. The city would not discharge or otherwise discriminate against workers based on their participation in the strike or in the union, or based on their “age, sex, marital status, race, religion, national origin, or political affiliation.” The workers cheered this provision, which declared an end to both racial discrimination and the firing of union activists—as had happened to thirty-three workers after the abortive 1966 strike. This provision’s importance became evident when Charles Blackburn announced that all strikers could now return to work.
AFSCME gave up some power in making this agreement, leaving public-employee unions vulnerable for years to come. As Loeb later pointed out to the press, this was a memo of agreement, not a contract; Tennessee law did not require him or any other employer to bargain in good faith; workers did not have to join or pay dues; in case of disagreement during bargaining, arbitration by a third party was advisory only, and the mayor could reject it. Wurf said that the right to belong to a union was a “basic right in a free society,” but it should be matched by a requirement that employers bargain in good faith. Loeb hadn’t done it, and this agreement still didn’t require it.
The agreement also prohibited AFSCME members from going on strike, a right that AFSCME had long struggled to achieve for government workers. With few protections by labor boards or the courts, and without required union membership and the right to strike, AFSCME Local 1733 could only use public pressure to get city leaders to bargain in the future. “All we did was get a premise for staying alive,” Wurf later said.
Workers listened tentatively as Wurf and Lucy read off the provisions. It was not all they wanted, but it was an agreement, and it was in writing. Early in the proceedings, they gave Wurf and then Jones standing ovations. Wurf turned over the microphone. Jones was overcome with emotion and could not speak. He sat down with tears streaming from his eyes, as Wurf and Lucy continued to read the agreement.
At 1:05 PM, Wurf again turned over the microphone to Jones, who called the question: “All those who approve the agreement, please stand.” People rose as one to their feet; no one remained seated. “All those who oppose?” There was no one. Jones declared, “The motion has carried!”
Wild jubilation engulfed Clayborn Temple, where tear gas still stained the walls. On the podium, Jones, Ciampa, Lucy, Wurf, Paisley, Epps, and Reverends James Smith, Lawson, Starks, and Bell, as well as Cornelia Crenshaw, O. Z. Evers, Maxine Smith, and others shook hands, hugged, laughed, and cried. Some workers rushed to the front to congratulate their representatives; others danced in the aisles, waved their fingers in a “V for victory” sign or held two thumbs up, and slapped each other on the back. Lawson called it a scene of “great joy and happiness and bedlam.”
Jones momentarily silenced the bedlam to say, “We have been aggrieved many times, we have lost many things,” tearfully referring to the man who was not there—Martin Luther King. “But we have got the victory.” People surged around Jones, patting him and cheering. The audience recognized Jones as a hero. It was a moment of vindication for all he had suffered during nearly eight years of trying to build a union.
Lawson now took the podium, and he too had his mind on the man who was not there. He wanted this victory to count as a first step toward fundamentally changing Memphis and building a lasting alliance between the black community and organized labor. He urged the workers and the union representatives not to forget where they came from or their larger objectives: “We know we have just begun. We want to get to the point where every poor family in this Shelby County can work together in an organization that will allow them to solve their own problems. The fact is that we were able to stand tall and true and together and we have won this glorious victory for you and for America.” He reminded AFSCME: “We are not going to let you forget your responsibility to this community.”
Reverend Starks rose to say that workers had once “looked askance” at the ministers, but, “Now we are together, let us stay together!” Reverend Bell joked that the workers had done better under Loeb than any other mayor, and he shouted, “Long Live King Henry!” Cornelia Crenshaw said it was time to organize hospital and housing workers. Tommy Powell exulted, “This is one of the biggest days ever for labor in Memphis. I just hope the Negroes and labor can bind themselves together to get some good politicians now.” Ralph Jackson said, “COME will not be disbanded. It will be strengthened” to demand “economic equality” (a phrase used by King) and an end to police brutality. It would try also to get relief from the debts workers had incurred to loan sharks (workers subsequently spent years paying these off).
People had high hopes that this would be the beginning of a broader movement for social and economic justice, as they joined hands and sang, “We Shall Overcome.” Wurf looked at banker Jesse Turner of the NAACP, “and I felt kind of silly because tears were coming out of my eyes and he was crying, too.” People in Memphis still sang, “Black and white together,” even when Wurf, Ciampa, Tommy Powell, Joe Paisley, and Malcolm Blackburn were the only whites in the room. “I still am moved by it because we ended every meeting that way,” said Wurf.
Workers said the key to the victory was that they had made their own decision. “We’re satisfied. They didn’t force us to accept anything, we voted on it. That makes the difference,” said James Allen. “It’s been tough, oh man. They sure have fought for us and I appreciate it,” said Sidney Robinson.
The wage increase provided the least cause for celebration. “The raise will help a little, not too much. I would rather have that and go back to work than not be working,” said Detroit Luster. Workers remained angry at Loeb. “Anytime a person has to go through this much” to get a few cents extra, said Luby Finney, “I don’t like him.” Said another worker, “He’s a sick man but I’ll say one thing for him. He did just what he said he would.”
AFSCME shop stewards left Clayborn Temple to plan implementation of the agreement, and the ministers immediately went into a strategy session. Most workers lingered, savoring their victory, relaxing. “Man, it’ll feel good to get back to work,” said Mack Dean. They could go home to their families that night, satisfied that they had stood up for their rights and prevailed. “There was joy on that day,” recalled Clinton Burrows, despite King’s death. “I loved him and I am proud I was part of this.” He gave thanks to “the Lord, my family, and the International union.” The workers also felt a sense of sadness. “We won, but we lost a good man along the way,” said one of them.
Mayor Loeb offered this interpretation to the press: “There is no winner, except all of the people of Memphis. The agreement is consistent with long established policies of the city and laws of this state.” He still opposed the agreement, he said; he had given in on nothing, but, “in the greater interest of the city I feel we should resolve this issue.” He also said that 250 strikebreakers would keep their jobs. Loeb told a top CBS News executive that he had not changed his views and had “at least 200,000 people backing us up, and only a handful against.” James Reynolds and Frank Miles signed the document and turned it over to the City Council for ratification; Loeb never signed anything.
Loeb prided himself on being “stubborn” and “hardheaded,” but, Reverend Jackson objected: “When I did that as a child I always got a whipping, and I didn’t think that was anything in particular to be proud of.” If Loeb clung to his unilateral decision-making, however, he also needed to make sanitation workers’ raises palatable to other city workers—an important political constituency ever since the Crump era. Laborers, cafeteria workers, janitors, nurses’ aides, and workers in city parks, schools, and the Memphis Housing Authority, as well as 600 Memphis hospital workers, all made less than the federal minimum wage of $1.60 an hour. Even firemen and policemen and many teachers lived at bare survival wages. All of these city workers needed a raise, and a union. Pay raises had been scheduled for February 1968, but they had not been implemented because voters had not approved serving liquor by the drink, thus undermining tax revenues.
Since the start of the strike, employers had feared that an agreement with AFSCME would set off a tidal wave of wage and unionization demands. Loeb tried to head this off by pledging, “Those below the minimum wage will be brought up”—but only to the minimum wage. In addition, firemen and policemen would also get a long-delayed 10 percent raise, in two 5 percent increments. As a result of that percentage increase, white policemen and firemen gained far more in wages than the sanitation workers did. AFSCME had raised the wage floor for nearly all city workers. Loeb left it to the City Council to come up with funding.
The city had finally accepted virtually the same agreement that the City Council subcommittee on public works had agreed to only two weeks after the strike began; Loeb’s own negotiators had accepted a similar agreement on March 5. Now, the City Council approved the “Memorandum of Agreement” on the afternoon of April 16; only Bob James voted against it, saying he did not see how the city could pay for the wage increases. Patterson criticized the council for not having imposed its own version of this agreement weeks earlier.
The mass media acknowledged, finally, that dues checkoff, done routinely for insurance and other purposes, was nothing unusual, and the Press-Scimitar editorially praised the settlement as a “Victory for the Community.” The Commercial Appeal admitted that AFSCME leaders in Washington had not instigated or even known about the strike, and that unions already had similar agreements with various city governments and the Tennessee Highway Department. Its editors praised Jerred Blanchard for putting his “political life on the line” in support of a settlement, and said the agreement paved the way for a “New Era in Memphis.”
It would have been nice, Benjamin Hooks said, if the mass media had also acknowledged that “the black community because of their solidarity and togetherness has won a victory.” Instead, it seemed to suggest that everything in Memphis would be fine again, as it once used to be. But something had definitely changed. As sanitation worker Luby Finney told a reporter, “We’ve got a union to fight for us now.”
THAT NIGHT, BEFORE some 1,500 celebrants at Golden Leaf Baptist Church, Lawson, Bevel, Bell, Ralph Jackson, and others outlined a fight against police brutality and for educational and economic uplift. A denim-clad Ralph Abernathy called the strike settlement a victory for teachers, janitors, maids, students, and poor people in general. Some people nationally viewed King’s death as the end of the civil rights movement, but Martin’s brother, A. D. King, told the crowd that the Memphis movement had served notice: “this is just the beginning.”