Martin Luther King

The story of the Memphis Strike and King's dream of a civil rights labour coalition

Abraham Lincoln may have emancipated the slaves in the USA in 1865, but it was left to the coalition of unions and civil rights groups to emancipate African American wage slaves more than a century later.

Martin Luther King Jnr was assassinated in Memphis on April 4 1968 while leading a general stoppage in support of black garbage workers. This April marked the 40th anniversary of his death.

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign by Michael K. Honey is dedicated to telling their story.

On February 1, 1968 Echol Cole, 31 and Robert Walker, 30 climbed inside the stench of the rusting garbage truck they worked to shelter from driving rain. They were crushed to death by a faulty hydraulic ram - 'chewed up like refuse in the back of a garbage compactor.'

Garbage work was shit work - black man's work. The men slaved an 80-hour week with 15-minute lunch breaks, without work clothes, gloves, toilets or showers. If they 'talked back' to their white boss, they were fired. Their families lived in slums.

The deaths of Echol and Robert were the last straw. The workers went out on strike. Most of them were not unionised, but one among them, T.O. Jones, had started up a local. The labour movement soon came to their aid - the Memphis Labor Council, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and US labour federation AFL-CIO. So did the civil rights movement, the Black Power students, the preachers and Martin Luther King.

In the street marches and protests that followed police brutality came to the fore. On February 22 when 600-700 workers marched the streets after yet more failed negotiations, police brought out rifles and billy clubs and sprayed mace into their faces.

It only served to galvanise support for the strike.

Martin Luther King arrived in Memphis in March and addressed around 25,000 people including the striking workers at Mason Temple, Memphis on Sunday the 18th.

King stressed that voting and civil rights were not enough to emancipate African Americans and had long called for a Negro Labor Coalition.

"All labour has dignity," he said. "You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labour. It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."

Martin Luther King helped people see the strike as something much larger than a local issue and gain spiritual strength for the fight ahead, Honey writes. King was like "a megaphone for the movement, one of the few people who could bring national attention to local struggles just by giving a speech."

That night King called for a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.

"And you let that day come, and not a Negro in this city will go to any job downtown. When no Negro in domestic service will go to anybody's house or anybody's kitchen. When black students will not go to anybody's school ..."

He promised he would return on March 22 to lead the march.

The general strike and march were put back until March 28 due to a snowstorm. King arrived late and the protest had already got out of hand with looters smashing shops and young Black Power students taking the lead from the unions.

King was evacuated as the protest turned into a riot.

Again the police turned violent, swinging clubs and spraying mace into people's faces.

The local hospital received dozens of victims of police brutality - a 75-year-old man, a 11-year-old boy, men and women with lacerations to their heads and shoulders, broken bones and teeth, skull concussions, buckshot wounds, facial injuries, body bruises, tear gas and mace irritations of the lungs and faces.

And one death.

Police suspected Larry Payne, 16, of looting.

They knocked on his door, "pressed the barrel of his single shot 12 gauge shotgun into Payne's stomach and pulled the trigger".

"The shot made a muffled sound like busting a sack," one witness recalled.

Martial law was declared in Memphis and the tanks rolled in.

But the next day the unions took control and the workers marched single file peacefully down the street carrying placards: "I am a man", "Decency is due every man", Dignity for all", "We won't be slaves no more".

King resolved to return on April 3 in the hope of leading a peaceful march. He came despite the many death threats.

The same day escaped convict James Earl Ray drove into Memphis in a white Mustang. He was a suspiciously cashed up poor white man from Missouri who subscribed to Ku Klux Klan publication, The Thunderbolt. He had with him a Remington Game Master model 760 used for big game - powerful enough "to kill a charging bull" according to its manufacturer.

The next day, April 4, King met with youth leaders and others in his room 306 at the Morraine Motel in preparation for the rally. At around 5.50pm they left. Martin Luther King was standing on the balcony talking to staff members in the courtyard below when the bullet was fired. Within hours he was dead and America was on fire. Riots broke out around the country. By April 11, 43 people had died and 2000 were injured in 80 cities.

But the march in support of striking garbage workers Martin Luther King had come to lead went ahead - his widow, Coretta Scott King and their children Dester, Martin and Yolanda in his place up front.

US President Lyndon Johnson flew in his Under Secretary of Labor James Reynolds to negotiate with the union and settle the dispute.

On April 16 the workers won a wage raise, union dues deduction, a non-discrimination clause, a career path, grievance procedure and the right to join a union.

A TV reporter five years later asked an unnamed sanitation worker for his reflection on 1968.

"I don't think we can show enough appreciation for what Dr King did," he said. "The strike would have been lost without him."

"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."

Before they worked six days a week - now they worked five. Before they worked as long as it took for no extra pay, now they worked 8-hour shifts. Before they had no breaks, now they had at least two - and lunch. Before white supervisors would fire black men on a whim, now they "can't 'buse you round anymore".

The Memphis Strike connected the struggles for black freedom and economic justice, creating the labour and civil rights alliance that Martin Luther King had long tried to build. More union victories were to follow with Coretta Scott King joining 497 striking black women hospital workers in Charleston that same year.

A congressional committee investigating King's assassination later found that racist businessmen in the St Louis area had put out a $50,000 bounty to kill King.

Honey is a labour historian and professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma. He was awarded the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award as the author whose work reflects Robert Kennedy's concern for the oppressed, his commitment to justice, democracy and human rights, and his belief in the power of individuals to effect social change.

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign, by Michael K. Honey, W.W. Norton publisher, 2007, 623 pages, paperback, can be purchased online at the AFL-CIO Union Shop for US $17.95 plus postage: https://unionshop.aflcio.org/Going_Down_Jericho_Road_P1328C101.cfm

Videos "Memphis Strike" and "I am a Man", speeches and photos can be viewed at the union website:

http://www.afscme.org/about/17418.cfm

Honouring the dream

Statement from AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee on the anniversary of the 1968 AFSCME Sanitation Strike in Memphis and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Forty years ago in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in solidarity with 1,300 AFSCME sanitation workers - workers denied their rights as free men and city employees. Forty years after the historic events in Memphis, we honour the man and the vision best by taking action to achieve a better America.

"Dr. King's dream inspires our fight against an intolerant administration that puts profits before people, that rewards wealth instead of work. We have suffered under it for more than seven long years. We must end the nightmare and build the dream. We must create an America where opportunity is abundant and prosperity is shared.

We must create an America that lives up to its ideals."