I Am a Man: Memphis, 1968

On February 1, 1968, Echol Cole and Robert Walker climbed into the drum of a city garbage truck in Memphis to shelter from a rainstorm. They had no other option. Black workers on the Memphis sanitation crews were not allowed inside the supervisor's cab. The compactor engaged. Both men were crushed to death. Cole was 36. Walker was 29.

The city of Memphis gave each family one month's wages. There was no workers' compensation. No formal investigation. No announced changes to safety procedures. The city buried it and expected the workers to do the same.

The workers did not.

February 12

Eleven days later, on February 12, 1968, roughly 1,300 Black sanitation workers walked off the job. They were organized under AFSCME Local 1733, a local that T.O. Jones had spent five years building against the city's active resistance. Jones, who had been organizing Memphis sanitation workers since 1963, was fired by the city for it, rehired under pressure, and kept building. By February 1968, when Cole and Walker died, Jones had a local and a membership that was ready to move.

Their demands were not complicated: recognition of the union, dues checkoff, safety equipment, equal treatment regardless of race, and a wage increase that would lift wages out of poverty. The city's response, from Mayor Henry Loeb, was a flat no, repeated for 65 days.

The signs

The placards read "I AM A MAN."

Rev. James Lawson, a Memphis civil rights leader who joined the strike's leadership from the first days, helped shape the phrase into the movement's core demand. It was not a rhetorical flourish. It was a direct answer to how the city had treated Echol Cole and Robert Walker. Two men climbed into a compactor drum because there was no cab for them. The city paid a month's wages and moved on. The "I Am a Man" sign said: that is not what a man's life is worth. That is not how a city treats workers it recognizes as fully human.

The consumer boycott that Black women across Memphis organized amplified that demand into economic pressure. Women who did not work the sanitation routes stayed out of downtown stores, week after week. The city's business community eventually understood that Henry Loeb's refusal to talk was costing them money.

The march King did not survive

Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to march. He had been there in March and was back on April 3, when he delivered what would be his last public speech at Mason Temple. "I've been to the mountaintop," he told the crowd, "and I've seen the Promised Land." He said he might not get there with them. The next evening, April 4, he was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

The workers did not leave. They had been on strike for 52 days when King was killed. They held for two more weeks after his funeral, with the whole country watching. That is the part that does not get into the photograph captions: 13 more days, no pay, under a mayor who still refused, in a city that was a national grief site. They held.

April 16

The strike ended on April 16, 1968. Memphis recognized AFSCME Local 1733. Dues checkoff was established. Workers got an immediate raise of ten cents an hour, with another five cents to follow in September. The wages were still below poverty. The union recognition and dues checkoff were the structural wins, the foundation on which everything else would have to be built.

T.O. Jones had been fired for organizing in 1963 and had rebuilt from nothing. AFSCME national rep P.J. Ciampa and international president Jerry Wurf had come in behind him. The women who had organized the boycott had squeezed the city from a second direction. And 1,300 men who had no shelter from the rain had stayed out for 65 days, through a murder and a national crisis, and come back to work with a union.

The "I Am a Man" sign was the answer to a compactor and a month's wages and a mayor who thought that was enough. Turns out it was not enough. It was the starting point.

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This is the last weekly of the year. Twenty-six weeks, twenty-six stories. The fight continues.

Sources

• Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (W.W. Norton, 2007)
• Joan Turner Beifuss, At the River I Stand (Memphis State University Press, 1985)
• AFSCME: The Memphis Sanitation Strike, 50 Years Later
• MLK50: Echol Cole and Robert Walker Died in a Garbage Truck and Started a Revolution
• I Am a Man: The Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968 (National Civil Rights Museum)