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Martin Luther King Jr. Died Fighting for the Right to Form a Union |
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When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968, he was helping sanitation workers in Memphis form a union. After his death, that union was formed and today is known as AFSCME Local 1733, one of the strongest unions in the city, representing thousands of city employees.
As blogger Nathan Newman points out, unions and their ability to lift workers out of poverty were critical factors in King’s drive for economic justice:
Martin Luther King Jr. had made a strike of public employees in Memphis a centerpiece of his efforts to launch the “Poor Peoples Campaign” of his final year. It’s worth understanding that Martin Luther King Jr., even as he rightly criticized the exclusionary rules of some individual unions, always saw a strengthening of unions and labor as critical to achieving long term justice for African Americans.
Today, two men who were eyewitnesses to the workers’ struggle say much has changed in the way the nation views poor black workers—but much has yet to be done.
The Rev. Benjamin Hooks, former executive director of the NAACP, was a criminal court judge in his hometown of Memphis in 1968 and one of the few African Americans with a bird’s-eye view of the inner workings of city government. The situation in 1968, Hooks says, were tragic:
The biggest tragedy was one man—Henry Loeb, the mayor. He had a plantation mentality. He thought if you did what he told you to do, everything would be all right. When he saw that people wanted a union—he didn’t like unions—he did everything he could to stop it. There’s a famous picture of him sitting in his office talking to a group of black sanitation workers with a shotgun under his desk. That’s the kind of mentality he had. He thought one white man with a shotgun could control thousands of black folks!
The black community was firmly in support of the sanitation workers. They rallied every day and filled Mason Temple [a local church] which holds thousands. When King got involved in the strike, even more people came out.
The sanitation workers had a terrible environment. They had to carry garbage without any masks or protective clothing. Two workers were crushed in a compactor. Once they got a union, all that changed. It’s one of the strongest unions in town. The sanitation workers got better wages and safer conditions.
The challenge now, as then, Hooks says, is one of leadership. Just as many white Memphians were reluctant to step in 38 years ago to help the sanitation workers, today’s leaders are not willing to tell the truth that economic and racial justice are still not realities.
For Richard Copley, 1968 was a watershed year for him as well as the sanitation workers. Copley was a college student freelancing as a photographer when he shot a series of famous photos of the Memphis garbage workers’ strike, including one with hundreds of strikers holding signs proclaiming “I Am A Man.”
“There was total disrespect for the sanitation workers. They were the unsung, unthought of workforce,” Copley says. “They weren’t paid properly. That was a scary time, but attention had to be brought on the conditions of poor and minimum wage workers.”
Now all that has changed, says Copley, who moved back to Memphis last year after being away for 25 years working for a national TV network and running his own multimedia enterprise. Today, the workers have more respect and better wages. But there is still work to do to make the American dream come true for everyone, he says.
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