I felt my place was out there with them. These men were working for substandard wages. For me not to be there would have been a denial of what I was preaching about every Sunday.

Now retired, Bell says the strike was a key turning point in Memphis and the nation because it showed the power of being organized and determined.

It was time for change. They helped people to see that we could make things better for us all if we worked together.

AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer William Lucy agrees. The sanitation workers recognized the importance of union membership to lifting black workers out of poverty, says Lucy, who was one of the organizers working with the Memphis strikers in 1968.

As Lucy says today:

The workers in the Memphis public works department, and I think workers across the South, recognized that their future was tied to their ability to organize a union and have a union represent them in the areas of wages, hours and conditions of employment. So no matter how bad the situation was, it would be worse if they were not able to form a union. And as bad as the strike got and as tough as life was, they were not about to give up until they achieved recognition of a union.

Dr. King’s involvement showed he recognized the fact that you had people who worked every single day and yet were not able to raise themselves out of poverty…and that the civil rights struggle and the struggle for workers’ rights are intertwined.

Hattie Jackson says the strike happened because blacks in Memphis were tired of being treated like slaves.

You wake up one morning and say “no more.” You just have to get on with it and not be a slave anymore.

Jackson and her late husband, the Rev. H. Ralph Jackson, were involved in the strike from the beginning. Ralph Jackson was one of the leaders of the strike. The strike was a family affair for the Jacksons, she says. Not only were she and her husband marching with the strikers, one of their daughters came home from college to march with them.   

Contrary to the common perception that the strikers and marchers were all poor, Jackson says they had many middle-class black supporters. She was, at the time, the only black principal of an all-white school in Memphis and her husband was a national officer of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination.

A lot of teachers and principals came to the mass meetings and gave money to support the strikers, but they hid their faces because they were afraid of losing their jobs. 

Jackson says the strike was good not only for black men, but for women as well.

You know that slogan “I Am A Man,” well we wanted to let them know that “I Am A Wo-man” and we deserve dignity and fair treatment as well.

Bell, who says he was arrested more times than he can count during the strike, says he was enraged with the racism not only of Memphis’ political leaders, but he was even more outraged at the racism of its white religious leaders.

He recounts that on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he and a representative of the national Presbyterian church met with the white Presbyterian ministers in Memphis to deliver a $10,000 check from the national Presbyterian Church to help support the strikers.

They went on about how it was an illegal strike and they refused to take the money. So I got [the national Presbyterian staffer] out of there and we were on the way to the Lorraine Motel [where King was killed] to pick up his bags and take him to the airport. That’s when the news came over the radio that Dr. King had been shot. Later they reported he was dead.

When we got to the Lorraine, those same ministers called to say they would take the check. I’ll never forget that.

 You can learn much more about the sanitation workers’ strike by picking up the book Going Down Jericho Road (available at The Union Shop Online™) or remember it with a poster of the strikers carrying signs proclaiming “I Am A Man” (also available at The Union Shop Online™).