King's final campaign in Memphis 40 years ago remains relevant today

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Forty years later, they are old men, many with bent backs and gingerly steps. And they are taciturn, strangers to an era of confession, getting in touch with your feelings.

So if you ask them what it was like, being a black man and a sanitation worker in Memphis in the 1950s and '60s, they will say simply that it was "tough" or it was "bad."

It will take some pushing for them to tell how you had to root through people's backyards, collecting their tree limbs and dead cats and chicken bones, because there was no such thing as a garbage can placed out by the curb. Or about white bosses who carried guns and called you "boy" and worked you 10, 12, 14 hours a day but only paid you for eight, at as little as $1.27 an hour. Or about how it was when the metal tubs you toted on your head rusted through and the garbage leaked.

"I have got maggots out of my head, what done fell in there. Sometimes, you find 'em in your collar," said Ozell Ueal, 68.

"I come home on the bus, [people] couldn't sit next to me. They say, 'You stink.' Most of the time, I'd get way in the back. Most of the time, I'd walk home," said Elmore Nickelberry, 76, who, like Ueal, is still working,

This is a story about the Memphis sanitation-workers strike of 1968, how black men who were, in their words, treated like "beasts," like "animals," like the garbage they collected, decided enough, no more. It is a story about how a demand for higher wages and better working conditions soon turned into a demand for something more.

And it is a story about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last campaign, the one that took his life, 40 years ago this Friday.

A trying time

The great civil-rights leader was besieged from all directions that season. Estranged from the White House for his stand against the war in Vietnam. Ridiculed by young blacks who thought him out of touch with the new militancy of guns and separatism. Tormented from within by depression, fatigue and a haunting presentiment of his own death.

In Memphis, death had already come.

Sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker had climbed into the back of one of the old garbage trucks to get out of the rain. But as the vehicle rumbled along, the hydraulic ram that compacted the trash started on its own. Cole and Walker were crushed. Just like garbage.

The men had complained for years about that truck in particular, about raggedy, malfunctioning old trucks in general. The city never listened. Now it gave each man's widow one month's salary — likely less than $300 — added $500 apiece, and called it square. Burial expenses alone were $900 a man.

"They felt a garbage man wasn't nothing," Nickelberry said. "And they figured they could treat us any way they wanted to treat us."

It was one indignity too many.

At a mass meeting 10 days later, years of accumulated anger exploded. Hundreds of men, represented by no union and taking no formal vote, decided: Enough. The next day, 930 of 1,100 sanitation workers, 214 of 230 sewer and drainage workers, did not show up for work.

Mayor and mayhem

At the time, it was just a strike, just the workers against the city, the latter represented by its newly elected mayor, a stubbornly intransigent cuss named Henry Loeb who drew a line in the sand early on and refused to budge. In his book, "Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign," historian Michael Honey paints a striking picture of the mayor: racist, virulently anti-union; stridently anti-communist.

"Anti-communism was just a huge layer over the white population at that time in Memphis. In the first negotiation that [union organizer] Bill Lucy had with them, Mayor Loeb brings up the communist issue and the war in Vietnam. [Lucy] was dumbfounded and he said, 'What did that have to do with anything?' "

The men were talking about raises. About a place to shower the filth off before they went home. About getting paid for time worked. About having a place to urinate.

In the minds of white conservatives, Honey said, "If you stood up for civil rights, you were automatically a communist."

So instead of moving toward settlement, the strike grew. It drew in national union leaders trying to help the men win recognition. Then came preachers, local activists, high-school kids, college students. It also attracted a militant youth group, the Invaders. They were disciples of revolution and Black Power who scorned daily marches, sit-ins, boycotts, negotiations and other tools of working through the system. They demanded confrontation. They demanded disruption.

It was an unwieldy coalition of egos and agendas, answerable to no one authority. Worse, from the city's point of view, were rumors that the workers would call in "outside agitators." Maybe the fiery black-power advocate Stokely Carmichael. Maybe even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

On Feb. 23, the strike exploded into violence. Sanitation workers were holding one of their daily marches when police appeared, riding five and six to a car, brandishing rifles and using their vehicles to force the marchers, who were walking several abreast and commandeering much of the street, back toward the sidewalk. Cars brushed dangerously close. March leader the Rev. James Lawson told the marchers, "They're trying to provoke us. Keep going."

Then, said the workers (the point remains disputed, 40 years later), a police car ran over the foot of a woman marcher. And parked there. And the men had had enough. "They picked that car up," said Joe Warren, 86, a retired sanitation worker, "and turned it over on its side. That's when all hell broke a loose."

Out came the nightsticks. The violence was indiscriminate: women, old men, ministers, not resisting, just standing there, didn't matter. Some policemen took off their badges as they whaled away.

"Them white police was mean with those sticks," Warren said. "They hit you with those sticks; they juke you with those sticks." Some men fought back with their protest signs.

And then out came the Mace, sprayed into eyes and nostrils at close range. Lawson got three shots full in the face. He fell, eyes burning, throat raw, disoriented, unable to breathe. His offense: He asked the police to stop.

"When you hit Main Street, that was just like a war zone. People marchin', people hollerin', people gettin' tear gas throwed all over them," Nickelberry said.

Words that bind

Soon after, a new slogan appeared on the signs the black men carried. Four words, but in that time and place, they were incendiary. Four words, but they encapsulated at long last something black men had never quite been able to get America to understand.

I AM A MAN.

"When you been overseas fighting," said Nickelberry, who served in Korea, "... look like you should be treated as a man. But they always call you a boy. 'Come here, boy. Do this here, boy. Do that there, boy. Come in the office, boy.' You just come from a war zone and be treated, not as a soldier, not as a man, just a boy. It's real hard."

What had been a strike was fully something more.

King came to town in March, invited by Lawson. He was supposed to give one speech, rally the workers and leave. Memphis would be a quick diversion from planning for the Poor People's campaign, through which he intended to lay the concerns of the American underclass — black, white, brown — before its government. But the diversion became a priority.

Because as he stood before that crowd in Mason Temple, it buoyed him, every time crowd members talked back to him, shouting "Amen!"

And "Yes!"

King was in his glory. He told them it was a crime for the citizens of a wealthy nation to subsist on starvation wages. He told them America would go to hell for failing its humblest citizens. He told them to stand together.

And then he told them what he had not meant to tell them, what came to him unplanned in that moment of inspiration and heat. They should "escalate the struggle." They should mobilize a work stoppage. Not only the sanitation men, but the teachers, the students, the clerks, the clerics, the maids, the mechanics.

They should shut Memphis down.

A march was set for March 28. King, having floated the idea, had little choice but to lead it.

"King," historian Honey said, "was always a strong supporter of the unions, from his teenager years when he had summer jobs and saw how the workers were treated when they didn't have unions, including the white workers." He had spent years trying to get the AFL-CIO to "get off this Cold War bandwagon" and join organized labor in common cause with the civil-rights movement. Memphis seemed tailor-made for him.

But Memphis had become poisonous and chaotic. There was garbage in the streets, sit-ins at City Hall, mass arrests. High-school students picketed downtown. Rocks were thrown through the windows of businesses owned by Mayor Loeb. There were trash fires. Gunfire.

Sanitation worker Ben Jones, 71, said, "I would tell my wife, when I leave home, 'I might be back and I might not.' " You had to accept the reality of your own death, they said. Make your peace with it. "I didn't care," Warren said. "And don't care now." His voice breaks and tears fall. "We worked hard. Some hard times."

The march was a disaster. Unlike demonstrators in the early days of the struggle, these had not been drilled in the discipline and tactics of nonviolent protest. They were excited and unruly and when King arrived, they pushed and shoved, trying to get near him.

"The people were trampling over my feet, crowding over me. The atmosphere was just wrong," recalled King's best friend and confidant, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy.

The march started with King and his ministerial allies in the lead, flanked by sanitation workers. But young people soon elbowed their way to the front, shoving the sanitation workers aside. And then, from behind, the sound of shattering glass.

Members of the Invaders had taken bricks and pipes to storefront windows, screaming "Black Power!"

The nation's premiere pacifist found himself at the head of a mob. He would not, he said, lead a violent march. Fearful for his safety, his men swept him away.

Behind them, police gassed and clubbed looters and bystanders alike. A black boy was seen stomping a white department-store mannequin. "I wish this was a real live one!" he cried.

A lone police officer surrounded by a black mob was rescued by two black women in a car. An apparently unarmed black boy was shot to death at close range by police. Finally, National Guardsmen sealed off the black neighborhoods.

The media response was scathing. King, they said, had stirred up trouble and then run away. Even those sympathetic to King said the violence had damaged his credibility. And so he had to return, to lead a new march, to prove nonviolence was still a viable tool of social change. "Either the movement lives or dies in Memphis," he said.

King's return

On April 3, King returned to a city under storm watch. The skies were menacing, the winds, punishing. Exhausted, King begged off speaking at the rally planned for that night and sent Abernathy. King settled down to bed.

But Abernathy called. The hall was packed. The people wanted him, would accept no one else. So King dressed and went out into the storm. He spoke at the rally without notes as the wind howled and the rain drummed down. There was a valedictory quality to it as King recounted the triumphs and tragedies of the 13-year civil-rights movement. He linked the sanitation workers' plight to that of the beaten and robbed man in the Bible who is rescued by the Good Samaritan.

Then, the presentiment touched him and he spoke, one last time, of his own death.

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over and I've seen" — singing the word — "the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land."

A spirit of defiance seemed to seize him and he roared in the face of his own demise. "So I'm happy tonight," he cried. "I'm not worried about anything! I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

It came the next evening. Standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, bantering with his men in the parking lot below, King was shot to death by a sniper.

And we lost, Honey said, the one man who was able to speak to rabbis and working men and preachers and militants alike, "to communicate across almost all the barriers and boundaries of the 1960s."

"I was shocked," Nickelberry said. "I was mad. It hurt me. Even hurt me now, just to think about it and talk about it."

The strike was settled April 16. The city recognized the union. The workers got a raise of 10 cents an hour, with another nickel-an-hour increase to take effect in September. The city agreed to make promotions on the basis of seniority and competence — not race.

The men also won — this had been a key sticking point — the right to have union dues automatically deducted from their paychecks.

And 40 years later, a black man is running for president, and his manhood is a given. The men who helped make that possible are aged and dying and largely forgotten. And feeling, some of them said, cheated.

They said the union they won is not strong and receives little support from younger workers. The job benefits aren't great, either. Ben Jones said he's still working at 71 because he needs to pay off his house; when he retires, his only income will be from Social Security. Sanitation workers have no pension.

Nor did racism disappear. "Some of 'em still call you boy," Nickelberry said. "In some of 'em's eyes, you ain't nothin' but a boy. Still a boy."

But there is, he said, a difference: You don't have to take it anymore. "I tell 'em, 'I'm 76 years old. I'm old enough for your daddy. I ain't no boy. I am a man.' "