I Am a Man: The Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968

On February 1, 1968, Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker climbed into the back of their garbage truck to get out of the rain, the only shelter the city allowed a Black crew that day. A malfunction set off the compactor, and it crushed them both to death. Eleven days later, on February 12, more than a thousand of the city’s sanitation and sewer workers walked off the job carrying signs that read I AM A MAN. The strike ran sixty-four days, produced Martin Luther King’s last speech, and ended on April 16 with a signed contract for the men who hauled the city’s garbage.

Cole was thirty-six. Walker was thirty. A coworker who watched it happen gave this account of the accident:

The motor started racing and the driver stopped and ran around and smashed that button to stop that thing …

It didn’t stop in time. Two other Memphis sanitation workers had died the identical way in 1964, and the city had never replaced the defective equipment.

Twenty years of asking first

Memphis’s sanitation crews had been organizing since 1959, when a worker named T.O. Jones started signing coworkers up for a union local. In June 1963, Public Works Commissioner William Farris fired Jones and 32 others for attending an organizing meeting. Community pressure got 32 of the 33 rehired, on the condition they drop the union. Jones refused and kept organizing anyway. When AFSCME chartered the group in 1964, the union numbered it Local 1733, after the 33 men who had lost their jobs the year before.

The local tried to strike again in 1966. The city lined up replacement workers and threatened to jail the organizers, and the walkout collapsed before a single truck stopped running. Mayor Henry Loeb cited that year’s court order against a repeat strike when he declared the 1968 walkout illegal on its first morning.

None of the underlying math had moved. Wages for the city’s mostly Black sanitation crews averaged $1.70 an hour in 1968, low enough that 40 percent of the workers qualified for welfare on top of full-time city jobs. The pattern showed itself in miniature the day before Cole and Walker died: 22 Black sewer workers were sent home without pay when it started raining on January 31, while white employees on the same crew kept working through the same rain and were paid for the full day. Labor history runs on this shape more than once: it took 146 dead in a single fire to rewrite New York’s factory safety code in 1911, and it took two men crushed in a truck to turn nine years of asking into a citywide walkout.

The walkout

On February 12, 930 of the city’s 1,100 sanitation workers and 214 of its 230 sewer and drainage workers refused to report for duty, and only 38 of the department’s 108 garbage trucks ran that day. AFSCME’s international president, Jerry Wurf, arrived from Washington on February 18 to back a demand that came down to what a union buys anywhere it wins: recognition, a grievance procedure, dues collected from a paycheck instead of chased down by hand, and enough of a raise that a full-time city job stopped requiring food stamps.

Loeb refused all of it. On February 22, the City Council, facing a sit-in in its own chambers, voted to recommend union recognition and a raise. Loeb rejected the vote, insisting he alone held the authority to recognize a union and would not use it:

This is not New York, and nothing will be gained by ignoring our law.

The next day, marchers who had been promised an eight-abreast permit and a police escort to City Hall were ordered to narrow their line to four abreast instead. When some began rocking the escort cars, officers answered with clubs and mace.

Where the sign came from

On February 24, Rev. James Lawson, the Memphis pastor coordinating support for the strike, told the men gathered at Clayborn Temple what the fight was actually about:

For at the heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man, that a person is not a person. You are human beings. You are men. You deserve dignity.

Organizers, including AFSCME’s Bill Lucy, settled on four words short enough for a placard and plain enough to need no explanation: I AM A MAN. Rev. Malcolm Blackburn, Clayborn Temple’s pastor and, in his other trade, a journeyman printer, set the type and ran the signs off a press in the church’s own basement, stamped with the union bug of the Allied Printing Trades Council. Decades later, a 1960 Hamilton Wood Type catalog turned up on eBay, and the wood type historian David Shields identified the placard lettering as Gothic No. 6243, a face Hamilton had cut in 1906. The type designer Tré Seals redrew it, added companion weights, pulled the punctuation from Baltimore Afro-American headlines of the era, and released the result as a digital typeface. Four words a Memphis minister set by hand in a church basement now ship as a font file.

The march that broke down

King, invited by Lawson, led a march through downtown Memphis on March 28. It fell apart within blocks: young men at the back of the crowd broke storefront windows on Beale Street, and police answered with tear gas, batons, and mace before the march reached City Hall. An officer named Leslie Dean Jones shot and killed 16-year-old Larry Payne that afternoon, saying Payne emerged from a basement holding a butcher knife; witnesses said Payne had his hands up. A grand jury never indicted Jones, and a Justice Department cold-case review closed the case without charges in 2017. At least 64 other people were hurt.

Memphis photographer Ernest Withers shot the day’s other lasting image: block after block of I AM A MAN placards moving down Beale Street. Decades later, Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that Withers had also been feeding reports on the movement to the FBI since at least 1968. By one researcher’s account, Withers had driven activists to rent the saw that cut the placard sticks that morning, the same sticks youths tore free and swung through storefronts once the march broke down. Withers put it to that researcher plainly:

If anybody is as much responsible for that riot up there, as anybody, I might be responsible.

The mountaintop

King returned to Memphis on April 3 to help repair the movement’s discipline after the March 28 collapse, and that night, at Mason Temple, he gave the speech historians call “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” He closed it like this:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn’t matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. 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 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. So I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at 6:01 the next evening and pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital just after seven. He was thirty-nine.

What Memphis actually signed

President Johnson sent Under Secretary of Labor James Reynolds to Memphis the day after the assassination to mediate. Reynolds met separately with Loeb and with the union, rarely both at once, starting April 6. On April 8, roughly 42,000 people, led by Coretta Scott King and the city’s union and civil rights leadership, marched in silence from Clayborn Temple through downtown.

The agreement came together on April 16. The City Council adopted it by a vote of 12 to 1, and Loeb signed it; strikers gathered back at Clayborn Temple that night and voted unanimously to accept a fourteen-month contract: recognition by council resolution, a dues checkoff, a grievance procedure, and 15 cents an hour in raises, 10 cents that May 1 and 5 more that September. Weighed against a demand for $2.35 an hour on a base of $1.70, it was a modest raise. Weighed against what Local 1733 had wanted since T.O. Jones started signing up coworkers in 1959, recognition and a grievance procedure that did not depend on Henry Loeb’s opinion of the law, the money mattered less than the signature under it. The city signed one week after the man who had come to help win the fight was buried.

The same wage arithmetic that had put 40 percent of a sanitation department on welfare in 1968 put roughly two hundred fast-food workers on a New York sidewalk in 2012 to start what became the Fight for $15: a job that pays too little to live on eventually produces people willing to walk off it. Memphis proved the other half of that equation first. A walkout alone stops the trucks. It takes a signed contract, and somebody willing to enforce it, to make the raise stick.