How the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike Changed the Labor Movement
The 1968 action led to greater economic mobility for Black workers. Today, union activists are trying to capture some of that spirit. Gary "Hoov" Hoover, Executive Director of The Murphy Institute and Tulane Professor of Economics, is quoted in a New York Times article by Kurtis Lee examining the impact of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Worker's Strike on economic mobility for Black workers 50 years later.
Jack Walker is a union man. He drives a garbage truck in Memphis, where his route can take him barreling past shotgun-style houses along the Mississippi River and down the narrow alleyways near the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He is aware, always, of how his union protections are tied to Dr. King’s death and that of another man: his father.
Robert Walker, Mr. Walker’s father, was also a sanitation worker. On Feb. 1, 1968, he was collecting garbage when sheets of rain started pouring down. He and his colleague Echol Cole took shelter in the compactor of their truck. When a compressing piston malfunctioned, the two men were crushed. The city had no intention to pay death benefits, offering Robert Walker’s widow only $500 for funeral expenses, “if you need it,” as the official letter put it. She had five children, including Jack, and was pregnant with a sixth.
The tragedy was a culmination of slow-burning indignities for Black sanitation workers in Memphis. They earned low wages to lug heavy, open tubs of refuse to their trucks. Rotting garbage seeped onto their skin and clothes. Their white colleagues, who were often drivers, showered at the depot at the end of their shifts. But the Black collectors were forced to ride the bus or walk home in their dank clothes covered in flecks of trash and maggots.
Fed up, they called a strike. Roughly 1,300 sanitation workers began marching through the streets of Memphis. They carried signs that read “I Am a Man,” with the “Am” underlined. The strike stretched on for weeks. Even as trash began to accumulate on city streets, Memphis’s mayor wouldn’t entertain the strikers’ demands, instead sending in police officers with clubs and mace to break up marches.
