By LEONARD PITTS
Miami Herald MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Forty years later, they are old men, many with bent backs and ginger steps. And they are taciturn, strangers to an era of confession, getting in touch with your feelings.
Also Online
Photos: 1968 sanitation strike
Video: Memphis sanitation workers
Tell Us: Where were you at the time of the MLK assassination?
Interactive: Defining a dream
So if you ask them what it was like, being a black man and a sanitation worker in this city in the 1950s and '60s, they will say simply that it was "tough" or it was "bad." And it will take some pushing for them to tell how you had to root through people's back yards, 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 come home on the bus," says Elmore Nickelberry, 76, who is still working. '[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."
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 Martin Luther King's last campaign – the one that took his life, 40 years ago Friday.
A trying timeThe 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.
That presentiment entered a sermon he preached in February. "Every now and then," Dr. King said quietly, "I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral." And then he told them how he wanted it to go. The person who delivered his eulogy was not to talk too long, was not to mention where Dr. King went to school, was not to bring up his Nobel Peace Prize.
"I'd like for somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others!" His voice was like a clap of summer thunder.
Because he saw death coming. In Memphis, it 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 up on its own. Mr. Cole and Mr. 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.
"They felt a garbage man wasn't nothing," says Mr. Nickelberry. "And they figured they could treat us any way they wanted to treat us. ... Make you feel bad, 'cause you know you wasn't no garbage. You supposed to been a man."
It was, finally, 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. The final act of the civil rights movement had begun.
No one knew it at the time.
Mayor and mayhemAt 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, even when his advisers advised him to, even when budging seemed a matter of plain common sense.
So instead of moving toward settlement, the strike only 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.
It was an unwieldy coalition of egos and agendas, answerable to no one authority. And on Feb. 23, the strike exploded into violence.
Sanitation workers were holding one of their daily marches when police appeared, brandishing rifles and using their vehicles to force the marchers back toward the sidewalk. Cars brushed dangerously close. The Rev. James Lawson told the marchers he was leading: "They're trying to provoke us. Keep going."
Then, say the workers (the point is still disputed, 40 years later), a police car ran over the foot of a female marcher. And parked there. And the men had had enough. "They picked that car up," says Joe Warren, an 86-year-old retired sanitation worker, "and turned it over on its side. That's when all hell broke a loose."
Out came the night sticks. The violence was indiscriminate: women, old men, ministers, not resisting, just standing there, didn't matter.
"Them white police was mean with those sticks," says Mr. Warren. "They hit you with those sticks; they juke you with those sticks." Some men fought back with their protest signs.
Words that bindSoon after, a new slogan appeared on the signs the black men carried. Four words, but they were provocative. Four words, but in that time and place, they were incendiary. Four words, but they managed to encapsulate at long last something black men had never quite been able to get America to understand.
Four words.
I AM A Man.
"When you been overseas fighting," says Mr. 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 now fully something more.
Dr. King came to town in March, invited by Mr. Lawson. He was supposed to give one speech, rally the workers, and then leave. Memphis would be just 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 lifted him, brought him up from the valley of the shadow, buoyed him every time they talked back to him, shouting "Amen!"
Dr. 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. And Dr. King, having floated the idea, had little choice but to lead it.
Memphis became poisonous and chaotic. There was garbage in the streets, sit-ins at City Hall, mass arrests. High school students picketed. Rocks were thrown through the windows of businesses owned by the mayor. There were trash fires. Gunfire.
Sanitation worker Ben Jones, 71, says, "I would tell my wife, when I leave home, 'I might be back, and I might not.' Just lettin' her know, don't keep your hopes up."
You had to accept the reality of your own death, they say. Make your peace with it. "I didn't care," says Mr. Warren. "And don't care now." His voice breaks, and tears fall. "We worked hard," he gasps. "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.
The march stepped off with Dr. King and his ministerial allies in the lead, flanked by sanitation workers. But young people soon elbowed their way to the front. And then, from behind, came 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 lone police officer surrounded by a menacing black mob was rescued by two black women in a car. An apparently unarmed black boy was fatally shot at close range by police.
Finally, National Guardsmen sealed off the black neighborhoods.
The media response was scathing. Dr. King, they said, had stirred up trouble and then run away. Even those sympathetic to Dr. King said the violence had damaged his credibility. And so he had to return, to lead a new march, to prove that nonviolence was still a viable tool of social change. "Either the movement lives or dies in Memphis," he said.
Dr. King's return
On April 3, he returned to a city under storm watch. The skies were menacing, the winds punishing. Exhausted, Dr. King begged off speaking at the rally planned for that night and sent Mr. Abernathy in his place. He settled down to bed.
But Mr. Abernathy called. The hall was packed. The people wanted him, would accept no one else. So Dr. King dressed and went out into the storm. He spoke to them without notes as the wind howled and the rain drummed down.
There was a valedictory quality to it, as Dr. 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 now, 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 very next evening. Standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, bantering with his men in the parking lot below, Martin Luther King was shot to death by a sniper.
And we lost, says historian Michael K. Honey, 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," says Mr. Nickelberry. "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 in five months. The city agreed to make promotions on the basis of seniority and competence – not race.
And 40 years later, you arrive in an era where a black man is running for president and, for all myriad issues of race and identity with which he is forced to grapple, he is not required to prove himself a man. The men who helped make that possible are aged and dying and largely forgotten. And feeling, some of them say, cheated.
They say the union they won is not strong and receives little support from younger workers. The job benefits aren't great, either. Ben Jones says 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," says Elmore Nickelberry. "In some of 'ems eyes, you ain't nothin' but a boy. Still a boy."
But there is, he says, 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.' "
