Marching to the Mountaintop: How Poverty, Labor Fights and Civil Rights Set the Stage for Martin Luther King Jr's Final Hours. Ann Bausum
of Memphis showed up for work every day knowing they would be treated like garbage. By the end of the day they smelled and felt like garbage, too. Unfairness guided their employment, and racism ruled their workdays. So passed the lives of the garbagemen of Memphis until something snapped, one day in February 1968, and the men collectively declared, “Enough is enough.” Accumulated injustices, compounded by an unexpected tragedy, fueled their determination. Just like that they went out on strike, setting in motion a series of events that would transform their lives, upend the city of Memphis, and lead to the death of the nation’s most notable — and perhaps most hated — advocate for civil rights.
Labor relations, human dignity, and a test of stubborn wills drove developments that spring in Memphis, Tennessee. Behind this union of worker rights and civil rights stood the men expected to handle one ever present substance: garbage.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In 1957, heartened by the successful outcome of the Montgomery bus boycott, key organizers team up with colleagues from other communities to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, and advocate for social change through the use of nonviolence. Key participants:
Martin Luther King, Jr., president from 1957 until his death in 1968.
Ralph D. Abernathy, treasurer, King’s closest colleague, and the man who succeeds him as organization president.
Lieutenants, such as Hosea Williams and Jesse Jackson (standing left and center with King and Abernathy at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, April 3, 1968), as well as Bernard Lee, James Orange, and Andrew Young.
Authorities
Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States (1963-1969).
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the chief force behind FBI campaigns to spy on and discredit Martin Luther King, Jr.
Former FBI agent Frank Holloman, director of the Memphis fire and police departments, and the department’s 800 officers, including undercover staffers Marrell “Max” McCullough, Ed Redditt, and Willie Richmond.
The Memphis Movement
On February 24, 1968, local clergy establish a strike-support organization called Community on the Move for Equality, or COME.
James Lawson, an associate of King’s with deep experience in the use of nonviolence and a local Methodist minister, becomes the group’s leader.
Other key organizing ministers include Presbyterian Ezekiel Bell, Clayborn Temple’s white leader Malcom Blackburn, Baptist minister and local judge Benjamin Hooks, AME leader H. Ralph Jackson, Baptist minister James Jordan, Baptist minister Samuel “Billy” Kyles, Baptist minister and youth organizer Harold Middlebrook, and AME minister Henry Starks (president of the association of local African-American ministers).
Charles Cabbage (left) and Coby Smith (right), who had founded the Black Organizing Project (BOP) in 1967, question the exclusive use of nonviolence as a force for change; they maintain an uneasy alliance with COME, especially after setting up a militant offshoot to BOP known as the Invaders with associates such as Calvin Taylor.
Other notable strike supporters include local activist Cornelia Crenshaw, Dick Moon (the university chaplain who mounts a hunger strike in April 1968), Maxine Smith (executive director of the local chapter of the NAACP), NAACP president Jesse Turner, and white Methodist minister Frank McRae (who tries to persuade the Memphis mayor to settle the strike).
Labor
Public workers organize the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, during the 1930s. By 1968 the organization represents almost 400,000 members in nearly 2,000 local chapters, including Memphis Local 1733.
T. O. Jones, president of AFSCME Local 1733, who helped found the fledgling union in 1963, stands in the front lines throughout the 1968 strike.
Jerry Wurf, international president of the union since 1964, assumes personal responsibility as the advocate for members of Local 1733.
AFSCME field services director P. J. Ciampa serves as the union’s chief liaison with the striking workers.
Other key national players from AFSCME include union organizer Jesse Epps (above), Bill Lucy (the highest ranking African American at AFSCME in 1968), and Joe Paisley (the Tennessee representative for AFSCME).
Workers such as Robert Beasley, Clinton Burrows, Ed Gillis, J. L. McClain, James Robinson, Taylor Rogers, Joe Warren, and Haley Williams are among the 1,300 men who fight for recognition as human beings and as members of a union; the vast majority are sanitation workers (1,100), but another 230 hold jobs in the sewer and drainage division of the department of public works.
Other local labor supporters include members of the United Rubber Workers Union (Local 186), Taylor Blair (a white union agent who advocates settlement), Tommy Powell (president of the Memphis Labor Council and a local white), and Bill Ross (a white who leads the local council of AFL-CIO affiliates).
Management
Henry Loeb, mayor of Memphis, 1968-1972, former local business owner, former public works commissioner (1956-1960), and former mayor (1960-1963).
Memphis City Council, thirteen members elected for service beginning January 1968 to fill seven district seats and six at-large seats, including twelve men (three of whom are African American) and one woman.
Charles Blackburn, director of the Memphis department of public works, which employs sanitation and street workers.