Today is the day the country choose to remember and honor the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. Right or wrong, this one young man - 39 years old at the time of his death - came to symbolize America’s most important movement and era.
Much has been written about Doctor King. But because today is not exclusively about Doctor King, but his fight to bring the Promise of America to everybody, I’m going to republish what Steven Greenhouse wrote just a few days ago in the NY Times about Echol Cole and Robert Walker - two men who were slowly crushed to death in a garbage truck - setting off the long-ago Memphis Sanitation workers’ strike that drew in Doctor King; and Elmore Nickleberry, one of the last living participants in the strike. In reading Greenhouses’ piece, I was struck - again - by how much of the Civil Rights era was about simple respect.
I’ve always found those old black and white images of all those men marching for the respect of simply being called a man very moving. It just doesn’t seem like a lot to ask for. Respect… R.E.S.P.E.C.T…
Elmore Nickleberry, 92, Sanitation Worker in ’68 Memphis Strike, Dies
Steven Greenhouse, a former NY Times reporter, interviewed Elmore Nickleberry for a chapter of his 2019 book “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.”
Elmore Nickleberry in 2008 holding a replica of a sign from the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Carl Juste/Miami Herald, via MCT, via Alamy
Elmore Nickleberry, one of the last living participants in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike of 1968, a historic walkout that sought to win respect and equal rights for African American workers and that drew the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to their side, died on Dec. 30 in Memphis. He was 92.
Mr. Nickleberry was one of 1,300 sanitation workers who joined the 65-day strike, which culminated in a major civil rights and labor union victory, albeit at a tremendous cost — Dr. King was assassinated while he was in Memphis to rally behind the strikers’ cause.
The sanitation workers, nearly all of them Black, were protesting low pay, poor working conditions and demeaning treatment. “Everybody called us ‘boy,’” Mr. Nickleberry said in a 2014 interview. “The supervisors also called us ‘boy.’ You’d tell them, ‘I ain’t no “boy.” I am a man.’ And they’d keep calling you ‘boy.’”
Each day, Mr. Nickleberry and the other strikers marched silently through downtown Memphis, carrying signs that said, “I AM A MAN.” Though he was not well known during the strike, Mr. Nickleberry, a thin, silver-haired, disarmingly friendly man, grew in prominence over the past quarter-century by speaking to youth groups, labor unions, civil rights groups, TV interviewers and documentary filmmakers.
Workers protesting during the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968.The Withers Family Trust/BAM
Memphis sanitation workers in those years used round 17-gallon plastic tubs to haul garbage from backyards to trucks on the street. Like his co-workers, Mr. Nickleberry would fill his tub with 30 or 40 pounds of garbage and carry it on his back, shoulders or head. “There would often be holes in the tub,” he said, “and the garbage and maggots would crawl down your back and onto your clothes.”
No matter how dirty and sweaty they were, the trash collectors weren’t allowed to shower in the sanitation depots. “We smelled real bad,” Mr. Nickleberry said. “Nobody wanted to sit near us” on the bus ride home. He usually walked the six miles instead. Arriving there, he said, “I’d take my clothes off in the backyard because I stink so bad.”
On Feb. 1, 1968, two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were sitting in the back of a garbage truck to escape a downpour when a malfunction caused the compactor to suddenly start running. It crushed them to death. The tragic mishap was a catalyst for the strike, which began on Feb. 12.
The work stoppage was further fueled by frustration over the Memphis mayor’s steadfast refusal to recognize the workers’ union, which was part of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
When the strikers held their first march, on Feb. 23, the police attacked them with batons and mace. “The police started whupping us,” Mr. Nickleberry told The Memphis Commercial Appeal in 2018. “I got hit hard.”
The strikers marched week after week, but the mayor, Henry Loeb, wouldn’t budge. He said it was illegal for city employees to strike and insisted that he would not bargain “with anyone who was breaking the law.”
To pressure him, the strikers enlisted support from union and civil rights leaders from across the country. Dr. King saw his involvement as part of his Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to pressure Congress to create more jobs and housing for thousands of economically disenfranchised people.
At the time, Mr. Nickleberry, who had been a sanitation worker for 14 years, earned $1.65 an hour (a little under $15 in today’s currency), just five cents above the federal minimum wage at the time. Forty percent of the trash collectors’ families fell below the poverty line; many qualified for welfare and food stamps.
Memphis sanitation workers marching past the Tennessee National Guard in 1968 during the strike, which lasted 65 days. Charlie Kelly/Associated Press
Dr. King was killed on April 4, the day after he gave his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis and four days before he was to lead a massive march in support of the sanitation workers. With the nation rocked by the assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened to settle the strike, dispatching James Reynolds, the under secretary of labor, to Memphis.
Mr. Reynolds succeeded in pressuring city officials to reach a settlement that recognized the union and included raises and strict protections against racial discrimination, which meant that Black trash collectors could finally earn promotions.
“We got a good raise,” Mr. Nickleberry said. (He received a raise of 15 cents per hour, a 9 percent increase.) “We got showers. We got better working conditions. We got health benefits.”
Most important, Mr. Nickleberry said, the workers won dignity. “The union came in and we got respect,” he said. “They stopped calling us ‘boy.’ They started calling us ‘A Man. A Sanitation Man.’”
Mr. Nickleberry said he continued working into his 80s because the 1968 settlement had left the workers without pension benefits. “I had to feed my family,” he told The New York Times in 2017. “That’s why I stayed.”
He finally retired in 2018 at age 86, making him the longest-serving municipal employee in Memphis history. He retired only after Memphis had reached a settlement with the 14 surviving strikers, giving them $50,000 each to compensate for their meager retirement benefits.
Mr. Nickleberry remained a strong union supporter throughout his life. “If we didn’t have a union, we would get nothing,” he said in 2014. “We’d be in the same shape as before. You got a union to back you, you achieve more.”