Voices from the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike: A Turning Point for Black Workers

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/01/21/voices-from-the-1968-memphis-sanitation-strike-a-turning-point-for-black-workers/

By James Parks, Jan 21, 2008

In the fall of 1967, T.O. Jones and Joe Warren, the first two leaders of the effort to organize a union of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., met with then-Mayor Henry Loeb to recognize and bargain with the almost all-black union, AFSCME Local 1733. As Warren recalls:

He told us you can have it, but you can never get dues checkoff or recognition. When I told him we would strike, he told me I would be the first one fired.

Video at link.

But after a two-month strike in 1968, the sanitation workers, many of whom were standing up against white authority for the first time in their lives, won recognition of the union. That victory was the catalyst for change in the paternalistic racist environment in Memphis. Today, the city has a black mayor and county executive, and Local 1733 represents public workers across the city.

Warren joined seven other veterans of the strike and told their stories at the annual AFL-CIO Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Memphis. King, a longtime supporter of unions, went to Memphis in April 1968 to lend his support to the sanitation workers’ strike and was assassinated while he was there.

The Rev. Ezekiel Bell was the first minister to support the strikers and one of their strongest backers. The city’s only black Presbyterian minister at the time, Bell had turned down a scholarship to Harvard to attend all-black Tennessee State University. His father had been a Mississippi sharecropper and once worked as a sanitation worker, so Bell says he understood the workers’ pain.

I felt my place was out there with them. These men were working for substandard wages. For me not to be there would have been a denial of what I was preaching about every Sunday.

Now retired, Bell says the strike was a key turning point in Memphis and the nation because it showed the power of being organized and determined.

It was time for change. They helped people to see that we could make things better for us all if we worked together.

FULL story at link.