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  Even King’s support of the strike in Memphis, a labor dispute between the city and municipal employees, was supposed to advance the Poor People’s Campaign. As King noted when he addressed the pro-strike rally in Memphis on March 18, the paycheck of the garbage workers was so paltry that some had turned to food stamps to feed their families. Linking their plight to the wider issue of American poverty would dramatize his case for the Washington protest.

  King envisioned Memphis as a springboard to Washington. Instead, the woeful turn of events—the rioting that marred his pro-strike march of March 28 and the imperative to recover by staging a nonviolent march on April 6—was having the opposite effect. Returning to Memphis now would be a costly detour. It would bog King and his staff down for at least five days in a city roiled by racial conflict. They would be stuck there until at least the day of the redemptive march, set for Monday, April 8.

  The timing could hardly have been worse. King and his aides were in the final stage of recruiting volunteers for the Poor People’s Campaign. They had a monumental task ahead of them. They were seeking an ethnically diverse cross section of poor people from ten cities in the Northeast and Midwest and from small towns and rural areas in five southern states. The African American preacher who grew up in middle-class circumstances in Atlanta was summoning poor people from across America. He was calling to Washington—in his terminology—not only Negroes but also Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians.

  He was promising a “massive mobilization.” It would mean flooding Washington with protesters, settling them in makeshift tent cities on the grounds of the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial. If their extensive demands for antipoverty legislation were not met, he would dispatch the protesters en masse into streets, parks, and office buildings. The protesters would jam the halls of Congress and offices of executive departments, swarm into hospital emergency rooms, and quite possibly tie up the vehicular traffic of central Washington. When asked by a reporter about the latter tactic, King was evasive. But he was clear about his intentions: the protesters would “plague” Washington as long as necessary to achieve their goals.9

  To prepare for an operation of that scale, King was shifting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference onto a different track. He had founded the SCLC, in 1957, in alliance with a regional network of mostly Baptist ministers, to struggle against racial segregation in the South. Now the emphasis would fall squarely on economic justice. He reassigned his staff to concentrate on the profuse details of the antipoverty drive. They would help recruit and train the thousands of people in the discipline of nonviolence. They would plan and execute the complex logistics to transport, house, feed, and manage the great mass of protesters.

  That was the plan before the debacle in Memphis. Diverting to Memphis for damage control was throwing the Poor People’s Campaign off schedule. As originally conceived, the plan was to enlist a first wave of three thousand poor people to converge on Washington in early April. Thousands more would follow in later months. Hastily revised because of the detour to Memphis, the plan was now for the campaign to begin on April 22. The aim was to draw not thousands but only a “symbolic delegation” to Washington at that time, as the Commercial Appeal reported on March 30.

  Recruiting volunteers, whose bodies and honor would be on the line in Washington, would have been hard enough if the Memphis riot had not undercut King’s image as an apostle of nonviolence. Now he believed he had to restore his credibility in order to reassure volunteers. If not, he feared few people would follow him to the nation’s capital.

  King’s powerful oratory, his iconic stature as the personification of the civil rights movement, the respect and awe with which millions of disadvantaged Americans regarded him—they were the engine behind the Poor People’s Campaign. On his personal magnetism hinged the success of his appeal for volunteers as he traveled around the country to build support. Without that central pillar of his credibility solidly in place, King acknowledged that the Washington campaign was “doomed.”10

  His breakneck schedule in March 1968 allowed him to stump from town to town, city to city, pleading for volunteers. During the eight days that ended March 18, he delivered thirty-five speeches at stops from Michigan to California. The schedule for a single day, March 19, sounded like the bookings of a week or two for gospel singers on a Delta tour. Starting in the early morning, he crisscrossed a large swath of Mississippi. He spoke at small African American churches in Batesville, Marks, Clarksdale, Greenwood, Grenada, and Laurel, finally reaching Hattiesburg and a bed close to midnight.

  Marks, Mississippi, would play a special role. It was to be the jumping-off point for a mule train that would plod the one thousand miles to Washington as a sort of moving billboard to promote the antipoverty cause. In his sermon at the National Cathedral he singled out Marks as an example of the privation that had inspired him to launch the Washington campaign. It was a backwater Delta town of twenty-six hundred inhabitants in Quitman County, one of the poorest counties in the United States. At the edge of cotton fields, he said, he had seen “hundreds of little black boys and girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear” and heard stories from jobless mothers and fathers about times when they could survive only if they would “go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something.”11

  In his travels to rally poor people to Washington, King barnstormed from one small airport to another in a chartered, twin-engine Cessna 40. King and a few aides then would rush to a nearby African American church where he would speak. Even with the benefit of a private plane, they sometimes arrived hours behind schedule.

  After Mississippi they moved on to Alabama and Georgia. He would talk to whatever crowd waited long enough to hear him. King would call on the people who turned out, as he did in Waycross, Georgia, on March 22, to join the “powerful and meaningful” Washington campaign that, he promised, would cause the “walls of injustice to come tumbling down.” His voice would resound with emotional fervor, attuned to the religious convictions of his listeners. In Waycross he hit that pious note, saying that poor people, as God’s children, were no less deserving than other Americans of jobs and income.12

  If it had not been for the quagmire of Memphis, King’s schedule would have had him presiding over a meeting of the national steering committee of the Poor People’s Campaign in Atlanta on April 1.13

  That meeting had been called off. Further, he would have been in Chicago on April 3, the day he was now flying to Tennessee instead, and in Detroit the next day. Now he would have to scrub travel to both cities. The detour to Memphis was bleeding time and energy that King and his staff had intended to devote to the antipoverty drive at a critical stage.

  The top echelon of his staff flying with him that morning from Atlanta to Memphis had major assignments as area managers of the Poor People’s Campaign. Abernathy had three cities under his watch, Washington, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey, Young had New York City and Philadelphia, and Cotton had North Carolina and Virginia.

  Other key aides—Jesse Jackson, James Bevel, James Orange, and Hosea Williams—were already in Memphis, having arrived earlier in the week. All would have to suspend their work on the antipoverty campaign. Williams had a particularly vital role as the national field director overseeing the entire campaign. King’s aides did not want to pause the antipoverty campaign and come to Memphis. They relented only at King’s insistence. Ordinarily they would have held workshops and planning sessions for many weeks, if not months, to pull off a protest of that magnitude. Preparing for the Birmingham campaign had consumed three months of planning and training. In Memphis they would have five days.

  King disregarded not just his aides’ advice but also the pleadings of Marian Logan, a trusted SCLC board member on whom he relied for counsel and emotional support. On the night of March 28, still reeling from the day’s riot, King had called Logan at her apartment in New York City. When she heard that he was stranded in Memphis, s
he winced. She told him bluntly, as she would recall, “You ought to get your ass out of Memphis.”

  King replied, “Darling, we can’t turn around now. We have to keep going.”14

  Chapter 3

  The Strike

  We have thousands and thousands of Negroes working on full-time jobs with part-time income.

  —MLK, speaking at an SCLC retreat in Atlanta, January 15, 1968

  THE STRIKE THAT BROUGHT King to Memphis in 1968 began on February 12. The date coincided with Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The timing was accidental. As the strike’s leaders initially conceived it, the walkout had nothing to do with race—no symbolic link to the Great Emancipator.

  The workers struck for the usual reasons: better wages and working conditions and union recognition. Yet what began purely as a labor dispute swiftly assumed the proportions of a highly charged racial confrontation, as labor historian Michael K. Honey explains in his definitive book about the Memphis strike.1 Just four days into the strike, the Memphis chapter of the NAACP thrust race to the front and center. At a news conference NAACP officials decried “racial discrimination” in the city’s treatment of the garbage workers.

  Within a few weeks, the men on strike were carrying signs reading, “I AM A MAN.” As a rallying cry, the slogan might have seemed oddly mild. Yet it evoked an anguished plea for an end to the era in which Southerners assumed the right to address adult black men as “boys” and lorded over them as if they had no more rights than boys.2 Taylor Rogers, who was in his tenth year as a garbage worker before going on strike in 1968, would put it years later: “We wanted some dignity. We wanted to be treated like men. We were tired of being treated like boys.”3

  The NAACP played no part in initiating the strike, only in backing it once it began. To the Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles, a Baptist minister and prominent member of the NAACP in Memphis, the strike came as a complete surprise. The garbage workers belonged to a world apart from the NAACP.

  They were not part of the city’s African American elite, the ministers, lawyers, and other professionals. The NAACP was in the hands of the elite. In the early 1960s, it turned to the federal judiciary for progress on civil rights. It brought lawsuits seeking court orders to desegregate schools, parks, and other public facilities. In some instances it engaged in sit-ins and picketing. But the NAACP leaders conducted their protests quietly, respectfully, collaboratively.

  To see a movie at a segregated Malco theater, Kyles, a film buff, would have had to climb a fire escape stairway and sit in the balcony section for African Americans (the “buzzard’s roost,” he called it). He refused. Instead he called M. A. Lightman, owner of the Malco. Kyles and Lightman devised a scheme to desegregate the theater quietly. Kyles and his wife slipped into the whites-only section for a midday showing of To Kill a Mockingbird. There were about a dozen whites in the theater. “I don’t think they even knew [the sit-in] was happening,” Kyles would recount. The Malco, bowing to the new reality, announced that the days of segregation in its movie theaters were over. As a token of his appreciation for how gracefully Kyles had desegregated his theater, Lightman presented him with a gift: a one-year pass to the Malco.4

  Kyles did not imagine the garbage workers as likely instigators of a civil rights protest. He doubted that they had the wherewithal to defy the city’s white establishment. They were the “lowest on the totem pole,” as Kyles put it.5 They inhabited a world of foul-smelling waste and low social status. They lacked education, money, and political power. They were ushers in Kyles’s church, not deacons.

  One leader of the garbage workers’ union was forty-six-year-old Joe Warren. At six foot one, broad-shouldered, a combat veteran of World War II, Warren was not a man to trifle with. He had grown up on a farm near the impoverished farming hamlet of Cordova, ten miles east of Memphis. The black farmers who populated the Cordova area hitched their hopes to the cotton crop. They were mostly sharecroppers who rented land on credit to grow cotton and borrowed from the landowner to buy supplies. They repaid their debt by committing to the landlord a share of their cotton sales. As the system played out, it was “arbitrary and highly susceptible to exploitation,” writes Eugene Dattel in his economic history of cotton and race.6 It was, in effect, a system of post-slavery peonage. It kept many of Warren’s neighbors in perpetual poverty.

  Warren’s father, McKinley Warren, was not a sharecropper. He owned a twenty-three-acre farm. But he, his wife (Estelle), and three children endured much the same hardscrabble conditions as their sharecropping neighbors.7 The Warrens lived in a two-room, log-and-plank house practically next to the tracks of the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad.

  By age ten Joe was driving mules to plow the fields and picking cotton under the broiling Tennessee sun. It was backbreaking work: bending over, plucking the fiber from its prickly, three-lobed bolls, tugging a long sack between rows, and tediously, interminably stuffing the cotton fluff into the sack. To earn more, Joe quit school in the eighth grade so that he could work longer hours in the fields.

  Weary of the farm life, venturing into an unknown and uncertain world, he fled to the city down the road but an eternity away: Memphis. Displaced by cotton-picking machines and other automated equipment in the 1930s and 1940s, many rural blacks like Warren were quitting farm life and heading to Memphis and cities beyond. Jobs were scarce in the cities for low-skilled farmhands, and racial barriers severely limited the prospects for decent employment. Warren, who was just sixteen, landed a laborer’s job at the Buckeye Cotton Oil Company.

  Though he was barely literate and had a criminal record—a juvenile conviction for stealing tires off a truck—the army drafted him for service during World War II. He saw fierce combat in Italy as a rifleman with the Ninety-Seventh Infantry. Except for having a front tooth knocked out during one firefight, he survived unscathed. “Thank God, I didn’t get killed,” he would say. He was honorably discharged in 1945 as a staff sergeant. In his separation papers the army recognized him for having “placed fire on the enemy, assisting in the capture of an enemy position. Fired rifle, threw grenades. Fired bazooka and A-30 caliber machine gun. Assisted in the capture of enemy positions and personnel.”

  He returned home to find the racial chasm in Memphis as wide as ever. “Couldn’t even talk to a white woman,” he would recall.8 He went to work as a custodian at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company plant. Laid off in 1962 with few options for employment, he took a job as a garbage-truck driver for the Memphis Department of Public Works.

  “Tub toters” was then a common name for garbagemen. It was a reference to the tin tubs that they would hoist on their shoulders, carry to backyards, fill with garbage, and lug to the trucks. The tubs leaked water, garbage, and maggots through holes in the bottom. As Taylor Rogers, who had been a tub toter, would say years later, “You didn’t have nowhere to wash your hands. You’d stand beside the truck and eat your lunch. It was just pure hell.”9

  To cover the prescribed routes, Warren and Rogers sometimes had to stay on the job past their forty-hour workweek. There was no pay for overtime work. No unemployment insurance. No disability benefits. There was an optional life insurance policy and a pension plan. But the workers’ share of the cost was such that almost no one signed up for either.10

  Pay was low. In 1968 the average was $1.80 an hour, fifteen cents above the minimum wage. Starting pay was $1.65, which an article on February 23 in the Commercial Appeal said roughly matched what other southern cities paid garbage workers. For those who were supporting a wife and several children, however, it was not a living wage.11 In his Memphis speech of March 18, King would drive the point home, saying that it was a travesty for full-time workers to receive part-time wages.12

  By and by, Warren was grumbling openly to his fellow workers about their working conditions and low pay. Warren found a ready ear in a co-worker, Thomas Oliver “T. O.” Jones. Like Warren, Jones was a World War II veteran—in his case, having served in the navy. At war’s
end, Jones found work in a unionized shipyard at Oakland, California. In 1958, he returned to his hometown of Memphis and took a job as a garbageman.13

  Mindful how unions could improve the lot of workers, Jones soon began organizing one to represent employees of the city’s Department of Public Works. He tapped Warren to help. Jones and Warren persuaded hundreds of their coworkers to join them. Identified by DPW management as a union firebrand, Jones was fired in 1963, but that did not stop his drive to establish a union. In 1964, he and Warren persuaded the garbage collectors to form Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees—AFSCME. Backed by the power of an emerging union, the workers won modest concessions. Wage increases of a few cents an hour were granted each year. Uniforms and foul-weather gear were provided. The tin tubs were phased out in favor of three-wheel pushcarts. A grievance procedure was instituted.14 The city adopted a civil service policy providing vacations and sick leave.15

  Unchanged was a deep-seated racial bias. The men who hauled the garbage were black. The supervisors were white. A black worker stayed on the payroll at the mercy of his white supervisors. Warren would recall: “The bosses would fire you if they wanted to fire you.”16

  For Warren and Jones, the key to the union’s survival was union recognition and a dues checkoff, whereby the city would deduct union dues from its members’ paychecks for transfer to the union treasury. Without the dues checkoff, a great majority of union members declined to pay the $4-a-month dues. If they did so, many of them feared, it would mark them as union activists and cost them their jobs.

  When Memphis businessman Henry Loeb announced that he would run for mayor in 1967, it seemed to present the union with an opportunity. On July 4, 1967, Warren called on Loeb at his stately house on Colonial Drive. He had a proposition: if Loeb would agree to recognize the union and allow a dues checkoff, the union would endorse him for mayor. Years later, Warren would remember the mayor’s curt reply: “There has never been a public employees’ union in this city, and there never will be.”17