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Prologue: The Fuse

On 1 February 1968 Echol Cole and Robert Walker worked the early morning hours collecting the refuse of Memphis, TN residents.*  As sanitation employees, their pay wasn’t much, less than two dollars per hour.**  Because they received hourly wages, the city deemed them ineligible for Worker’s Compensation.  If they worked efficiently and finished their work early, supervisors would simply send them home and dock their pay.  More often, however, they had to work overtime hours for which they received no money at all, thus giving the city untold man-hours of free services.  Some of these workers had to rely on second jobs to pay their bills and support their families.  Others fell to the mercy of public assistance. 

Other municipal employees had either salaries or at least higher hourly wages.  They had benefits too.  The bulk of these were Euro-American.  The sanitation workers, however, were almost exclusively African American, and therein lay one of the uglier tensions between the garbagemen and the city.  Despite the recently passed Civil Rights Act of 1964, Mayor Henry Loeb, a staunch segregationist, ran his 1967 campaign dog-whistling that he would undermine the newly minted federal laws, and restore the pecking order many white Memphis residents had previously taken for granted. 

Naturally, most black Memphis residents voted against him–not that it did them any good.

Loeb showed bitter animosity to black labor organization, and refused to grant any concessions regarding pay and working conditions.  Instead of negotiating with the sanitation workers directly, he ordered a local labor leader, T.O. Jones, to deal exclusively with Public Works Commissioner Charles Blackburn, who claimed he had no authority to change city policy.***   Moreover, Loeb made clear that he would not hesitate to use police actions to break up any picketing or protests. 

So people like Cole and Walker had little choice but to acquiesce to the situation and make do the best they could.  On the one hand this was a labor issue, pure and simple.  But intertwined with it was the ghost of past racial laws that regarded people like them as something less than human, or at best second-class citizens.  They were forbidden, for example to take bathroom breaks.  In addition to the low pay, the job was filthy, in a literal sense.  And the city made no provision for uniforms (that came out of their pockets), or the repair and cleaning of said uniforms (again, that came out of their pocket).  What’s worse, they were all answerable to a white supervisory staff, who often treated them with contempt, derision or condescension.  And if it rained, the city prohibited them from seeking shelter in a public place.  In the case of inclement weather, the city allowed them to take shelter in the back of the truck, which meant they could sit with the garbage.

So, on 1 February 1968, during a driving rainstorm, Cole and Walker took refuge in the back of their truck.  Unfortunately, these trucks received little mechanical maintenance and often malfunctioned.  One could guess that it would be only a matter of time when a switch shorted or some other mishap would cause the trash compactor to activate unexpectedly.  And that’s what happened to Cole and Walker.  The compactor suddenly, and without warning, went into action, mangling the both of them into unrecognizable forms.**** 

The deaths of Cole and Walker served as the fuse to an explosion a long time coming.  Mayor Loeb attempted to stifle the eruption by authorizing a payment of one month’s salary and funeral expenses to each of their estates.  But this half-assed attempt at mollification only infuriated other workers and the local African American community that supported them, thus resulting not only strikes, but on 23 February 1968 full scale political demonstrations.  Public Director of Fire and Safety Frank Holloman, formerly a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI, made the decision not to interfere with the demonstrations, so long as they remained peaceful, despite Loeb’s earlier promise to send in police to quash any such activity.

Figure 1.  Memphis sanitation worker's strike, Spring 1968 



The demonstrators found support in groups of young political activists, among them the Black Organizing Project (BOP) and a collective know locally as the Invaders.  In hindsight, one can fairly characterize some of the supporting actions of these groups, particularly the latter, as risky or perhaps even controversial.  So it helped that an organization made of older, more experienced civil rights leaders stepped in to expand public awareness regarding the plight of Memphis sanitation workers.

The Community on the Move for Equality (COME) sought national and international publicity for the strike and the racial issues surrounding it by getting some of the civil rights movement’s big names to participate in a massive demonstration, a peaceful march.  They planned it for 14 March, with NAACP President Roy Wilkins and noted civil-rights warrior Bayard Rustin agreeing to headline the event.  But one of the COME members, Rev. James Lawson, thought they might have a chance to bring in the biggest name of all, Rustin’s star protege and Nobel Laureate Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


__________________________

*Some sources refer to the former as Echole Cole.

**That’s approximately $12.00 per hour in 2017 money.

***Jones and thrity-three other sanitation workers were fired in 1963 after attending a meeting of the Teamsters Union.  The workers successfully gained membership in the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1733 the following year. 

****Most attribute Cole and Walker’s death to an accident caused by the reckless indifference of a local department with no regard for black employees.  We’ll later hear from an attorney whose informants gave him evidence that Cole and Walker were actually targeted for murder



This post first appeared on The X Spot, please read the originial post: here

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Prologue: The Fuse

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