MLK, the Black Sanitation Workers Struggle in Memphis, and the Ongoing Struggle

Martin Luther King with Memphis sanitation workers' leaders who fought for the right to organize AFSCME Local 1733Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Most people don't know much about the context - what projects was King working on at the time, and why was King in Memphis? It is important to tell this story, to understand what King was doing and talking about in the last couple years of his life to get a better understanding of the increasing threat he posed to the system and why he was assassinated.

1967 and 1968 were years of incredible upheaval around the world. Liberation movements in the Third World and radical and revolutionary movements in the First World had a tremendous upsurge. Within the U.S., the non-violent ideology of the main civil rights organizations of the 50s and early 60s was giving way to new conceptions of Black power and Black Liberation. Malcolm X put the struggle of Black people in the U.S. in a global context before he was assassinated in 1965 -- making links with the revolutionary national liberation movements rocking Asia, Africa and Latin America at the time. The Black Panther Party was formed in 1966 and spread around the country in 67-68 as an explicitly revolutionary and socialist Black organization. Local rebellions in Black urban neighborhoods began in these years, which then spread to the entire country and became massive in the days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. The anti-war movement in the U.S. was becoming a mass phenomenon, and a growing anti-imperialist section of the movement began to actively support the revolutionaries in Vietnam.

It was in this context that we have to consider Martin Luther King's ideas and actions in 1967-68. He was being pushed to the left by the surging revolutionary movements around the world, and the rising revolutionary sentiment and organization in the Black community.

At this time King began to speak out forcefully against the Vietnam War, against the counsel of more conservative leaders in the civil rights movement who until then had totally refused to link the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement. The best testament to King's increasing outspokenness on Vietnam is the powerful Beyond Vietnam speech from April 4, 1967. You can read and listen to the speech here.

At this time he began to speak of the need for a radical revolution of values in America. He spoke of the U.S. government as the number one purveyor of violence in the world, calling out their hypocricy in demanding that the Black freedom movement be non-violent, at the same time that the U.S. was carrying out frightful and unprecedented levels of violence and destruction against the people of Vietnam. In the speech King says one of the reasons he is speaking out against the Vietnam war was precisely because of this contradiction:

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

In the following excerpt from the Beyond Vietnam speech King speaks at his most powerful, as a revolutionary:

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

King began to speak of these three fundamental things that must be overcome in America - the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism in order "to get on the right side of the world revolution." That is not the Martin Luther King that kids are taught about in U.S. schools!

Memphis

In 1968 King was organizing a Poor People's Campaign to bring thousands of poor people to Washington D.C. to set up an encampment there to demand an end to poverty in the U.S. While organizing for the Poor People's march on Washington, King found out about a struggle of some Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

For King this was a crucial struggle to support - it combined the issues of poor Black working people fighting for economic justice and fighting against a racist power structure that kept Black people from advancing out of poverty. And it was in the Deep South. King's advisors told him not to go to Memphis becuase they were deep in the process of organzing for the Poor People's march on Washington and they saw this as a distraction from that. But King insisted on going to Memphis - he saw the struggle there as being exactly what the Poor Peole's Campaign was about, and thought that the struggle of Black sanitation workers in Memphis needed to be supported and could help build for the march on Washington.

So King went to Memphis to support the Black sanitation workers who had been involved in a long campaign to try to win basic equality and decent conditions in their workplace. They were organizing with AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), a union that represents mostly public sector workers. The reactionary Memphis establishment was stonewalling the Black workers in the manner that was very familiar in the Deep South in the 50s and 60s.

At the River I StandThere is an excellent documentary film, At the River I Stand, which chronicles the Memphis sanitation workers' struggle. It covers the conditions of the sanitation workers and their decision to finally stand up and fight against huge odds; the absolute stonewalling of the white racist power structure against any demands of the Black workers; the mobilization of the entire Black community in support of the workers; the role of AFSCME; the massive struggle that ensued; the arrival of King and the growing militance of Black youth in Memphis who didn't want to follow King's non-violent tactics and pushed for more militancy; the assassination of King; and then the subsequent victory of the sanitiation workers when the white racist power structure finally caved and granted recognition to the union and ceded to the workers' demands in the aftermath of King's assassination and massive rebellions in the entire country. It is quite an incredible story and I encourage people to seek out and watch the movie. There are many valuable lessons here for those interested in the fight against white supremacist capitalism.

Taylor Rogers, a participant in the Memphis sanitation workers' struggleAFSCME recently reprinted an interesting participant's account by Taylor Rogers, one of the Black sanitation workers in Memphis. Rogers became the president of the Memphis sanitation workers' AFSCME Local 1733 after they won the struggle.

Here are some quotes from Rogers' account:

I went to work on a truck in 1958, carrying a big tub into backyards and loading up. We had no union, no vacation, no benefits, no pensions, no overtime. The pay was 94 cents an hour. We had to do whatever they told us to do, and if you were hurt on the job, you got nothing. In about 1964 we started trying to organize. We formed AFSCME Local 1733, but they wouldn't recognize us. We'd hold meetings, and if the boss found out about it you got fired. One rainy day the boss sent us home without pay while the white workers got paid. Then two of the guys were killed in a compactor and their families got nothing. We said, 'This is enough,' and we voted to strike. We didn't only want decent pay and working conditions. We wanted dignity -- not to be treated like second-class citizens. But the mayor [Henry Loeb] told us the strike was illegal.

Nobody seemed to realize how bad things were [for blacks in Memphis] but us. We took a stand. Someone has to take a stand. We had to be united to get where we wanted to go. The union helped us do that.

You can read more in the article on the AFSCME website.

The Struggle Continues...

Raleigh sanitation workersBlack workers in the South still face institutionalized racism and poverty and still continue to fight back. Over the past year Black sanitation workers in Raleigh, North Carolina have been fighting and winning victories in their struggle for livable working conditions and union recognition in the right-to-work-for-less South, as this Fight Back article reports, and as union and Black community leader Saladin Muhammad talks about in this interview. In struggles such as this, and such as the Goodyear workers in Alabama, the fight of Black people for basic survival and democratic rights, the fight against poverty, and the fight of the multinational working class can come together in the South to show the way forward for fundamental change in the U.S. In those struggles the revolutionary potential of King's politics in his last years continues on.

For further reading on the progressive legacy of Martin Luther King, I recommend these three articles from Fight Back Newspaper:

Standing Up For Freedom, Peace and Justice: Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Naomi Nakamura

MLK: Economic Justice for African Americans by Adam Price

A Time to Break Silence: Dr. King and the Struggle for Peace by Naomi Nakamura

This post is part of Pottawatomie Creek blog's call to blog against white supremacy in honor of Martin Luther King Day 2007.