Marching to the Mountaintop: How Poverty, Labor Fights and Civil Rights Set the Stage for Martin Luther King Jr's Final Hours. Ann Bausum

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      Holes peppered the corroded bottoms of many city-supplied washtubs, so garbage slop dripped onto the bodies and clothes of sanitation workers as they toiled. Tubs rested unused (above) during the 1968 strike. The Memphis action began just as a nine-day garbage strike ended in New York City (above, sweeping up some accumulated trash).

      Tell the men to go back to work, Ciampa told Memphis labor leader Bill Ross by telephone. Ross refused, explaining that he had never seen such a determined group of men. “I said, buddy, I’m the only one white man in this building with 1,300 black souls out there. I’m not about to go out there and tell those people to go back to work. Now if you want to tell them to go back to work, you come down here and you do it yourself.”

      Almost immediately the AFSCME field director flew to Memphis. By Monday night, three other AFSCME staffers had arrived, including Bill Lucy, a black Memphis native pulled from an assignment in Michigan. After meeting on Tuesday with Mayor Henry Loeb and with a room full of striking workers, Ciampa realized that nobody, not even T. O. Jones, could have stopped the strike. Jones “had to run to stay out front,” Ciampa would later say.

      Ciampa could find no common ground with the mayor. Loeb insisted that negotiations take place in front of news reporters, a tough environment for reaching the compromises necessary for strike settlements. Ciampa sized up Loeb as insincere, close-minded, and happy to make comments that played well to his white citizen base while avoiding serious negotiation. Meanwhile, Ciampa, a tough-talking negotiator with an Italian-American accent, struck Loeb as rude and intrusive, and Ciampa’s assertive northeastern style grated against other whites, too. After Ciampa directed a few choice comments at the mayor—“Oh, put your halo in your pocket and let’s get realistic”; “Because you are mayor of Memphis it doesn’t make you God”; and “Keep your big mouth shut!”—orange bumper stickers reading “Ciampa Go Home” appeared all over Memphis. Within days AFSCME international director Jerry Wurf would decide to take personal charge of the negotiations, leaving Ciampa to coordinate strategy regarding the workers.

      Traditionally, striking workers would set up picket lines and march with protest signs at their places of work. Replacement laborers, known as scab workers, would have to “cross the picket lines” and face verbal harassment by strikers in order to get to work. But Ciampa’s team and local union leaders worried that this aggressive approach might backfire in the racially charged South. They didn’t want to give members of the city’s almost entirely white police force an excuse to attack black strikers. Instead, strike organizers turned to tried-and-true forms of nonviolent civil disobedience: mass meetings, peaceful marches, boycotts, and so on. Such strategies had worked in past labor fights and were central to the ongoing civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

      “WE’VE got to stay together in the union to win the victory. Strength is in numbers. We must stay together for however long is necessary—a day, a week, a month.”

      P. J. Ciampa, AFSCME field director, addressing workers on February 13, 1968

      The first mass march occurred the afternoon of Tuesday, February 13, day two of the strike. T. O. Jones and Bill Lucy led a formation of more than 800 workers, walking in rows of four or five men, from their union meeting place in north Memphis to downtown. They clapped, cheered, and sang freedom songs as they marched a distance of about five miles to city hall. “The men are here,” Lucy told the mayor. “You said, ‘Any men you want to bring down to talk to me, I’ll talk to them.’ Here they are.” At first Loeb misunderstood the size of Lucy’s group and asked him to escort the men into the mayor’s office. Soon he corrected himself and met workers in a large assembly hall.

      Loeb’s so-called plantation-mentality approach backfired when he spoke to the workers as if they were children—humoring, scolding, and pressuring them to return to work. To the mayor’s shock, the men laughed at him.

      Strike organizers credited Henry Loeb (above, at desk, during early negotiations) with becoming their best ally because his attitudes and behavior united blacks (below, marching on February 23) in their opposition to the city.

       They clapped, cheered, and sang freedom songs as they marched a distance of about five miles to city hall. “The men are here,” Lucy told the mayor. “You said, ‘Any men you want to bring down to talk to me, I’ll talk to them.’ Here they are.”

      When Loeb expressed his empathy for them by using the expression, “I’d give you the shirt off my back,” one of the men called in reply, “Just give me a decent salary, and I’ll buy my own.” The workers’ cheekiness and disrespect infuriated the mayor. Loeb vowed to get the garbage collected with or without the men’s help. “Bet on it!” he declared as he stormed out of the meeting.

      Loeb was a well-educated business-owner-turned-politician. Three generations of his family had exploited black workers and amassed a fortune in the family laundry business. His father had prevented black washerwomen from organizing a union or striking for better pay by filling their jobs from the ranks of the unemployed. Employees put up with miserable wages because some job was better than no job. When Henry Loeb became public works director in the СКАЧАТЬ