“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
On this Martin Luther King Day, we at E&B are remembering the sacrifices that Martin Luther King and his contemporaries made for civil rights and labor rights. It is worthwhile to remember the reason behind why Martin Luther King traveled to Memphis in April 1968 and ultimately lost his life. So often the fight for civil rights played out in the arena of labor disputes. King traveled to Memphis in connection with a labor dispute involving the city sanitation workers.
The Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike began on February 11, 1968. The striking workers (all of whom were black) were fighting desperately for workplace safety, citing years of dangerous working conditions and the recent on-the-job death of two of their coworkers. At that time the City of Memphis had a rule that black workers could not seek shelter from inclement weather in a residential area. The City also did not pay black city workers who lost work as the result of inclement weather (although white workers were paid when they lost work due to inclement weather). Earlier in 1968 some of the city sanitation workers were caught in a torrential downpour. One sanitation truck stopped to wait out the storm, and some of the employees got into the cab. Not everyone could get into the cab, so two workers had to sit in the back of the vehicle to get out of the downpour. The two black men, ages 36 and 29, were crushed to death when a “mechanical malfunction” unexpectedly caused the trash compactor to activate.
Despite the fact that the two men died in the course of their employment, the two men’s families received no workers’ compensation benefits, no pension benefits, no payout of any insurance; in short the families of these two men received nothing for their terrible loss.
King first visited Memphis to show his support for the Sanitation Workers Strike on March 18, 1968. On March 18th King spoke to a group of labor and civil rights activists. King encouraged the group to support the sanitation strike by undertaking a citywide work stoppage. However after King departed the situation deteriorated and local leaders pleaded with King to return to Memphis. Despite the fact that King had already intended to pursue activities in another part of the country, King agreed to return to Memphis. On April 3, 1968, King returned to Memphis to support the striking workers. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
The assassination caused a series of city-wide protests to carry on the fight that King had helped to lead. On April 16, 1968, negotiators reached a settlement of the strike. The settlement allowed the City Council to recognize the Union representing the City sanitation workers, guaranteed an increased wage, allowed the workers to return to work contingent on the City following through on its promises.
Martin Luther King understood all too well the intimate connection between the struggle for civil rights and the fight for worker justice. In the last speech King ever gave on the evening of April 3, 1968, he said:
Memphis Negroes are almost entirely a working people. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs—decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.
Although we honor Martin Luther King on the anniversary of his birth for his commitment to civil rights, it is worth remembering that Martin Luther King gave his life in the fight for worker justice.
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