MLK assassination stained Memphis, limited city's prosperity

Ex-worker recalls sanitation strike that drew King to city

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Joe Warren dropped his head to his hands and sobbed as he remembered back 40 years to the bitter garbage workers strike that drew Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis — and to his death.

Warren, 86, was one of the 1,300 black sanitation workers who walked off the job in 1968 with a strike that tore at the foundation of the city's white-only rule.

"They talked to you like you were a dog, and they worked you like a dog," he said, his shoulders trembling. "But I couldn't find a job nowhere else."

The 65-day strike for the right to unionize ended with a victory for the workers. But King's assassination stained this Southern city for years, limiting its prosperity and hurting its reputation worldwide.

"It took a decade of growth out of the Memphis regional economy," said David Ciscel, a University of Memphis economist. "It was a time of fairly rapid growth in the South, and it was a time when Atlanta and Nashville kind of left us behind ... People just didn't want to associate with us."

The city's fortunes eventually improved, thanks largely to a young cargo airline named Federal Express that in the early 1980s showed that Memphis could still be a good place to do business. The airline grew into today's FedEx Corp.

"It rescued Memphis," Ciscel said.

The sanitation strike and King's assassination made clear to blacks and whites alike that "the old plantation mentality had to be dumped," said Michael Honey, author of "Going Down Jericho Road," a history of the Memphis strike and King's struggle for economic justice for the poor.

In the 1960s, close to 60 percent of black families in Memphis lived in poverty, Honey said, and few jobs other than manual labor were open to blacks.

Today the city has a poverty rate of nearly 24 percent overall, almost twice the national figure, and 30 percent among black residents.

But the good jobs, in government and the private sector, are no longer reserved for whites. Memphis, which was 40 percent black in the 1960s, is now more than 60 percent black. It has had a black mayor since 1991.

The strike began in February 1968 after two sanitation workers were crushed by a trash compactor when they climbed in a garbage truck to get out of the rain.

The accident was blamed on faulty equipment, but it inflamed tensions that had festered for years over low wages, poor working conditions and racist treatment of black workers by white superiors.

The garbage workers had to wrestle with tubs and cans of all shapes and sizes, some so heavy it took two or three men to lift them. In the sweltering Memphis summers, the containers were prime breeding grounds for maggots that tumbled onto the workers.

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