There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  In this same period King had been drawn to a labor dispute with civil rights overtones in Memphis. On February 12 sanitation workers of Memphis Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) staged a wildcat strike as the result of mounting grievances, including a recent accident in which two workers had been crushed to death by defective machinery. The local had thirteen hundred members, all but five of whom were black, and had long endured pay and promotion disparities and other slights, even as the city for five years had staved off the union’s demand for recognition. “The mayor of that city [Henry Loeb], who was living in the eighteenth century,” explained Walter Reuther, “was arguing … that it should take a worker five years to get the going rate of $1.80 an hour because, he said, it takes five years to learn the skill to empty a garbage can.”58 The men were so poorly compensated, with no overtime or vacation pay, many were forced to rely on welfare and food stamps.

  The city, eager to get the workers back on the job, agreed to some of the local’s demands, including a more just system of promotion, improved health and retirement benefits, and a streamlined grievance procedure. But it shunned union recognition and a pay hike, and Mayor Loeb, already unpopular with Memphis’s substantial black community, refused to negotiate further until the men returned to their jobs; he threatened to fire any who stayed away. An injunction the city had obtained against a sanitation strike in 1966 was still in effect, and could be wielded against the local.

  Work stoppages by public employees anywhere tend to rapidly become politicized because the withdrawal of their labor involves a direct threat to residents, businesses, and municipal treasuries.59 Memphis was no exception. The strike had quickly awakened long-simmering tensions in the racially polarized city, yet the sanitation workers were energized by the news that their counterparts, New York City’s sanitation crews, had recently won concessions as the result of a walkout. While the Memphis NAACP and several black ministers, including civil rights veteran James Lawson, a former King lieutenant, made efforts along with some white labor leaders to negotiate further with city officials, the mayor was adamant that Memphis would not sign a contract with a municipal workers’ union. Loeb, whom Newsweek described as “a native Memphian who got his wealth from his family’s laundry business and his segregationist politics from the white plantation paternalism that still permeates Memphis at every level,” was (like many other white Southern politicians of his generation) inclined to believe he understood black people and had their best interests at heart, even though he had received only 2 percent of their votes. In his mind he was doing them a service by keeping a union from meddling in the relationship the workers enjoyed with their city.60

  When Loeb authorized the hiring of scabs to man the garbage trucks with police officers riding shotgun, tensions mounted, exacerbated by both local newspapers; one, the Commercial Appeal, had compared the strikers to the Vietcong.61 The union, defying a new court injunction against picketing and demonstrating, conducted protests along Main Street, the workers and their supporters carrying signs that read I AM A MAN, clearly articulating the strike’s larger meaning as a demand for dignity. Simultaneously the black community launched a boycott of downtown white businesses. There were a number of incidents: white officers sprayed Mace on black youths who pounded their fists on a passing squad car; police cleared people from the streets and made arrests without cause; even Local 1733’s president, T. O. Jones, was taken into custody, accused of disorderly conduct and inciting to riot.

  After a boisterous crowd of nine thousand filled a church on March 14 to hear visiting civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and Roy Wilkins voice their support for the strike, local ministers and the AFSCME began to perceive in the standoff with Mayor Loeb the possibility of a major civil rights/labor protest. As Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor had shown the world in 1963 during the SCLC’s campaign in that city, successful civil rights campaigns often thrived on a prickly antagonist, which the difficult Mayor Loeb promised to be. Memphis, in the context of civil rights activism, had been relatively quiet, but Lawson and the others concluded that feelings about the sanitation strike were so strong, Martin Luther King Jr. might inspire and lead a meaningful campaign in the city. After communications with King and his aides, a nonviolent march to be led by King was scheduled for Thursday, March 28. While engagement in the Memphis strike would be a distraction from King’s planning for Washington, surely the temptation was great to use the struggle in Memphis for workers’ rights as an example of the movement’s new direction.

  One precarious difference between King’s entry into the Memphis strike and the Southern civil rights campaigns he and his core SCLC staff had personally led was that here King was flying somewhat blind, entering into a local struggle whose outlines were familiar but whose specifics he and his closest aides had not had the opportunity to fully examine. Some information not shared with King and his entourage was that a group of local black teenagers calling themselves the Invaders rejected nonviolence, and that Lawson and other leaders had not adequately engaged with them or heard them out.

  King’s lack of intelligence on what was transpiring in Memphis was compounded on the day of the march itself, when his plane was delayed and he arrived at the Clayborn Temple AME Church, where six thousand marchers awaited him, two hours late. Neither he nor his aides were told that earlier that morning black high school students trying to leave school to join the march had clashed with police, hurling rocks and empty soda bottles. Finally under way along Beale Street, the procession with King at its head had traversed only three blocks when young marchers at the rear began taunting cops and smashing shop windows. Police, edgy from the earlier battle at the high school, surged into the crowd, flailing with riot sticks and eventually deploying both Mace and tear gas. At the sound of the disruption the entire march stopped, then splintered, as adult participants dropped their placards and retreated in confusion to their homes or back to the Clayborn Temple. King was quickly hustled into a commandeered car and driven away.

  With the march in disarray, street fighting escalated. Amid reports of looting, a black teenager, sixteen-year-old Larry Payne, was shot and killed by police who said he’d attacked them with a butcher knife. By the time order was restored, fifty people required medical attention and more than a hundred had been arrested. The local press denounced King and declared the chaos he’d brought to Memphis a “riot,” while Mayor Loeb called out four thousand National Guardsmen.

  The city’s response was an overreaction, no doubt based on the prevalent anxiety regarding urban racial violence. Loeb, it was reported, had called for the militia only minutes after the first window was broken, and some of the soldiers came equipped with rifles fitted with telescopic sights in order to combat the fictional threat of “Negro snipers.”62 The looting, it turned out, had been rather minimal, and some of the reports of fires lit by arsonists were found to have been people burning their own garbage because the city was no longer picking it up. The rapid deterioration of a peaceful march led by Dr. King into street violence, however, was nonetheless an embarrassment; it sent the worst possible message about the wisdom of conflating civil rights movement tactics with a labor conflict, and King was personally singled out for criticism for fleeing the scene, rather than doing something to halt the rioting. “The whole incident underscores the general national edginess,” averred the New York Times, reminding King that Gandhi had seen fit to suspend his followers’ street protests when violence had occurred, and that King would do well to “appreciate the consequences for the civil rights movement and the nation of an April explosion in Washington.”63

  King was distraught over the death of Larry Payne, and angered by his staff’s failure to gather adequate intelligence about the Memphis strike. He was also discomfited by the murmurings from old allies like the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, who suggested the Poor People’s Campaign be reconsidered since it appeared King no longer possessed the abi
lity to manage large-scale demonstrations. Some Southern members of Congress were already recommending that King’s protestors be banned from entering Washington altogether. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia thought a court order should be obtained for that purpose. “If this self-seeking rabble-rouser is allowed to go through with his plans here,” warned Byrd, “Washington may well be treated to the same kind of violence, destruction, looting and bloodshed” that had occurred in Memphis. Congress already had a bill under consideration that would make it a crime to cross state lines to take part in urban violence—a measure aimed at militants and perhaps broad enough to include the leaders of the SCLC.64

  To King, however, the plight of the black sanitation workers in Memphis illustrated precisely how the issues of economics and race intertwined, and he announced that another march would be held in Memphis, this time organized by his own staff. He sought out and met with the representatives of the teenage Invaders, and was upset when he learned what Lawson and others had largely kept from him: that the youth had felt excluded from the earlier community protests and were irritated that their input had been spurned. King recognized that it was important to take the young men seriously. Rather than scold them, he listened to their complaints and seemed to succeed, through the force of his celebrity, at convincing them to mend their ways for the rescheduled march, which was to take place on Friday, April 5. The city had obtained a federal court injunction against the event, which, despite the pleading of the U.S. attorney and city officials, King insisted he would defy. However, he agreed to postpone the protest until Monday, April 8, in order to allow national labor delegations time to make it to town to participate.

  The night of Wednesday, April 3, Memphis was deluged by heavy rains, and King—assuming the weather would diminish attendance at a scheduled church rally for the striking sanitation workers—sent his chief lieutenant, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, to speak in his stead. Soon Abernathy was on the phone to King’s room at the Lorraine Motel to report that the turnout at the church was both sizable and spirited, despite the bad weather, and that his presence was earnestly desired. Abernathy no doubt thought it would be beneficial for King, who was still upset by recent events, to bask in the adulation of a sympathetic audience in the familiar setting of a black church. When King arrived at the gathering he went to the pulpit and, seemingly wanting to clear his troubled mind, launched into a prophetic rumination. “Well, I don’t know what will happen now,” he told the expectant audience,

  But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”65

  If Abernathy believed the outing would be therapeutic for King, he was right: the emotional words King had spoken and the profuse adulation of his listeners seemed to restore the leader’s equilibrium, granting a momentary tranquillity after all the tension of the past several days. By the following evening, Thursday, April 4, even the skies above Memphis had cleared, and as day turned to dusk he and his aides dressed for dinner at the home of a local supporter. At a few minutes before six, from a perch across the street, assassin James Earl Ray looked up from his rifle to see a man wearing a crisp black suit, white shirt, and tie emerge from a second-floor room and come to stand alone by the railing of the motel balcony. “If you are cut down in a movement that is designed to save the soul of a nation,” King had said not long before, “then no other death could be more redemptive.”66

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  AS THE DIVERGENT REACTION within the labor movement to the war in Vietnam became harder to ignore, some sort of split began to seem inevitable. One of the most fragile potential breaking points was the Meany-Reuther partnership at the helm of the AFL-CIO. Their relationship had never been rock solid. Reuther in the mid-1950s had denounced the Lovestonian cold war meddling that Meany fathered, and while relations improved when the two leaders joined to respond to the McClellan Committee’s indictment of labor, that thaw ended in 1963 when Meany refused AFL-CIO endorsement of the March on Washington, which Reuther and the UAW wholeheartedly supported. Most recently Reuther had donated $50,000 from the UAW to the Memphis sanitation strike, only to then be informed that Southern UAW members had refused to lower flags to half-mast after King’s murder on April 4. Reuther was truly a man in the middle—unable to separate himself from the outdated leadership cadre around Meany, irritated by reactionary members of his own union, and getting little if any sympathy from UAW doves who were irked by his hesitation to criticize the war.

  Reuther characteristically responded to his dilemma by making forward-looking plans. He launched an effort to build education centers aimed at reviving labor’s conscience and developing young talent in the labor field, the facilities also being available as recreational retreats for union members and their families. He sought to reestablish the movement’s ties to liberals and intellectuals. He called for more direct aid to farmworkers and intensified efforts to organize the nation’s public service employees, and spoke of finding ways for the UAW to play a larger role in combating racism. With great prescience he warned of the need to develop common bargaining goals for autoworkers in all auto-producing nations as a means of counteracting global wage competition, and recommended the country turn its attention to repairing bridges, roads, and other infrastructures.

  He did not believe the AFL-CIO was up to these challenges. “As the parent body of the American labor movement, [it] suffers from a sense of complacency and adherence to the status quo, and is not fulfilling the basic aims and purposes which prompted the merger of the AFL and CIO” in the first place, Reuther remarked in December 1967. “[It] lacks the social vision, the dynamic thrust, the crusading spirit that should characterize the progressive, modern labor movement which it can and must be if it is to be equal to the new challenges and the opportunities of our twentieth century technological society.”67 The AFL-CIO, he said, had come to have “little to do with America today. It has much to do with yesterday.”68

  Meany brushed off Reuther’s criticism. “We resent being called tottering old men who do not know what we are doing!” he argued, but he consented to a special meeting Reuther requested to describe the UAW’s plans and air the automakers’ frustrations with the federation. However, when Meany insisted the meeting be held with the understanding that the UAW would accept its conclusions no matter what, Reuther replied that his organization was not about to “give anybody a loyalty oath,” and the gathering was canceled.69 In early 1968 the UAW began withholding its AFL-CIO dues of $90,000 per month, and in May of that year, following an exchange of threats and warnings between the two leaders, the UAW was dropped from the AFL-CIO for nonpayment of dues. On July 1, 1968, it announced its formal separation.70

  The departure of the UAW from the nation’s mainstream labor coalition was only one more item of adverse news in what had become a troubling, dismal season. After the funeral for Martin Luther King Jr., the SCLC, groping its way forward without its leader, had gone through with the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, part sheer determination, part memorial for King; although violence was averted, the crusade was halfhearted and its results negligible. Once the participants departed Washington and the campaign’s tent city was razed by the government, it was almost as if it had never happened. In the meantime the promising Bobby Kennedy, his eloquence and antiwar position carrying him toward the Democratic nomination for president, was assassinated in Los Angeles in early June, moments after being declared the winner of the California primary.

  Reuther had known and admired both King and Kennedy. With President Johns
on having abdicated, Reuther now turned his efforts toward helping Vice President Humphrey’s candidacy. But nothing seemed to work as it once had for the Democrats. The party’s convention in Chicago self-destructed, as the forces that had been gnawing at American society erupted in full view of the world. Rallies by antiwar protestors brought fierce assaults from Mayor Richard Daley’s police, the chaos—as well as the tear gas—spilling into the convention itself as Daley’s minions intimidated delegates, reporters, and supporters of the remaining antiwar candidate, Eugene McCarthy. Humphrey appeared small and ineffectual against the backdrop of lawlessness as he tried to bridge the antiwar cause and yet remain loyal to the Johnson administration’s policies; only in the convention’s last hours did he offer to halt the U.S. bombing of Vietnam if elected. With the Democrats in turmoil, Richard Nixon, the former vice president who had narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and appeared to have exited politics after losing a bid to become governor of California, staged an impressive comeback, winning the 1968 election by vowing to bring peace with honor to the conflict in Vietnam and to stand for law and order at home.