![]() The great civil rights leader was besieged from all directions that season. It is a story about how a demand for higher wages and better working conditions soon turned into a demand for something more.Īnd it is a story about Martin Luther King's last campaign - the one that took his life, 40 years ago this Friday. This is a story about the Memphis sanitation workers' strike of 1968, how black men who were, in their words, treated like "beasts," like "animals," like the garbage they collected, decided enough, no more. They say, 'You stink.' Most of the time, I'd get way in the back. "I come home on the bus," says Elmore Nickelberry, 76, who, like Ueal, is still working, " couldn't sit next to me. Sometimes, you find 'em in your collar," says Ozell Ueal, 68. "I have got maggots out of my head, what done fell in there. Or about how it was when the metal tubs you toted on your head rusted through and the garbage leaked. ![]() Or about white bosses who carried guns and called you "boy" and worked you 10, 12, 14 hours a day but only paid you for eight, at as little as $1.27 an hour. ![]() So if you ask them what it was like, being a black man and a sanitation worker in this city in the 1950s and '60s, they will say simply that it was "tough" or it was "bad."Īnd it will take some pushing for them to tell how you had to root through people's backyards, collecting their tree limbs and dead cats and chicken bones, because there was no such thing as a garbage can placed out by the curb. ![]() Share your thoughts on this article and see what other readers are saying. ![]()
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