Civil Rights Events

MLK and RFK -- Early 1968

… King saw, at least as early as the 1963 March on Washington, that the movement needed to expand beyond anti-discrimination and into areas like economic equality. That tied into his anger over Vietnam and the wasted resources he said would be of better use at home fighting poverty.

“He was trying to regain something. He was deeply concerned about the direction of the country and his movement,” said Joseph Rosenbloom, in his book, Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours. “He was trying to revitalize the movement. He thought the war was a huge mistake and was draining resources from far more important causes. He thought that the most critical issue facing the country was poverty.

The Vietnam speech and King’s efforts to address poverty was a stark shift in his thinking and marked a sharp contrast to the optimism of the “I Have a Dream” speech just four years earlier.

“He was trying to recruit thousands of poor people and convince them to come to Washington, possibly for months, to engage in a series of protests demanding a legislative response to the problems of poverty,” Rosenbloom said. “They would need to be brought to Washington. Housed in Washington. fed and organized. That would have to go on in a controlled fashion for an unpredictable long time. All that was an enormous task.”

About 60 people gathered in the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church in January 1968 for a party that would celebrate King’s last birthday. He would turn 39….

If the birthday party served as a reprieve, it was only briefly.

King immediately got back to work planning the Poor People’s Campaign while fighting with his own doubts.

“Over the last three months, Doc is in a shakier emotional state than he had ever been before,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Garrow. “It was a combination of exhaustion and the political pessimism.”

At that point, King had been under an intense spotlight for 12 years with nonstop travel and his mood had become increasingly despondent.

“But it was not just external pressures,” Rosenbloom said. “He suffered from chronic insomnia. He was on the road all the time and he was utterly exhausted. And physically, he wasn’t always in terrific shape.”

[Jesse] Jackson said at times King talked about giving it all up to spend his time writing, traveling and making speeches. Even perhaps being president of Morehouse College.

“He was trying to figure it out,” Jackson said. “He was preaching through his pain.”

But it was becoming painfully clear that the planning for the Poor People’s Campaign was not going well, even to the point where it was fracturing the already tender SCLC. Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and James Bevel all questioned some aspect of why they were doing it.

“It was not very well organized and it doesn’t seem that it is gonna draw folks to D.C.,” said Garrow, the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “He is very much behind the 8 ball because everything is running behind.”

On Feb. 1, two weeks after his birthday party, two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning compactor in a garbage truck where they were taking shelter from the rain. Their deaths led to a massive strike, peppered with spates of violence and police confrontations.

As the impasse tightened, almost in desperation, James Lawson, the pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, called King and asked him to help put pressure on the mayor (Suggs 6-7).

The rain was torrential, flooding streets and overflowing sewers. Still, the Memphis public works department required its sanitation workers — all black men — to continue to work in the downpour Feb. 1, 1968.

That day, two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, took shelter from the rain in the back of their garbage truck. As Cole and Walker rode in the back of the truck, an electrical switch malfunctioned. The compactor turned on.

Cole and Walker were crushed by the garbage truck compactor. The public works department refused to compensate their families.

Eleven days after their deaths, as many as 1,300 black sanitation workers in Memphis walked off the job, protesting horrible working conditions, abuse, racism and discrimination by the city …

…

The men …worked in filth, dragging heavy tubs of garbage onto trucks.

“Most of the tubs had holes in them,” sanitation worker Taylor Rogers, recalled in the documentary “At the River I Stand.” “Garbage would be leaking. When you went home, you had to stop at the door to pull off your clothes. Maggots would fall out on you.”

The men worked long hours for low wages, with no overtime pay and no paid sick leave. Injuries on the job could lead to their getting fired. If they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid. Most of them made 65 cents per hour.

“We felt we would have to let the city know that because we were sanitation workers, we were human beings. The signs we were carrying said ‘I Am a Man,’ ” James Douglas, a sanitation worker, recalled …. “And we were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has.”

Led by T.O. Jones, a sanitation worker who had attempted to organize the workers in a strike years earlier, and supported by the AFSCME, the men demanded the city recognize their union, increase wages and improve inhumane conditions for sanitation workers.

…

Memphis’s then-mayor, Henry Loeb III, refused the demands of the sanitation workers union, Local 1733, refusing to take malfunctioning trucks off routes, refusing to pay overtime and refusing to improve conditions.

“It has been held that all employees of a municipality may not strike for any purpose,” Loeb said in a 1968 news conference …. “Public employees cannot strike against your employer. I suggested to these men you go back to work.”

On Feb. 14, 1968, Loeb issued an ultimatum, telling the men to return to work by 7 a.m.

Some men returned to work under police escort. Negotiations between the majority of strikers and the city failed. More than 10,000 tons of garbage had piled up in Memphis….

The Rev. James Lawson, a King ally, said at a news conference: “When a public official orders a group of men to ‘get back to work and then we’ll talk’ and treats them as though they are not men, that is a racist point of view. And no matter how you dress it up in terms of whether or not a union can organize it, it is still racism. At the heart of racism is the idea ‘A man is not a man.’ ”

On Feb. 19, 1968, the NAACP and protesters organized an all-night sit-in at Memphis City Hall. The next day, the NAACP and the union called for a citywide boycott of downtown businesses.

…

On March 18, 1968, King, who was in the midst of working on the Poor People’s Campaign, flew into Memphis (Brown 1-4).

Robert F. Kennedy toured eastern Kentucky on February 13 and 14, 1968, landing at Lexington 's Bluegrass Airport and traveling over two hundred miles in those two days. At the same time, in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive was still underway - marking a major turning point in both the war and in attitudes toward it. Less than a month later, RFK would announce his candidacy for presidency.

Kennedy's purpose in touring eastern Kentucky was to examine the outcomes of the first wave of "war on poverty" legislation with the people it most affected - previous trips of inquiry were made to the San Joaquin Valley of California, the Mississippi Delta, northern New Mexico, and the hills of western Pennsylvania.

… Kennedy held field hearings for the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty in two locations during the tour, in Vortex and Fleming-Neon, taking testimony that would be entered into the Congressional Record. RFK also visited individual homes, schoolhouses, and county centers during his tour, focusing on the needs of children and young people, asking questions about what they had eaten that day, and viewing for himself the effects of both poverty and the federal efforts to combat it.

The schedule of the tour was grueling: Kennedy met dozens of people individually, spoke to thousands, and traveled over rough mountain roads, starting with a hearing in Vortex at a one room schoolhouse whose entire student body consisted of the children of one rural family; on to another one room school in Barwick, where the teacher, Bonnie Jean Carroll cooked a hot meal for her students on a pot-bellied stove everyday; on to Hazard, where he toured the African American neighborhood, Liberty Street; to a strip mining site where he viewed for himself the physical destruction produced by surface mining …

Advance man Peter Edelman would write: In nearly every place, especially rural communities, where we found a severe unwillingness to help the poor, we also found, and not always because of ethnic differences, a pocket of feudalism in America: a local power structure committed to perpetuating itself at all costs and unwilling to countenance the slightest improvement in the lives of the excluded, for fear they would gain the confidence and the wherewithal to overturn the status quo at the ballot box. Elected officials, judges, police officers and sheriffs, and local bankers and business people were always ready to use any tool necessary to quash dissidence whenever it appeared. This was true in Cesar Chavez's world in California, in the Rio Grande valley in south Texas, in Mississippi, and in Appalachia (About 1-3).

The boy was 11 years old and had never seen a man in the middle of winter with a suntan and such straight teeth in his corner of the United States, the small towns baked into the impoverished hills of eastern Kentucky.

But here was Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in February of 1968, in a gray coat and dark, narrow tie, his sandy brown hair falling over his forehead. The senator stood on the steps of the Letcher County courthouse, a horde of citizens gazing in wonder at him and the ungainly caravan of reporters documenting his every step in those days when everyone expected him to announce his candidacy for president.

“I stood really close to him — I was able to do that — and that was the first time I’d seen someone with a suntan in winter,” Benjamin Gish, now 61, said 50 years later. “I asked my mom how was that possible? And she said, ‘Only wealthy people can have suntans in February.’ It was like a big star had come to town. I was amazed just seeing him there.”

In those months before he ran for president, Kennedy commanded public attention opposing the Vietnam War and criticizing President Lyndon Johnson.

But he was also preoccupied with the scourge of poverty and hunger, a focus that had taken him to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn, and to the Mississippi Delta, where he was seen wiping away tears after venturing into a family’s shack and meeting a child with a distended stomach who was listless from malnourishment.

Now, a year later, Kennedy [had] traveled to eastern Kentucky’s coal country, a region that one local leader told him accounted for 20 of the nation’s 30 poorest counties; where a doctor told Kennedy that 18 percent of the population was underweight and 50 percent suffered from intestinal parasites; where one man, Clister Johnson of Partridge, Ky., told him that he, his wife and nine children survived on a monthly income of $60.

“They’re desperate and filled with despair,” Kennedy told a television reporter. “It seems to me that in this country, as wealthy as we are, this is an intolerable condition. It reflects on all of us. We can do things all over the rest of the world but I think we should do things for people in our own country.”

Over the course of two days, Kennedy traveled 300 miles in Appalachia, stopping in towns with names such as Neon and Hazard and Pippa Passes. He held two public hearings, one of them in a one-room schoolhouse, visited people in their beat-up homes and tapped into a “deep vein of disillusionment,” as described at the time by William Greider, then a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal.

“Don’t Give Us Anymore Promises,” read a banner at one stop. “We Can’t Eat Your Fancy Promises.”

…

Greider, who would later write for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and the Nation, said he was “put off by the theatrics and manipulation” as he approached the trip, a sense that Kennedy was stringing along the public and the press, which was awaiting word on whether he would run.

Yet Greider said he saw something during those two days in Kentucky that “captured me and changed my mind a little bit about Bobby Kennedy.” It occurred at a schoolhouse, where the senator and his entourage arrived to find six or eight students and their teacher “who were in shock when we stormed in. Terrified. They didn’t know what this was, they had never heard of Bobby Kennedy or national politics.”

“These kids were hunkered down at their desks, hoping that this storm would pass, and he grasped immediately that this was a horror show,” Greider said. “He went around, one by one, kneeling by their desks. He didn’t say very much. He nodded at them, talked to them in whispers, held their hands. It was such a human response. This was a side of the politician you don’t see very often” (Schwartzman 1-4).

Works cited:

“About RFK's 1968 Tour.” The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project. Web. http://rfkineky.org/1968-tour.htm

Brown, DaNeen L. “‘I Am a Man’: The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike that Led to MLK’s Assassination” The Washington Post. February 12, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/12/i-am-a-man-the-1968-memphis-sanitation-workers-strike-that-led-to-mlks-assassination/

Schwartzman, Paul. “They Were Kentucky’s Poorest, Most Desperate People. And He Was a Kennedy with an Entourage.” The Washington Post. February 212, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/21/they-were-kentuckys-poorest-most-desperate-people-and-he-was-a-kennedy-with-an-entourage-and-presidential-aspirations/?noredirect=on

Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/