Commemorating April 4, 1968: ML King, Garbage Workers and Trade Unions — by Chris Mahin

[Written a few years ago, this essay is useful to review when the question of collective bargaining for public workers is again on the table, and when FBI attempts to isolate union activists is also on the table.  April 4 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination.]
April 1968:
Dr. King is Killed Defending Labor’s Rights

by Chris Mahin

April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While many events are held each year to honor Dr. King’s memory, too often people forget – or have never learned — why he was in Memphis that spring. Dr. King went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers – and paid for his stand with his life. That makes April 4 an important anniversary not only in African American history (and in U.S. history in general), but in the history of the labor movement as well.

On February 12, 1968, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers went on strike. At the time, they were making less than $1 an hour and were eligible for welfare. They decided that they had had enough of poor wages, terrible working conditions, and a viciously anti-union mayor.

The workers were members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The strike was the culmination of years of mistreatment. The workers worked 12 hours a day carrying garbage with busted, leaking pails. Some of the pails were infested with flies and maggots, and the workers had no place to wash up in the yard when they had to leave the trucks. Some of the workers had no running water when they returned home after work. The workers had no real benefits of any kind.

This dire situation came to a crisis point on Feb. 1, 1968, when the accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert

The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated, now a museum.

Walker.

Almost 1,400 sanitation workers joined the strike. They shut the city down.

The workers and their supporters marched daily to pressure the mayor and the city council to recognize the sanitation unit under AFSCME Local 1733. The men wore signs which read “I AM a Man,” a slogan that was eventually recognized around the world.

Tension grew in the city as Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb called the strike illegal and threatened to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to work. On February 14, the mayor issued a back-to-work ultimatum for 7 a.m. on Feb. 15. The police escorted the few garbage trucks in operation. Negotiations broke off. The newspapers began to report that more than 10,000 tons of garbage was piling up.

It was in that tense environment that AFSCME organizers appealed to Dr. King to come to Memphis to speak to the workers. Initially, King was reluctant. He was immersed in work preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was a huge undertaking, an effort to bring poor people of all ethnicities to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 to protest poverty. But when AFSCME organizer Jesse Epps pointed out that the fight of the sanitation workers in Memphis was part of the same struggle as the Poor People’s Campaign, King agreed.

Once in Memphis, King immediately grasped the importance of what was unfolding there. On his first visit to the city, March 18, he spoke to a crowd of 17,000 people, and called for a citywide march.

On Thursday, March 28, King led a march from the Clayborn Temple, the strike’s headquarters. The march was interrupted by window breaking at the back of the demonstration. The police moved into the crowd, using nightsticks, Mace, tear gas – and guns. A 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead. The police arrested 280 people, and reported about 60 injuries. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in.

On Friday, March 29, some 300 sanitation workers and ministers marched peacefully and silently from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and dozens of National Guardsmen with their bayonets fixed.

In the last days of March, King cancelled a planned trip to Africa and made preparations to lead a peaceful march in Memphis. Organizers working on preparations for the Poor People’s Campaign in other cities were directed to leave those cities and come to Memphis, for it was clear that the Poor People’s Campaign could not be won without winning the fight in Memphis.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King returned to Memphis. That evening, he gave an extraordinary speech to hundreds of people at Mason Temple. The speech has gone down in history as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Anyone who reads it today will notice that it  is an eloquent statement of support for the sanitation workers. (That night, King called them “thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering.”) But it is also a farewell speech, the oration of a man who knew he might not have long to live, and who was searching his soul to make sense of his life, and his place in history.

In the speech, King emphatically rejected the calls not to march again because of an injunction:

“[S]omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right!”

At the end of his remarks he referred indirectly to the underhanded attempts by racists, the FBI, and other forces to sabotage his leadership and destroy the movement, declaring:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like everybody, 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. And 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!”

Less than 24 hours after uttering those words, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Urban rebellions broke out in more than 60 cities. In response to pressure from all over the country, the federal government sent Labor Department officials to Memphis to mediate a settlement to the strike.

On Tuesday, April 16, AFSCME leaders announced that an agreement had been reached.  The agreement included union recognition, better pay, and benefits. The strikers voted to accept the agreement.

It was a bittersweet end to a long battle. The strike ended in victory, but at a terrible cost, the death of one of the foremost symbols of the fight for justice in that (or any) era. AFSCME’s victory in Memphis inspired other workers in Memphis to join unions, and other employees throughout the South to join AFSCME. The Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King had been working on when he went to Memphis did take place later in the tumultuous year 1968. As King had hoped, it brought together poor people of all ethnicities to demonstrate in Washington, D.C. – African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.

Given Dr. King’s role in the Memphis sanitation strike and the tremendous community support that the strikers received, perhaps the month of April ought to be a time to remember that not all labor leaders have an official position with a union — and that labor  comes in all colors, and includes both employed and unemployed people. If we hold on to those lessons, we will honor what was won with such great sacrifice in Memphis in April 1968.

Annie Shapiro and the Chicago Garment Workers Uprising in 1910

[Marlene Targ Brill is a Chicago based writer with a distinguished list of children's books to her credit.  Her most recent publication celebrates Annie Shapiro, who began that uprising 100 years ago, just 6 months before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.  The following interview, conducted by Joan Brunwasser in Op-Ed News, explores Chicago as the center of the men's clothing industry and how that related to organizing the entire industry.   She came to write the book from a suggestion by her sister-in-law. as she reports in the interview,

As an author, I've often had people come to me with ideas they think I should write about.  I usually tell them to write the story themselves.  But when my sister-in-law told me about her aunt and the strike she led when a 17-year-old Russian immigrant to Chicago, I thought I would include her story in lists of topics for editors who I knew.  For years, no one was interested.  In fact, I was so sure no one would become interested, I threw away the articles my sister-in-law had sent to me about her aunt, Hannah (Annie) Shapiro.

Then, I got the magic email that authors love to read.

Conducted after the recent events in Wisconsin brought workers' rights to the fore once again, the interview and the book itself have great relevance today.  The entire interview may be read by clicking this link.]

Marlene Targ Brill on “Anne Shapiro and the Clothing Workers’ Strike”

opednews.com

My guest today is Chicago-based author, Marlene Targ Brill. Welcome to OpEdNews, Marlene. You have a new book out. Can you tell our readers about it?

photo credit: Richard B. Brill

Thank you for permitting me to talk about my latest book, Annie Shapiro and the Clothing Workers’ Strike.  This true picture book story discusses the role Hannah (Annie) Shapiro and other Chicago immigrants played in the 20th-century labor movement.  The book tells how 17-year-old Annie rebelled against 10-hour workdays, bullying bosses and cuts in already-low wages.  She walked out of a Hart, Schaffner & Marx Chicago sweatshop in 1910 and urged others to join her.  Because of her brave stand, 40,000 other workers walked out, closing down the men’s textile industry in Chicago and Milwaukee.  The strike triggered formation of a giant national union now called Workers United and resulted in employees nationwide receiving better treatment and wages.

There was so much going against Annie. She was a young person, an immigrant, who spoke broken English and was embarrassed about it. She was not well-educated; she was 12 when she had dropped out of school to go to work because her mother got sick. And her large family depended on her earnings to get by. Yet she risked everything by not accepting terrible work conditions and being willing to do something about it. Success didn’t come easy. Tell our readers what happened when she and the other girls who were her fellow workers approached the United Garment Workers Union for support.

The UGWU was male-only, and after all, this was 1910. At first, the men didn’t take the women seriously.  So Annie and the twelve original women who followed her out of Shop 5, where they worked, asked the Women’s League for assistance.  The League was a group of wealthy women who helped families who came to Hull House, Chicago’s settlement house founded by Jane Addams, for assistance.  League women gladly picketed with the strikers and raised funds to help families in distress from the strike.  After a couple thousand workers joined the protest, the UGWU decided the girls not only raised a serious issue but one supported by workers throughout the men’s textile industry in Chicago. [The interview continues here.]

[Brill refers in her interview to Workers United, the union that is descended from the original garment workers unions of the early part of the 20th century.  Workers United annually conducts a commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York, as they have this year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of that tragedy.  This past September, Marlene Targ Brill spoke at the Workers United convention.  On Thursday, April 7, Noel Beasley will represent Workers United at the Chicago commemoration of the Triangle Fire.  For more information about that event click here.

To learn more about Annie or Marlene Targ Brill's other titles, go to www.marlenetargbrill.com or contact Lerner Publishing at www.lernerbooks.com.]

Rosie’s Girls — by Julia Stein

[Reposted from Counterpunch's Poetry Basement, edited by Marc Beaudin.  Julia Stein's poetry along with other work from the poetry anthology she edited, Walking Through A River Of Fire, will be read at a commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,  Thursday, April 7, 2011.  The program begins at 3 pm, ends at 5 pm at Gage Gallery, 18 So. Michigan Ave; and will be followed by a screening of the recent American Experience documentary film on Triangle.  At 6 pm the Working Women's History Project continues the commemoration with a special performance of a play written for this occasion, performed at their annual fundraising gala at Roosevelt University, 214 So. Michigan Ave. - Lew Rosenbaum ]

One of Rosie’s Girls
by JULIA STEIN

We union girls every Saturday walked to the Asch building,
yelled up to the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, “So long
until victory is yours” to our sisters at Triangle Factory,
our sisters who lost their strike, the girls defeated
by scabs, their dreams of union smashed,
our sisters entrapped up the elevator eight, nine floors,
the girls who are locked in, one fire escape, no union
the floors covered with scraps of clothing,
the girls who screamed and burned in the fire.

After the terrible fire I walked numbly in the April rain

into the funeral march crowd that overflowed Washington Square.
My sorrow was enough to flood all of Fifth Avenue,
My rage was enough to flood all of Broadway.
They led the empty hearse first up through the huge arch,
then we walked silently eight abreast the rain hitting us hard
up Fifth Avenue the fine ladies in their frilly shirtwaists and the
fine gentlemen in their fancy suits on the sidewalk stared at us,
we were so drenched walking past the mansions of the rich.

We hissed and screamed from the floor, the galleries
packed with my brothers and sisters of the dead at
the Metropolitan Opera House memorial meeting;
we only quieted when Rosie Schneiderman, tiny steel wisp
with her flaming red hair, whispered,
‘This is not the first time girls have burned alive
in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death
of one of our sister workers. Every year thousands of us
are maimed.” Rose’s voice was our voice was my voice.

We followed Rose across the Lower East side hoisting her up
to speak. Rosie with her flaming red hair at the street meeting told us
the Governor ignited a commission to investigate.
All those meetings for five years she gave us hope telling us
the commissioners crawled through the tiny hole in the wall
to the steep iron ladder covered with ice, the factory’s only
fire escape, visited canneries where five-year olds snipped beans,
seven year olds shelled peas, saw machinery that
scalped women, cut men’s arms off. We followed her.

I was one of Rosie’s girls who helped leaflet for her meetings
every noon and evening telling our sisters and brothers
the legislator passed, the governor signed laws making it
safe to work. We walked the streets leafleting our people
in the factories and stores to speak up speak up until the sprinklers
were installed, fire escapes built up the sides of factory buildings,
the doors to the factories unlocked. My sorrow lessened,
still March 25 every year I take a bunch of daisies to
Evergreen Cemetery, lay it on the grave of a Triangle girl.

Julia Stein is the editor of the anthology Walking Through a River of Fire: 100 Years of Triangle Poetry (C.C. Marimbo).  She also has four previous books of poetry: Under the Ladder to Heaven, Desert Soldiers, Shulamith, and Walker Woman.