“We took a stand”

The AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) web site carries the personal story of one of the sanitation workers in Memphis, whose strike Martin Luther King Jr. was supporting when he was assassinated.

From there:

“I went to work on a truck in 1958, carrying a big tub into backyards and loading up. We had no union, no vacation, no benefits, no pensions, no overtime. The pay was 94 cents an hour. We had to do whatever they told us to do, and if you were hurt on the job, you got nothing.”

“In about 1964 we started trying to organize. We formed AFSCME Local 1733, but they wouldn’t recognize us. We’d hold meetings, and if the boss found out about it you got fired. One rainy day the boss sent us home without pay while the white workers got paid. Then two of the guys were killed in a compactor and their families got nothing. We said, ‘This is enough,’ and we voted to strike.”

“[By March] morale was getting low. We had to convince some to keep up the fight. That’s when [the union and others] got Dr. King involved. He put everything aside to come help us.”

“Nobody seemed to realize how bad things were [for blacks in Memphis] but us. We took a stand. Someone has to take a stand. We had to be united to get where we wanted to go. The union helped us do that.”

And Dr. King helped take a stand. He was assassinated hours before a scheduled march to protest the workers’ treatment, non-violently. Read his last speech, “I’ve been to the mountaintop”

Racism is still very present here in Portland. Read “How to fight racism as an individual” from Friends of the Oglala Lakota. And “Our home-grown Hitlers”, a 2003 article by Jeff Baker in The Oregonian remembering the death of Mulugeta Seraw.

It’s good to have the day off, if you aren’t in a service job that doesn’t – interesting that sanitation workers get Christmas and New Year off, but not this day, huh? Please use it to honor Dr. King, by doing something to take a stand today.