better pay, better hours, the right to organize, a procedure for resolving disputes. They wanted to be recognized as working professionals--and not as boys. Theirs was a labor dispute with unmistakable racial overtones, since almost all the sanitation and sewer workers were black.
February was an inauspicious time to begin a garbage strike; conventional wisdom had it that a work stoppage should occur in the summer, when the refuse would rot faster and produce an unholy stench. But the strike preyed on an old dread lodged deeply within the civic memory: Ever since the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878 --which was then thought to have been spawned by putrescent garbage heaped in open cesspools--the city had been extremely attentive to public cleanliness.
From the start, the city refused to acknowledge the garbagemen's cause, or even their union's existence. Soon a few scabs were brought in, but they couldn't keep pace, and the garbage began to pile up all around the city. Municipal employees could not go on strike, Memphis's mayor, Henry Loeb, insisted. 'This you can't do,'185 he told them. 'You are breaking the law. I suggest you go back to work.'
Henry Loeb III was a garrulous,186 square-jawed man, six feet four, who had commanded a PT boat in the Mediterranean during World War II. He came from a family of millionaires who owned laundries, barbecue restaurants, and various real estate concerns. His wife, Mary, the daughter of a prominent cotton family, was Queen of the Cotton Carnival in 1950. It couldn't be said that Loeb was a racist--certainly not in the raw, Bull Connor sense--and he was by no means a typical cracker politician. For one thing, he'd been schooled in the East, at Phillips Andover and Brown; for another, he was Jewish, a biographical quirk that made him unfit for the Memphis Country Club (even though he'd recently converted to Christianity and joined his wife's Episcopal church).
Like many white business leaders in the South, Mayor Loeb approached the entwined subjects of labor and race with a paternalism reminiscent of the plantation. Although always outwardly courteous to blacks, he called them 'nigras'187 despite his best efforts, and he seemed to believe that his fair city, having avoided the messy troubles of Little Rock, Birmingham, and Montgomery, didn't have a race problem. During an earlier term as mayor, Loeb had presided over the integration of the city's public establishments, schools, and restaurants without incident. Reinforced by that mostly positive experience, Loeb's position was that black folks in Memphis were
This was a prevalent attitude among white Memphians, in fact, an attitude perhaps best summed up by a popular cartoon that ran in the
The garbage workers didn't seem so different from Hambone; many of them were older men who talked and carried themselves not unlike the cartoon character. They were 'the world's least likely revolutionaries,'188 the journalist Garry Wills said at the time. Unschooled in the ways of protest, they were lowly Delta 'blue-gums,' as some whites still called them--men who scratched where they didn't itch and laughed at things that weren't funny. Yet these men were playing fiercely against type. They refused to listen to the mayor, and they would not go back to work. Instead, they were out there each day, marching down Main Street, past glowering police and unsympathetic merchants, on the way to city hall to lay their grievances before the massuh.
Mayor Loeb, stubborn as John Wayne, didn't see what was coming--even after it had arrived. Memphis, which had been run for generations by the well-oiled machine of an all-powerful political boss named E. H. Crump, was an orderly, quiet, and well-mannered town of leafy parkways and beautiful cul-de-sacs. Crump had died in 1954, but his punctilious spirit lived on. Affairs were supposed to run smoothly, and people were supposed to be nice. It was not only discourteous to honk your horn in Memphis; it was
The nominal leader of the strike was a blunt, overweight former garbage worker named T. O. Jones, a firebrand whose considerable courage did not quite make up for his lack of savvy or experience. Eventually, the sanitation workers attracted more sophisticated national leadership in the form of labor representatives from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The real moral force behind the strike, however, proved to be a local Memphis minister, a cerebral man who happened to be a legendary tactician of the civil rights movement. His name was James Lawson.
An old friend of Martin Luther King's, Lawson had studied the tenets190 of civil disobedience while living in India, had played a crucial role in leading the successful Nashville sit-ins of 1960, and had traveled to Vietnam on an early peace-seeking mission. Lawson saw the sanitation strike not merely as a labor dispute but also as a civil rights crusade, and soon he made his influence felt. 'You are human beings,'191 he told the striking workers. 'You deserve dignity. You aren't a slave--you're a man.'
One day a few weeks after the start of the strike, the garbage workers began carrying a placard whose slogan, echoing Lawson's words, neatly summed up their fight. The slogan caught on in Memphis, and then around the nation. It said: I AM A MAN.
12 
ON THE BALCONY
THROUGH THE MONTH of February 1968, as Martin Luther King stepped up his travels around the country to promote the Poor People's Campaign, it became clear to everyone close to him that he desperately needed a vacation. His doctor said so, and so did Coretta. Friends and colleagues noticed the bags under his eyes, the despair in his voice, the worry on his face. He nursed ever-deepening doubts about himself and the direction of the movement. His insomnia worsened. In speeches and sermons, he touched increasingly on morbid themes. He even made the SCLC draft new bylaws declaring that his closest friend and right-hand man, Ralph Abernathy, would succeed him should anything happen to him. King, clearly, was about to snap.
Finally his staff prevailed. It was time for their leader to head for somewhere sunny. Abernathy would go with him. Their usual habit, this season of the year, was to spend a week in Jamaica. This time, though, King had a different idea: they would fly to Acapulco.
They left the first week of March. On the initial flight, to Dallas, King fell into an argument192 with a segregationist white man from North Carolina. Ordinarily, King never engaged in pointless one-on-one jousts, but something about the man ignited his temper. Uncharacteristically aggressive in pressing his points, King talked about the Poor People's Campaign as an alternative to riots this summer. The argument predictably went nowhere, but when they landed in Dallas, the segregationist wished King good luck in Washington, saying, 'It may be the last chance for your brand of non-violence.'
On the ramp, Abernathy questioned King about the argument.
'I don't play with them anymore,193 Ralph,' King said testily. 'I don't care who it offends.'
In the Dallas airport, King and Abernathy stopped off in a men's clothing shop. When he noticed Abernathy admiring a collection of fine neckties, King lapsed into an effusively generous mood. 'Here, take this,' he said, handing Abernathy his American Express card. 'Buy one for me, and four or five for yourself, whatever you want.' He set off down the terminal to place a call at a pay phone while Abernathy bought nearly fifty dollars' worth of ties.
They landed in Acapulco that afternoon and checked in to a suite at the El Presidente Hotel with a balcony that looked out over Condesa Beach and the brilliant blue Pacific. King and Abernathy spent the day watching the famous cliff divers and then ducking into the shops of La Costera. King remained in a sentimental and ultra- generous mood, one that Abernathy found sweet but strange. Anything that met Abernathy's fancy, King tried to buy.
After a long day, they collapsed in their suite. Abernathy woke up in the dead of night,194
