Mindful how unions could improve the lot of workers, Jones soon began organizing one to represent employees of the city’s Department of Public Works. He tapped Warren to help. Jones and Warren persuaded hundreds of their coworkers to join them. Identified by DPW management as a union firebrand, Jones was fired in 1963, but that did not stop his drive to establish a union. In 1964, he and Warren persuaded the garbage collectors to form Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees—AFSCME. Backed by the power of an emerging union, the workers won modest concessions. Wage increases of a few cents an hour were granted each year. Uniforms and foul-weather gear were provided. The tin tubs were phased out in favor of three-wheel pushcarts. A grievance procedure was instituted.14 The city adopted a civil service policy providing vacations and sick leave.15
Unchanged was a deep-seated racial bias. The men who hauled the garbage were black. The supervisors were white. A black worker stayed on the payroll at the mercy of his white supervisors. Warren would recall: “The bosses would fire you if they wanted to fire you.”16
For Warren and Jones, the key to the union’s survival was union recognition and a dues checkoff, whereby the city would deduct union dues from its members’ paychecks for transfer to the union treasury. Without the dues checkoff, a great majority of union members declined to pay the $4-a-month dues. If they did so, many of them feared, it would mark them as union activists and cost them their jobs.
When Memphis businessman Henry Loeb announced that he would run for mayor in 1967, it seemed to present the union with an opportunity. On July 4, 1967, Warren called on Loeb at his stately house on Colonial Drive. He had a proposition: if Loeb would agree to recognize the union and allow a dues checkoff, the union would endorse him for mayor. Years later, Warren would remember the mayor’s curt reply: “There has never been a public employees’ union in this city, and there never will be.”17
Loeb won the election anyway without the union’s support. Warren and Jones determined they had no recourse except to strike. They thought it best to wait until Loeb completed his first few months in office, his honeymoon period. Perhaps they would strike in the summer of 1968. Then, in the heat of the Memphis sun, piles of fast-rotting and stinking garbage would accumulate all over town. In those circumstances the mayor would feel greater pressure to settle a work stoppage on favorable terms for the union.
Back-to-back events on two successive days in early 1968 triggered a premature strike. On January 31, twenty-two black sewer and drain workers were sent home when it began to rain. No white employees were sent home. When the rain stopped a couple of hours later, the whites began working. They earned a full day’s pay. The blacks complained, and the city eventually agreed to pay them, but only for two hours.
On the very next day, a five-man garbage crew was caught in a driving rainstorm. There was room for only three of them in the cab of their Weiner barrel truck. The two junior men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, sought refuge in back. They crawled into the yawning compactor compartment. A freak electrical short apparently caused by an errant shovel hitting loose wires triggered the compactor. Cole and Walker were dragged into its jaws and crushed to death.
The nightmarish accident buttressed the workers’ long-standing complaint about outdated and derelict equipment. The city had introduced the barrel truck only ten years earlier in grudging compliance with the workers’ demands. A compactor-equipped truck was a modernizing step forward. But the barrel trucks posed new hazards. They were not always well maintained. Union leaders had been pleading with the city to replace them, according to local historian Joan Beifuss.18
Aggrieved and outraged by two jarring events—the rainy day incident and the horrible deaths of Cole and Walker—Local 1733 voted to strike. The union’s members vowed not to return to work until Loeb granted their demands. For workers who risked their jobs and the livelihoods of their families by striking, it was a great leap. Taylor Rogers, who was supporting a family of eight children, five girls and three boys, remembered the wrenching moment: “I sat down and talked to my family before I went out on strike. They said, ‘look, Daddy, you ain’t doing nothing no way.’. . . And my boy say, ‘Daddy, we’re with you. We’ll go out and work and whatever money we get, we’ll bring in.’” Once the strike was under way, the son, Taylor Jr., shined shoes to help out.19
The early days of the work stoppage went exceedingly well. By the third day the strike was idling all but four of the city’s 188 garbage trucks. Thirteen hundred employees of the Department of Public Works, all African Americans, were refusing to work. On the fourth day, Joseph Paisley, an AFSCME organizer in Tennessee, crowed to a reporter: “They stood in unison, one thousand plus, they’re not going back.”20
Mayor Loeb, however, was not about to sit on his hands as garbage stacked up throughout his city. One week into the strike, Loeb began hiring workers to replace the strikers. Fearful of losing their jobs permanently and with rent and car payments coming due, some of the strikers were drifting back to work. By mid-March, a month after the strike began, the Commercial Appeal would report that sixty-seven trucks were back in service.
Working overtime, escorted by police squad cars, hastily mobilized crews were collecting garbage from most of the city’s businesses and apartment buildings. As though to demonstrate a civic duty to counter the strike, Boy Scouts were pitching in to haul away some of the garbage heaps in residential neighborhoods.
By April, ninety-five garbage trucks were rumbling through the city’s streets.21 The trucks, crewed mostly by new hires, were steadily clearing mounds of accumulated garbage from alleys,
