Redemption

balcony section for African Americans (the “buzzard’s roost,” he called it). He refused. Instead he called M. A. Lightman, owner of the Malco. Kyles and Lightman devised a scheme to desegregate the theater quietly. Kyles and his wife slipped into the whites-only section for a midday showing of To Kill a Mockingbird. There were about a dozen whites in the theater. “I don’t think they even knew [the sit-in] was happening,” Kyles would recount. The Malco, bowing to the new reality, announced that the days of segregation in its movie theaters were over. As a token of his appreciation for how gracefully Kyles had desegregated his theater, Lightman presented him with a gift: a one-year pass to the Malco.⁴

Kyles did not imagine the garbage workers as likely instigators of a civil rights protest. He doubted that they had the wherewithal to defy the city’s white establishment. They were the “lowest on the totem pole,” as Kyles put it.⁵ They inhabited a world of foul-smelling waste and low social status. They lacked education, money, and political power. They were ushers in Kyles’s church, not deacons.

One leader of the garbage workers’ union was forty-six-year-old Joe Warren. At six foot one, broad-shouldered, a combat veteran of World War II, Warren was not a man to trifle with. He had grown up on a farm near the impoverished farming hamlet of Cordova, ten miles east of Memphis. The black farmers who populated the Cordova area hitched their hopes to the cotton crop. They were mostly sharecroppers who rented land on credit to grow cotton and borrowed from the landowner to buy supplies. They repaid their debt by committing to the landlord a share of their cotton sales. As the system played out, it was “arbitrary and highly susceptible to exploitation,” writes Eugene Dattel in his economic history of cotton and race.⁶ It was, in effect, a system of post-slavery peonage. It kept many of Warren’s neighbors in perpetual poverty.

Warren’s father, McKinley Warren, was not a sharecropper. He owned a twenty-three-acre farm. But he, his wife (Estelle), and three children endured much the same hardscrabble conditions as their sharecropping neighbors.⁷ The Warrens lived in a two-room, log-and-plank house practically next to the tracks of the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad.

By age ten Joe was driving mules to plow the fields and picking cotton under the broiling Tennessee sun. It was backbreaking work: bending over, plucking the fiber from its prickly, three-lobed bolls, tugging a long sack between rows, and tediously, interminably stuffing the cotton fluff into the sack. To earn more, Joe quit school in the eighth grade so that he could work longer hours in the fields.

Weary of the farm life, venturing into an unknown and uncertain world, he fled to the city down the road but an eternity away: Memphis. Displaced by cotton-picking machines and other automated equipment in the 1930s and 1940s, many rural blacks like Warren were quitting farm life and heading to Memphis and cities beyond. Jobs were scarce in the cities for low-skilled farmhands, and racial barriers severely limited the prospects for decent employment. Warren, who was just sixteen, landed a laborer’s job at the Buckeye Cotton Oil Company.

Though he was barely literate and had a criminal record—a juvenile conviction for stealing tires off a truck—the army drafted him for service during World War II. He saw fierce combat in Italy as a rifleman with the Ninety-Seventh Infantry. Except for having a front tooth knocked out during one firefight, he survived unscathed. “Thank God, I didn’t get killed,” he would say. He was honorably discharged in 1945 as a staff sergeant. In his separation papers the army recognized him for having “placed fire on the enemy, assisting in the capture of an enemy position. Fired rifle, threw grenades. Fired bazooka and A-30 caliber machine gun. Assisted in the capture of enemy positions and personnel.”

He returned home to find the racial chasm in Memphis as wide as ever. “Couldn’t even talk to a white woman,” he would recall.⁸ He went to work as a custodian at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company plant. Laid off in 1962 with few options for employment, he took a job as a garbage-truck driver for the Memphis Department of Public Works.

“Tub toters” was then a common name for garbagemen. It was a reference to the tin tubs that they would hoist on their shoulders, carry to backyards, fill with garbage, and lug to the trucks. The tubs leaked water, garbage, and maggots through holes in the bottom. As Taylor Rogers, who had been a tub toter, would say years later, “You didn’t have nowhere to wash your hands. You’d stand beside the truck and eat your lunch. It was just pure hell.”⁹

To cover the prescribed routes, Warren and Rogers sometimes had to stay on the job past their forty-hour workweek. There was no pay for overtime work. No unemployment insurance. No disability benefits. There was an optional life insurance policy and a pension plan. But the workers’ share of the cost was such that almost no one signed up for either.¹⁰

Pay was low. In 1968 the average was $1.80 an hour, fifteen cents above the minimum wage. Starting pay was $1.65, which an article on February 23 in the Commercial Appeal said roughly matched what other southern cities paid garbage workers. For those who were supporting a wife and several children, however, it was not a living wage.¹¹ In his Memphis speech of March 18, King would drive the point home, saying that it was a travesty for full-time workers to receive part-time wages.¹²

By and by, Warren was grumbling openly to his fellow workers about their working conditions and low pay. Warren found a ready ear in a co-worker, Thomas Oliver “T. O.” Jones. Like Warren, Jones was a World War II veteran—in his case, having served in the navy. At war’s end, Jones found work in a unionized shipyard at Oakland, California. In 1958, he returned to his hometown of Memphis and