We still fight injustice today‼️ Via raiseupthesouth Today in Southern labor history, we remember the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike. On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. Frustrated by the city’s lack of response, low wages, and dangerous working conditions, 1,300 Black men from the Memphis Department of Public Works went on strike. As striking workers carried signs through the streets reading “I Am a Man,” 4,000 National Guardsmen and police called in by the mayor filled up the city’s jails. Just after he addressed the strikers, on April 4th, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in his hotel in Memphis. King’s murder created tension throughout the city. President Lyndon Johnson sent in a special negotiator in the tension of the moment, and on April 16th, the City of Memphis agreed to the workers’ demands. In the end, it’s solidarity that won the Memphis Sanitation worker...