I AM A MAN: The Trigger Nobody Remembers

February first, nineteen sixty-eight was a cold morning, and two men named Echol Cole and Robert Walker took shelter from the rain in the only covered space available to them on a Memphis city garbage truck. That space was the compactor drum. The truck malfunctioned. Both men were crushed to death inside it.

They were Black sanitation workers employed by the city of Memphis. They had no break rooms, no safety equipment, no union protections, and no equal pay with white workers doing comparable work. The conditions that killed them had been standard practice for decades. When it rained, Black workers could not shelter in the cabs of the trucks, which were reserved for white supervisors. They waited in the drums, or they waited in the rain. On February first, the drum closed.

Their deaths triggered the Memphis Sanitation Strike: one thousand three hundred city workers, nearly all of them Black, walked off the job eleven days later, on February twelfth. They carried signs that read "I AM A MAN." That phrase, which became one of the civil rights era's most enduring images, was a direct response to the conditions that had made Cole and Walker invisible to the city that employed them. They were not men under Memphis's labor system. They were equipment.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local Seventeen Thirty-Three, had been trying to organize Memphis's Black sanitation workforce for years. The city's mayor, Henry Loeb, refused to recognize the union, refused to negotiate, and initially called the strike illegal. He was still refusing when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis in March to support the strikers, and again when King returned in April.

On the evening of April third, nineteen sixty-eight, King delivered what became known as the "Mountaintop" speech at Mason Temple, five miles from this spot. The next evening he was shot standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He had come to Memphis because Echol Cole and Robert Walker went to work in the rain.

The strike settled on April sixteenth, twelve days after the assassination. The city recognized the union, agreed to dues checkoff, and granted a wage increase. Cole and Walker are buried in Memphis. The settlement that bore their cost does not say their names.