Posthumous Victory

The words spilled haltingly from the pulpit of Memphis' crowded Clayborn Temple A.M.E. Church: "All those in favor of ratification, stand." But the congregation's response was anything but faltering. The big Negro church rocked with happy cheers, the thud of stomping feet and the din of dancing in the aisles. "And all those opposed?" persisted T. O. Jones, the emotion-choked president of Public Works Local 1733, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. In their delighted and deliriously unanimous mood, the question was neither heard nor heeded by Memphis' 1,300 striking garbage men.

The garbage men had reason enough to rejoice. Their predominantly Negro union not only forced a form of recognition from the cotton capital; its 14-month pact with city hall also calls for some solid pocketbook gains, including grievance procedures, a system of mer it promotions and a 9% pay hike. Mayor Henry Loeb, who bitterly branded the strike illegal when it began ten weeks ago, even agreed to a dues checkoff; under a face-saving scheme, a credit union will collect the money for the sanitationmen's treasury.

Symbol of Revolt. Ironically, it was the violence of Martin Luther King's death rather than the nonviolence of his methods that ultimately broke the city's resistance. Loeb, 47, a wealthy Southern patrician-turned-politician, relented on the critical issue of union recognition only after the assassination and under concerted pressure from the White House (through Labor Under Secretary James Reynolds), civil rights and labor leaders, and his own increasingly irritated local establishment. While many white Memphians initially supported Loeb's stand, they soon fretted over their city's fading image and the threat of more Negro boycotts and street violence. Just before the strike's end last week, King's successor, the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, played on their fears by promising to treat Memphis to "the most militant nonviolent steps ever taken."

Though the settlement wreathed King's final struggle with a posthumous victory, it did not restore racial harmony to Memphis. Negro leaders are already preparing other battles. COME (for Committee On the Move for Equality), which mobilized Negroes behind the garbage men, plans fresh boycotts and picketing in a campaign to win more jobs, better housing, and improved educational opportunities for Memphis blacks. The new labor-civil rights coalition forged during the strike may soon flex its organizing muscle on behalf of Memphis' Negro hospital workers and Negro teachers. Memphis, in fact, has become so symbolically significant to the Negro cause, that Abernathy hopes to use it as a Deep South springboard for King's postponed Poor People's March on Washington next month.

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