{"id":3044,"date":"2008-04-01T15:44:28","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T21:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=3044"},"modified":"2008-04-01T15:44:28","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T21:44:28","slug":"leonard-pitts-jr-four-decades-later-men-recall-kings-last-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=3044","title":{"rendered":"Leonard Pitts Jr.: Four decades later, men recall King’s last campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY LEONARD PITTS JR., MiamiHerald.com, 30 March 2008
\n<\/a>
\nRelated Content: * Interactive | ‘I am a man’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

MEMPHIS —
\nForty years later, they are old men, many with bent backs and gingerly steps. And they are taciturn, strangers to an era of confession, getting in touch with your feelings.<\/p>\n

So if you ask them what it was like, being a black man and a sanitation worker in this city in the 1950s and ’60s, they will say simply that it was ”tough” or it was ”bad.” And it will take some pushing for them to tell how you had to root through people’s backyards, collecting their tree limbs and dead cats and chicken bones, because there was no such thing as a garbage can placed out by the curb. Or about white bosses who carried guns and called you ”boy” and worked you 10, 12, 14 hours a day but only paid you for eight, at as little as $1.27 an hour. Or about how it was when the metal tubs you toted on your head rusted through and the garbage leaked.<\/p>\n

”I have got maggots out of my head, what done fell in there. Sometimes, you find ’em in your collar,” says Ozell Ueal, 68.<\/p>\n

”I come home on the bus,” says Elmore Nickelberry, 76, who, like Ueal, is still working, ‘[people] couldn’t sit next to me. They say, `You stink.’ Most of the time, I’d get way in the back. Most of the time, I’d walk home.”<\/p>\n

This is a story about the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike of 1968, how black men who were, in their words, treated like ”beasts,” like ”animals,” like the garbage they collected, decided enough, no more. It is a story about how a demand for higher wages and better working conditions soon turned into a demand for something more.<\/p>\n

And it is a story about Martin Luther King’s last campaign — the one that took his life, 40 years ago this Friday.<\/p>\n

[Read the story<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY LEONARD PITTS JR., MiamiHerald.com, 30 March 2008 Related Content: * Interactive | ‘I am a man’ MEMPHIS — Forty years later, they are old men, many with bent backs and gingerly steps. And they are taciturn, strangers to an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-N6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}