Monday, January 17, 2000
Sanitation workers recall Dr. King's help
Strike drew him to Memphis, where he was assassinated
BY EARNEST WINSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Thirty-two years ago, while he was organizing the national “Poor People's Campaign,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis, Tenn., to support striking sanitation workers.
He never returned. A day after delivering his famous “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech to the sanitation workers, he was shot to death.
But his work there for fair treatment and better wages for sanitation workers was not in vain.
Sanitation work in many places was considered a black man's profession, a dirty job that required few skills.
Today, in Cincinnati and in most other major cities, perceptions linger, but treatment and wages of sanitation workers are better and conditions are more tolerable.
As the country commemorates Dr. King's life and legacy during today's national holiday, sanitation employees remember the civil rights leader for helping improve their working lives.
“I think at the time solid waste/sanitation workers were looked down on,” Cleophus O. Kelley, assistant superintendent of operations in Cincinnati's Solid Waste Division, said.
“People thought it was a degrading job. You had very few people — other than African-Americans — apply for the job because it was considered an unwanted job, a dirty job. The pay was low at the time and it had very few benefits,” Mr. Kelley, 67, of Madisonville, continued.
“I don't know if we would be where we are now without him. We have come a long way.”
There's still a long way to go toward realizing the full extent of Dr. King's dream of economic justice, Dr. Keith Griffler, assistant professor of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, said.
“King always saw more and more toward the end of his life the importance of economic issues,” Dr. Griffler explained. “It was no accident that he was working with sanitation workers and helping out there cause because he saw this as a larger struggle for economic justice.
“This is an issue that we're still struggling with today. It's important for us on a holiday like this to derive the lessons from his life and to look beyond the most symbolic things that we tend to look at.
“There's a tendency to look at King's career as being purely a question of racial discrimination in the most immediate sense — desegregation, equal opportunity in employment — and to forget that Dr. King insisted that racial justice was impossible without economic justice.”
Among sanitation crews, race and economics converged.
In Cincinnati, 79 percent of the 217 solid waste employees are African-American. Among all of the city's approximately 7,000 employees, 32 percent are black.
In the late 1960s, Cincinnati sanitation workers earned an average of $1.67 an hour, compared with the average of $2 an hour that highway maintenance employees made then, Mr. Kel ley said.
Pay and status weren't the only problems here.
When Larry Davis joined Cincinnati's Sanitation Division 30 years ago, he said, worker safety was not a city priority.
There were “parts of town that you didn't even want to go in,” Mr. Davis recalled.
He said black workers felt the tension in overwhelmingly white Mount Washington after the 1967-1968 riots in the central city.
Over-the-Rhine was dangerous beyond racial differences. Once, “someone threw a bottle out of an abandoned building and it just missed my head,” said Mr. Davis of Mount Airy, who is now supervisor of collection.
He reported it to management and they gave him a hard hat.
“They weren't interested in safety back then like we are now. If a (sanitation) helper came in today and said someone threw a wine bottle at their head, there would be more done than just giving them a hard hat. We would call the police, investigate it and try to find that person and prosecute them.”
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees keeps no figures, but anecdotal evidence suggests sanitation workers nationwide are predominantly black, William Lucy, international secretary/treasurer, said in Washington, D.C.
“Historically, it's just been a place where African-Americans have been able to get hired,” said Mr. Lucy, whose union represents Cincinnati sanitation workers and more than 1.3 million public service and health care members nationwide.
“This was the specific area almost reserved for African- Americans,” he said. “It was an area where (non-black) people did not want to work.”
That sanitation employees remain disproportionately black “is just evidence that race and class remains linked in our society today,” added Dr. Griffler. “Some fundamental issues that Dr. King wanted to settle have not been settled — the connection between racial justice and economic justice.
“And those statistics show that we have not achieved Dr. King's goals and we're not even close to them, partly because we no longer focus on that part of his message.”
For individuals, however, a city job hauling other people's garbage can be a step up.
Pamela Howell became a solid waste helper four years ago because it was better than her previous job.
“It was a better career opportunity for me from the career I was in. I used to be a yellow bus driver,” the 33-year-old Westwood resident said. “Financially, it's better.”
In addition to better pay, sanitation employees report better benefits, training and increasingly safety-conscious managers.
Cincinnati solid waste workers are responsible for garbage pickup, making sure city streets are litter-free and cleaning illegal dump sites, among other duties.
Sharing the streets creates its dangers beyond race and assault.
Two years ago, a Cincinnati solid waste worker was pinned against his truck by a motorist. The worker still has knee problems.
Last year, two workers escaped serious injury when one pushed the other out of the way of an oncoming car.
“The job is always hazardous,” Mr. Kelley said. “A lot of times the public does not pay attention to the workers out there.”
Then there is the weird or malicious. Last week someone put a small homemade bomb in a garbage bag, which exploded as workers loaded the truck. No one was injured and an investigation is continuing.
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