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 ca