This chapter reframes the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike by placing it at the intersection of a long civil rights movement and a burgeoning public sector labor movement. In the decade that followed, AFSCME carved out significant strongholds in Florida and Louisiana and made inroads into anti-union bulwarks like Arkansas and North Carolina by drawing on the same potent combination of black public workers and a community-oriented civil rights unionism. These victories set the stage for explosive standoffs with the new generation of black political leaders that came to power in the mid-1970s and provide a crucial thread of continuity between the classic era of black protest and more recent manifestations of civil rights unionism.
Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of a feisty black lawyer named Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr., who became Atlanta’s first black Vice-Mayor and subsequently Atlanta’s first black mayor. Jackson’s mayoral tenure marked the first of its kind in terms of black big city leadership and bolstered the black Mecca image. Jackson’s emergence was the fruition of caste and class within black Atlanta. He was a fifth generation Georgian, born into two of Atlanta’s prominent black families. As the grandson of prominent black Atlantans Andrew Jackson and John Wesley Dobbs, Jackson graduated Morehouse College at age 18 and went on to receive legal training in Durham, North Carolina. Jackson cut his teeth as a champion for the people and made headlines as the people’s politician with his quixotic 1968 run for the U.S. Senate against Senator Herman Talmadge. Jackson’s first term as mayor of Atlanta was full of political success. However, during his second term as mayor, many of his working class and poor black constituency felt as if he sacrificed them to play politics.
In the aftermath of the sanitation strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King, the black community in Memphis achieved an unprecedented political mobilization, especially through the NAACP’s “Black Monday” protest. This essay employs local archival collections, newspapers, and personal interviews to show that in less than two months, the NAACP was able to create a unified front within the black community that forced rapid changes in the Memphis school system. While the NAACP organized downtown marches, pickets, and Monday boycotts of public schools, black youths vandalized schools and businesses before the approaching holiday season. At its height, more than 66,000 students and 600 teachers missed school to support the protest. By the time the boycott ended, the school board agreed to appoint two black advisers, a black assistant superintendent, and a black coordinator. The Black Monday protest was successful, but it also exposed the limitations of coalitions in the Black Power era, as moderates and radicals struggled to find common ground.