1960s Memphis

In March of 1968, “I AM A MAN” would have seemed like a rather innocuous declaration. However, for sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, it was a rallying cry that had implications that went far beyond a local labor dispute. Laurie B. Green’s extraordinarily insightful article, “Race, Labor, and Gender in 1960s Memphis: ‘I Am a Man’ and the Meaning of Freedom” published in Journal of Urban History, goes back to that time that came to symbolize the issues in America during the late 1960s and were rooted in the founding and a failed Post-Civil War Reconstruction. She considered the events that took place in Memphis during the 1950s and 1960s within a much bigger historical context. They brought to the public the other social problems

that were enslaved within the word ‘racism,’ and speculated on how labor and gender issues in one city reflected everything that continues to undermine the promise Thomas Jefferson made in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” Many believe that what was meant by this was “all white men were created equal” or some believe that what he said is true that “all men are created equal” because back in the time of slavery the slaves weren’t considered people, but property.
Memphis in March 1968 had been governed by Mayor Henry Loeb for nearly a decade, and yet the picture the Chamber of Commerce painted a picture of racial harmony for the rest of the United States to encourage corporate interests to relocate and take advantage of the minorities who worked for low wages.

The article makes compelling connections between the “plantation mentality” that characterized the American South from its earliest days through the Civil War and beyond (Green 467). As the article points out, with few exceptions, Memphis was still a cotton-based economy during the 1960s, which suggests this plantation mentality was easily transferrable from the cotton fields onto the factory floors. When sanitation workers decided to protest their working conditions, what might have been an isolated incident was given national media attention when the most famous American civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., participated in the March 1968 march. But according to the article, it was not Dr. King’s presence that mobilized factions to participate in civil disobedience; it was the freedom sentiments that were contained in protest signs that read, “I AM A

MAN.”
The author concentrated extensively upon the role the black women played in this movement perhaps in an attempt to explain why they would have been so moved by what white feminists might have interpreted as a sexist statement. At this time, black women were being enslaved by American labor not in plantations but in “sweatshops, laundries, and hospitals” (Green 466). One of the most riveting descriptions of what Memphis factories were like at that time came from a rural Mississippi migrant worker named Sally Turner, who became a laborer at Farber Brothers auto accessories manufacturing plant, in hopes of achieving greater socioeconomic freedom (Green 473). She described a workplace that segregated its black and white female employees, and how on Friday paydays the employer would withhold wages the black women worked hard all week for. Comparing this to oppressive plantation conditions, Ms. Turner described the efforts to organize a local labor union in 1965 to have a water fountain installed in the plant, stating they were forced to drink out of a “country bucket... and a dipper,” just as their slave ancestors did (Green 473). One year after the passage of landmark federal legislation and in Memphis (and likely in many other southern cities), industrial slavery replaced the plantation variation of slavery. In this article, the author did a masterful job of eloquently applying the old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The assassination of Dr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. less than a week after joining the striking sanitation workers did not minimize the national impact of the “I AM A MAN” campaign as Laurie B. Green revealed in “Race, Labor, and Gender in 1960s Memphis: ‘I Am a Man’ and the Meaning of Freedom.” A simple sentence was transformed into a declarative statement celebrating the civil rights movement in the United States that, as the author noted, transcended time and geography. She observed that ‘being men’ meant a rejection of subservience in terms of civil rights and social identity (Green 484). The black male workers used it as a mantra to attack the racial stereotypes that persisted and the black female workers used it to reject the notions that there was a different “womanhood” defined by race (Green 484). Instead, “I AM A MAN” awoke within these women a determination and commitment to social activism that were equal to their male counterparts. Ms. Green concluded her article with the observation, “In the context of the working-class struggles in the urban South of the 1960s, we need to emphasize demands for both an altered social reality and a changed self-definition. As wage laborers who had left sharecropping and other forms of plantation labor behind when they migrated to the city, urban African American workers now engaged both these aspects of freedom within the turmoil of the mid-1960s”

(465).
The author emphasized that the times may have changed, but the message that was resonating in urban Memphis in 1968 was the same one the slaves were singing about in the Negro spirituals in the rural plantation south. This article accurately argues that the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not liberate the oppressed: A collective chorus of black men and women chanting, “I AM A MAN” marching down the streets of Memphis did.