"They're trying to take us down again," said the 81 yr-old original Memphis sanitation striker
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MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death here, some of the striking sanitation workers who marched with him are again fighting for their jobs.
In 1968, wages were so low that some workers had to stand in welfare lines to feed their families. Working conditions were so dangerous men were dying on the job. Today, the divisiveness is over whether the people who pick up the garbage should be government employees or whether the service should be turned over to private contractors . . .
"It looks like they're trying to take us down again," said 81-year-old Elmore Nickleberry, one of the original strikers who still drives a garbage truck at night. Nickleberry and fellow strikers are expected to take part in a march Thursday to honor King's sacrifice on the 45th anniversary of his death.
The shadow of 1968 still looms over Nickleberry and 1,300 other workers. They were overworked and underpaid, picking up grimy, leaking waste without proper uniforms. They faced the daily risk of severe injury or death while working with malfunctioning garbage trucks . . .
read: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=176101287
Elmore Nickleberry - I Am a Man: From Memphis, a Lesson in Life (2009)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2224255/
read/listen: Sanitation Workers Remember King's Last Stand
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89361277
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