Civil Rights, Sanitation Work, and the Fight for Dignity
- Joelle Peikes
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Most people don’t think of garbage collectors as civil rights heroes. I certainly haven’t always. But that’s a problem.
Living in Tennessee for the past three years, I’ve been struck by how many defining moments of the American Civil Rights Movement unfolded here. Last year, I visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and revisited the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike from a long-ago history class. Working in global WASH, I’m reminded that the connection between sanitation work and civil rights in the United States is more than a historical anecdote and remains as urgent as ever.
When Sanitation Became a Civil Rights Battle
In the 1950s and ’60s, Black sanitation workers in Memphis were employed under brutal conditions. They earned less than $2 an hour, received no healthcare or paid time off, and faced open racial discrimination from white supervisors. Over 40 percent relied on welfare, despite holding multiple jobs. Denied access to showers at work that were reserved for their white counterparts, Black workers often returned home or rode public buses in dirty uniforms. When it rained, Black sewage workers were sent home without pay, while white workers stayed on the clock.
In the winter of 1968, mounting tensions came to a head when two Black sanitation workers—Echol Cole and Robert Walker—were crushed to death while seeking shelter from the rain in the back of the garbage truck they operated. Their deaths sparked a strike by more than 1,300 Black sanitation workers, who demanded not only safer working conditions and fair wages, but the most basic acknowledgment of their humanity. They marched through the streets carrying signs that read simply: “I AM A MAN.”
The Legacy of 'I AM A MAN'
More than 50 years later, their struggle reverberates in today’s policies and public health systems. Sanitation work—collecting trash, managing sewers, cleaning public toilets—remains among the most dangerous and undervalued jobs in America, and is still disproportionately performed by people of color. Yet without it, society would collapse. Working toilets, clean streets, and functioning sewer systems are not luxuries—they are the foundation of public health and human dignity.
As Americans mark Juneteenth (June 19)- a celebration of Black freedom–we must continue to amplify the ongoing fight for racial equity in the United States. Health and public safety have always been important indicators of social welfare. In a society where we are willing to overlook the health and safety of some for the benefit of others, we have to ask, what do freedom and dignity really mean?
All labor has dignity.
In April 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his second trip to Memphis to support the Sanitation Workers’ Strike. It was during this trip that he was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, today home to the National Civil Rights Museum. Two weeks later, the city voted to recognize the sanitation workers’ union and promised higher wages. The end to the strike marked a turning point that sparked sanitation labor movements nationwide and expanded public-sector union organizing throughout the ’70s and ’80s, according to William P. Jones, a history professor at the University of Minnesota. Today, Black workers have the highest union membership of any racial or ethnic group.
Still One of the Deadliest Jobs in America
Despite advances and the necessity of their work, sanitation workers continue to face unsafe conditions. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the fatality rate for refuse and recyclable material collectors increased in 2023. With 41.4 fatalities per 100,000 employees, it’s been ranked the fourth-deadliest job in the country. In addition, rates of illness in solid waste collection workers spiked alarmingly between 2022 and 2023, from 5.8 to 13.8 per 100 full-time employees.
On the frontline are the Black and Brown workers who disproportionately hold positions in sanitation work, especially in cities. During COVID-19, a Brookings study reported that health care support and service positions, like housekeepers and janitors, were overwhelmingly held by Black and Latinx or Hispanic women. Many are underpaid, lack adequate personal protective equipment, and have little public recognition for their labor.
Andrea, an Intensive Care Unit housekeeper, put it plainly: “One minute you are important enough. The next minute it is like, ‘No, you aren’t that important to get the proper equipment, but you are important enough to clean for the next patient.’”
From Father to Son: The Ongoing Fight in Memphis
In Memphis, as of 2018, at least two workers who stood on the strike line in 1968 were still on routes for the City of Memphis public works department. Robert Walker’s son, Jack Walker, a union member, drives a garbage truck down the same streets that his father did before his tragic death that sparked the strike. Their continued service speaks not only to their resilience and the resilience of workers around the country but also to the unfinished nature of the fight for worker dignity and racial justice.
Sanitation work as a whole includes toilets, sewers, wastewater systems, public hygiene infrastructure, and solid waste and recycling management. These systems are largely failing Black communities in the U.S., especially in the rural South.
In Lowndes County, Alabama, Black and low-income residents have lacked access to basic sanitation services for generations. As a result of systemic neglect, the population of Lowndes county–75% of whom are Black–have been exposed to raw sewage on their properties and in their homes, enduring severe health and safety risks.
In 2023, the U.S. Justice Department reached an agreement with the Alabama Public Health Department that would make improvements to infrastructure, and protect residents who could not afford proper septic systems from arrest. However, that agreement has since been terminated as a result of the Trump administration’s policy “to eradicate illegal DEI preferences and environmental justice across the government and in the private sector,” once again putting Lowndes County’s Black and low-income communities at extreme risk.
Sanitation Worker Justice Now
In March 1968, during his first trip to Memphis to support the strike, Dr. King addressed the workers on the strike line saying, “One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”
But dignity demands more than words; it requires safe working conditions, fair wages, and clean, functioning systems for everyone.
Sanitation is not a technical concern—it’s a civil rights issue that has plagued our nation since its inception.
Dr. King returned to Memphis in April 1968, where he delivered his final speech, the words of which bear particular resonance today: “Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising. And wherever they are assembled today…the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.’”
We can’t honor the sanitation workers of Memphis—or protect the health of Americans today—without fixing the broken systems that continue to fail them. Dignity and freedom aren't symbolic–they are piped, flushed, and unionized.
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