Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle

Conclusion

288 Black Memphians participating in the sanitation strike support movement had their eyes trained on the present and future of American society and of their own lives, yet their understandings of freedom had emerged out of years of struggle with what many identified as the “plantation mentality.” For urban black southerners in the mid-twentieth century, many of them migrants from the rural South, critiques of the “plantation mentality” resonated with meaning, given their earlier efforts to remove themselves geographically from the power relations of the plantation. Their use of the term imbued the idea of freedom with complex and historically specific meanings, which involved dismantling racist practices that influenced everyday life and rejecting racial identities that associated blackness with servitude and even inhumanity. The idea of the “plantation mentality,” which surfaced as part of the black vernacular of the 1960s, offers new insights into nearly three decades of struggle between the Second World War and the sanitation strike, a crucial period in the history of the black freedom movement and American society. Grappling with that period today demands that we analyze both the actions and the thoughts of those who struggled on many fronts to claim a new manhood and womanhood and to change their society. The freedom movement sparked by the 1968 sanitation strike did not conclude with Mayor Loeb’s agreement with the union but inspired further struggles, both immediately and over the next decade. Motivated by the symbolism and momentum of the strike, and deeply moved by the fact that King had lost his life in Memphis, black Memphians in workplaces, public housing, high schools, and elsewhere launched protests to challenge racial injustice and demand equality. Whether they had taken to heart King’s message about reaching the promised land or interpreted “I Conclusion 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 Conclusion 289 Am a Man” as a call to demand respect, black Memphians mobilized following the strike and King’s assassination. This is not to say that such struggles resulted automatically from the tragedy of King’s assassination in Memphis, or from the intense weeks of meetings and demonstrations on behalf of the sanitation workers that had preceded it. Quite the contrary. Many black Memphians describe the devastation they experienced in April 1968 and for months thereafter. Naomi Jones, a member of Local 282 of the furniture workers union who had been involved with the strike support movement, remembers that she “felt so let down for six or eight months after Martin Luther King died.” Songwriter and performer Isaac Hayes, who grew up in Memphis and worked at Stax, describes himself as “filled with so much bitterness and anguish, till I couldn’t deal with it.” Hayes “couldn’t write for about a year,” he recalls.1 It is important to see, therefore, that the movements that ensued in the aftermath of the sanitation strike had already been under way before the sanitation strike but now gained new steam from workers’ responses to the tragedy of King’s death, and identification with the ideas conveyed by the strike. When public employees at John Gaston Hospital, for example, initiated their own strike almost immediately after the sanitation strike ended, they adopted “I Am a Man” as their own slogan and joined afscme Local 1733, the sanitation workers’ local. Although the hospital had finally desegregated as a result of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, orderlies, nurses, and assistants continued to confront low wages, long hours, and humiliating treatment.2 Organizing in manufacturing sweatshops and mass industries also intensified, as did the nascent welfare rights movement. For Local 282 of the furniture workers union, the strike would inspire numerous new organizing drives and usher in a new young leadership, with Willie Rudd, a militant young black Memphis worker, elected as president. The reinvigorated local made racial justice and community-based protest fundamental to organizing, as was especially the case during the 1980 strike against the Memphis Furniture Company, when workers finally won union representation after a protracted, difficult struggle. The dynamic, black-led labor organization also elected to key positions women like Ida Leachman, who was unable to get a factory job until 1969, when a plant where she had been unable to procure a job in the early 1960s finally desegregated.3 At rca, where black workers had also supported the sanitation strike, King’s assassination ignited so much rage that management temporarily suspended production. The language of freedom...