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Why We Need the 'I AM 2018' Moment of Silence: Remembering Echol Cole and Robert Walker
Today, we are taking a moment of silence in honor of the two men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, whose tragic deaths 50 years ago led to the Memphis sanitation strike and the historic involvement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As part of "I AM 2018," we are reposting the following article by historian Michael Honey, which originally ran on the AFL-CIO website 10 years ago. It tells the story of Cole and Walker and of King's involvement in the strike.
On Feb. 1, 1968, two sanitation workers in Memphis, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, rode out a driving rainstorm by climbing inside one of the Sanitation Division’s old "wiener barrel" trucks. The walls inside the packer were caked with putrefying garbage of all sorts—yard waste, dead chickens, moldy food.
Cole and Walker’s soiled, worn-out clothes smelled of garbage. The city did not provide them with gloves, uniforms or a place to shower. They did hard, heavy work, lifting garbage tubs and carrying them on their shoulders or heads or pushcarts to dump their contents into outmoded trucks.
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