E-mail a friendTaylor Rogers
airdate April 1, 2008
In 1968, Taylor Rogers was a Memphis sanitation worker and helped organize African American workers in launching a strike to win recognition as a union. Strikers were beaten, gassed and jailed, leading Dr. Martin Luther King to agree to draw attention to the workers' plight. The day after speaking to a group of workers, King was assassinated. After 64 days, the strike succeeded, and Rogers later served as president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees' Memphis branch for 20 years.
Former Memphis sanitation worker describes what Dr. King's support and presence meant to the workers' strike. (4:20)
Taylor Rogers
Tavis: I wanted to spend a few minutes talking to one of the sanitation workers, and so I'm pleased to have Taylor Rogers, a retired Memphis sanitation worker who served as one of the union organizers during the 1968 strike that drew Dr. King to this city. He's also a past president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Union here in Memphis. Mr. Rogers, an honor to have you on the program, sir.
Taylor Rogers: Glad to be here.
Tavis: You are the sharpest sanitation worker I have ever seen, brother. You didn't dress this way for work every day, did you?
Rogers: (Laughs) Well, they can now.
Tavis: They can now, okay.
Rogers: Yeah. (Laughter)
Tavis: They can now, but not back in the day.
Rogers: Not back in the days.
Tavis: What do you recall about the conditions that you were working under back in '68 that you all felt Dr. King could raise higher on the American agenda?
Rogers: Well, back in 1968, we had to go back in the backyards and people had 50-gallon drums, and we had to take the garbage out of those drums and put them in tubs, drag those tubs out on your head or shoulders, whichever was comfortable to you. And a lot of those tubs had holes in them; the garbage would leak all over you.
When you got home in the evening you had to take off all those dirty clothes to keep from taking maggots in the house. And our working conditions were just terrible. You had to stand beside the truck to eat your lunch, so we just got tired and said we weren't going to take no more.
Tavis: So you all decided to go out on strike and you did, and the mayor at the time, Mayor Loeb, told you all that strike was illegal, told you to get back to work. What happens then?
Rogers: We told him we wasn't going back to work until we got organized. And then Jerry Wood (sp), Bill Louis (sp) and them came in from International Union and backed us up. And Reverend Kyles and all the ministry in the city got behind us. When we took a stand, they stood with us.
Tavis: How many folk were - how many men are we talking about now?
Rogers: Thirteen hundred sanitation workers.
Tavis: Thirteen hundred sanitation workers. We've all seen those famous photos of you and your colleagues during the strike wearing those signs that say, "I am a man, I am a man." Where did that come from, what did that mean to you?
Rogers: That meant to me that we were wanting some dignity, and that's what we stood up for. And we just stood up and said, "I'm a man."
Tavis: What did you think that Dr. King could do for the movement? There were those who thought it was important to get him in town. We just talked to Reverend Kyles, one of the persons who reached out to Dr. King to get him to come here. But what was your sense of what King could do by coming to Memphis?
Rogers: We felt like King could motivate men and keep us motivated, because things were starting to get long, and people had started getting tired. Some men had started going back to work. And when he came in, we wanted to - he went back, and came back out. So he motivated us to keep us going.
Tavis: How tough was it - to your point now, how tough was it keeping these men organized, keeping them together, keeping them from not breaking ranks and going back to work, as some did?
Rogers: Well, it was kind of tough but we kind of kept them together. T.O. Jones was really our leader, the late T.O. Jones. He was the first president, and I was the third president of AFSCME Local 1733. So along with T.O. and myself and others, we kind of talked to the men and just kind of kept them together.
Tavis: How did you feel, then, when Dr. King comes for the first march and it ends up in violence? That was not what you wanted, was it?
Rogers: No, no.
Tavis: How'd you feel when that happened?
Rogers: Well, it wasn't the marches. (Unintelligible) maybe I don't - it might have been the FBI, somebody trying to discredit Dr. King because he headed the March on Washington. I think that he was trying to be discredited to keep him from doing the March on Washington.
Tavis: So how did you feel then when he does come back to do it over a second time, to try to get it right. And here he is coming to support y'all and he dies while he's here, gets assassinated while he's here.
Rogers: Well, you know we felt real bad over that, but we felt that he didn't die in vain, because we did get organized and we did get recognition. So we felt pretty bad, it was kind of a hard way to go.
Tavis: But after his assassination, though, you all did get organized and conditions because of that, unfortunately, did get better.
Rogers: Got better, yeah.
Tavis: And you still stand strong all these years later.
Rogers: All these years later.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you on the program, and thank you for your sacrifice and your struggle on behalf of our generation.
Rogers: Thank you.
Tavis: Thank you so much, Mr. Rogers. Taylor Rogers, one of those sanitation workers that brought Dr. King to this city. That's what Dr. King gave his life for.
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