The Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike: King's Last Cause For Economic Justice

It was a call for help from activists that took the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis in March 1968. Days later he would be fatally shot by James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

But before the motel, the shooting, the riots and the mourning, there was the Memphis sanitation workers' strike.

King broke away from his work on the Poor People's Campaign to travel from Atlanta to Tennessee and help energize the strikers — his last cause for economic justice.

Fifty years later, Elmore Nickelberry is one of the last strike participants still on the job with the Memphis Sanitation Department. He's 86 and his night shift starts at the "barn" — mostly a giant parking lot full of garbage trucks.

Today he's a driver with a crew of two, and his truck is equipped to lift and dump trash bins. Back in the '50s and '60s, he did the lifting and dumping.

"When I first started it was rough," he says. "I had to tote tubs on my head, on my shoulders, under my arms."

He rode on the back of truck, jumping off to go into people's back yards to pick up garbage. It was a filthy, and often thankless job.

Nickelberry says the trash tubs would leak, dripping onto his clothes. Sometimes he would have to climb into the back of the truck to help load the garbage.

"And when