Memphis – Tourists will be suspended in front of a group of life-size statues at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on September 1st. , “I’m a man.”

Visitors are of all ages. There is no doubt that some of the elderly remember the origins of the “I am a man” slogan. The attack was made by Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, wearing the signs to point out humanity in the face of dangerous working conditions.

One man is separated from the whispering guest. Joe Calhoun doesn’t need videos or displays that remind you of the strikes depicted in museum exhibits.

He lived it.

Calhoun, now 75, was working adjacent to Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. during his last visit to Memphis on April 4, 1968. I’ve collected signs of striker as a teenager.

“I didn’t understand the scope.”

Calhoun moved to Memphis with his family in 1967. His father was a US Air Force officer and was stationed overseas until Calhoun was 15 years old. Living in Memphis was a culture shock.

“I lived in Memphis towards the end of Jim Crow’s law, and the treatment was still the same,” Calhoun said. “There was a separation in the store. Black people could buy clothes, but they couldn’t give it a try.”

“It was totally foreign to what I went through,” he said. “I come from a very protected, multicultural environment in the military and live abroad. My background didn’t give me what I need to arm myself.”

Just a few months before Calhoun graduated from Melrose High School in Orange Mound on the south side of Memphis, two garbage collectors (Ecole Cole and Robert Walker) were crushed when they loaded garbage into a malfunctioning truck. The February 1968 incident was not the first time a worker had been killed in an equally frightening manner, but Memphis officials still refused to replace the broken equipment.

Cole and Walker’s death were the last straw for fellow workers, most of whom were black, working for low wages in filthy and dangerous conditions.

When volunteers called to support the strike, Calhoun saw the opportunity to be involved and gathered iconic signs with a phrase chosen as a statement of humanity for workers.

“The whole thing about civil rights is new to me and I just thought what was going on was wrong,” Calhoun said. “So when high school and college students called to help strike, I saw the opportunity.”

Calhoun said his parents were worried that he would be redirected to a strike staging site at Claiborne Temple near Beale Street in the heart of downtown Memphis. The city was nervous, and a curfew was imposed and the National Guard deployed to maintain the order.

Calhoun has lived in the church attic for three weeks and listened to the king and other national civil rights leaders, including King, Rev. James Bevel, Rev. James Lawson, and Stokeley Carmichael, and others. We have planned to get better conditions and ways to get higher wages.

“I was meeting them. I got coffee and cigarettes for Rev. Wang and others. I was their runner,” Calhoun said. “But I didn’t understand what was going on. You know when you were young, and your teacher tells you to do something, you could just say that Do that without thinking about the long-term consequences of what you’re doing.”

The 1968 strike was not the first time workers had tried to win concessions from Memphis. They were granted a local union charter by US, County, County, and City Employees (AFSCMEs) in 1964 and received a strike in 1966, but failed. King’s presence in 1968 attracted the attention of the public with the light of workers, and it was Memphis the day before the assassination that he gave his final speech known as “I’ve been to the mountain peaks.” .

The AFSCME organizers negotiated a contract with Memphis officials to recognize the Sanitary Workers’ Union, and ended the strike on April 16th.

Moving feet

King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. Just as the civil rights movement did not die with him, Calhoun also did not stop his work.

Shortly after the King’s murder, Calhoun traveled to Washington, DC to help fulfill King’s plan for a campaign for the poor living in Resurrection City, a 42-day tent camp at the National Mall.

In 1969, Calhoun, a group that fused student nonviolence coordination committees with the more radical Black Panther organising strategies as a member of Memphis invaders, was in the terror of 1969 from Memphis to Little Rock, Arkansas. I took part in fighting.

Calhoun meets the invader leader Lance “Sweet Willy Wine” Watson – he later changed his name to Sukara A. Yahweh – Hygienic attacks. By the time Watson went for a walk against the horror, Calhoun was working at Vista, a federal anti-poverty program in Forest City, Arkansas.

During the 135-mile walk, Calhoun and other members of the group faced the threat of violence from White Arkansan from members of the University of Arkansas football team.

Take a break and find a new mission

Around 1970, the invaders disbanded. Calhoun married in 1974, had children and devoted himself to his career as a historian.

His children grew up and moved.

“After they moved to California, I woke up and thought: What now?” Calhoun said. “I’ve been readministered over the last 10 or 12 years.”

In 2020, after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, Calhoun joined the Memphis Black Life Matters march in protest. He had the following signs: “I marched in 68. Marced in 2020.” Now he said, he renewed the sign.

“We changed it from 2020 to 2021 to 2022, but now it has changed it to 2025.

“People ask what’s different about marching today and in the ’60s. 70% of the marching in Black Life Matter’s marching wasn’t color,” Calhoun said. “Marcher saw how people from other parts of the country were treated.”

He made Tennessee Sen. Justin Pearson one of the Tennessee 3s when the Republican-controlled Tennessee home ousted Pearson in 2023 for leading a gun safety rally on the house floor. I coached the staff.

More recently, Calhoun is the operation manager for the Wizards Collection, a museum located just outside the Lorraine Motel, which houses the works of black photojournalist Ernest Wizards. He chronicles the civil rights movement, and the museum features photographs of key figures in the movement, including Calhoun.

“Everything I do is for my grandchildren,” he said. “It may be selfish, but I want them to live in a better world.”