MEMPHIS — On a September day at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, tourists pause solemnly before a group of life-size statues, some made in Tennessee National Guard uniforms, others with red-and-white signs around their necks proclaiming, “I’m a man.”
The visitors are of all ages. Some of the older folks no doubt remember the genesis of the slogan “I am a man” — the Memphis sanitation workers strike of 1968, in which workers carried the signs to highlight their humanity in the face of unsafe working conditions.
A man stands apart from the whispering guests. Joe Calhoun doesn’t need videos or displays reminding him of the strike depicted in the museum exhibit.
He lived it.
Calhoun, now 75, raised strikers’ signs as a teenager during the three-week period he worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights icon’s final visit to Memphis before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968 together.
“I didn’t understand the scope”
Calhoun moved to Memphis with his family in 1967. His father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and was stationed overseas until Calhoun was 15. Living in Memphis was a culture shock.
“I lived in Memphis toward the end of the Jim Crow laws, but the treatment was still the same,” Calhoun said. “There was racial segregation in the stores. Black people could buy clothes, but you couldn’t try them on.”
“It was completely alien to anything I had experienced before,” he said. “I came from a very sheltered and multicultural background in the military and lived outside the country. My background didn’t give me what I needed to arm myself.”
Just months before Calhoun graduated from Melrose High School in Orange Mound, a black neighborhood in south Memphis, two trash collectors — Echol Cole and Robert Walker — were crushed while loading trash into a broken-down truck. The February 1968 incident was not the first time workers had been killed in similarly gruesome ways, but Memphis officials still refused to replace the faulty equipment.
The deaths of Cole and Walker were the final straw for their colleagues, most of whom were black and worked for low pay in filthy and unsafe conditions and were treated more like animals than people, they said during the strikes.
When a call went out for volunteers to support the strike, Calhoun saw an opportunity to get involved by putting together the iconic signs with the phrase on them chosen to express the workers’ humanity.
“The whole civil rights thing was new to me and I just thought what was going on was wrong,” Calhoun said. “So when high school and college students were called upon to help with the strike, I saw an opportunity.”
Calhoun said his parents were concerned that he would travel from their home to the site of the strike at Clayborn Temple near Beale Street in the heart of downtown Memphis. The city was tense, a curfew was imposed and the National Guard was deployed to maintain order.
For three weeks, Calhoun lived in the church attic and listened as King and other national civil rights leaders such as Bayard Rustin, James Bevel, Rev. James Lawson and Stokely Carmichael plotted how to achieve better conditions and higher wages for sanitation workers.
“I was in a meeting with them. I got coffee and cigarettes for Rev. King and others. I was a runner for them,” Calhoun said. “But I didn’t understand the magnitude of what was happening. You know when you’re young and your teacher tells you to do something, you do it without thinking about the long-term effects of what you’re doing.”
The 1968 strike was not the first time workers tried to get concessions from Memphis. They had received a local union charter from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in 1964 and also went on strike in 1966, but failed. King’s presence in 1968 drew national attention to the plight of workers, and the day before his assassination he gave his final speech in Memphis, known as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
AFSCME organizers negotiated an agreement with Memphis officials to recognize a sanitation workers union, ending the strike on April 16.
Feet in motion
King was murdered at the Lorraine Motel. Just as the civil rights movement did not die with him, Calhoun did not cease his activities.
Shortly after King’s assassination, Calhoun traveled to Washington, D.C. to carry out King’s plan for a pro-poor campaign. He lived at Resurrection City, the 42-day camp on the National Mall.
As a member of the Memphis Invaders, a group that combined the organizing strategies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the more militant Black Panthers, Calhoun participated in the 1969 Walk Against Fear from Memphis to Little Rock, Arkansas.
Calhoun had met the Invaders’ leader, Lance “Sweet Willie Wine” Watson – he later changed his name to Suhkara A. Yahweh – during the sanitation strike. When Watson was staging the Walk Against Fear, Calhoun was working for VISTA, a federal anti-poverty program, in Forrest City, Arkansas, Watson’s base for the march.
During the 135-mile trek, Calhoun and other members of the group faced daily threats of violence from white Arkansans, including, he recalled, members of the University of Arkansas football team crammed into a flatbed truck in Hazen.
Take a break and find a novel mission
Around 1970 the Invaders disbanded. Calhoun married in 1974, had children and devoted himself to them and his career as a historian.
His children grew up and moved away.
“After they moved to California, I woke up and thought, ‘Now what?’” Calhoun said. “In the last 10 or 12 years I’ve gotten involved again.”
In 2020, after police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, Calhoun joined a Black Lives Matters march in Memphis in protest. He carried a sign that read: “I marched in 1968. Marching in 2020.” Now, he said, he has updated the sign.
“I changed 2020 to 2021, then to 2022, and now I’m changing it to 2025.
“People ask me what’s different about marches today and in the ’60s. Seventy percent of protesters at Black Lives Matter marches were not of color,” Calhoun said. “The protesters saw how people were treated in other parts of the country.”
He mentored Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, the Memphis Democrat who made national headlines as one of the Tennessee Three when the Republican-dominated Tennessee House of Representatives expelled Pearson for leading a rally on gun safety in the House in 2023 .
These days, Calhoun serves as director of operations for The Withers Collection, a museum just around the corner from the Lorraine Motel that houses the work of black photojournalist Ernest Withers. He documented the civil rights movement and the museum displays photos of the movement’s essential figures – 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.”
