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What Labor Day Owes Black Memphis

They built the holiday they were written out of — from the Pullman porters barred from the 1894 strike to the sanitation workers who died for a union in 1968

By Shawnee Calhoun | Scarlett's Media

September 7, 2026 | Memphis, TN

Split-panel illustration: at left, President Grover Cleveland signs the Labor Day bill into law in 1894; at right, Memphis sanitation workers march in 1968 holding I AM A MAN placards.

A split-panel illustration contrasting two moments 74 years apart. At left, a president signs the bill making Labor Day a federal holiday on June 28, 1894 — two days into the Pullman boycott, and six days before he sent federal troops to break it. At right, Memphis sanitation workers march in 1968 for union recognition, safety measures and a living wage. Illustration generated with Gemini AI; concept and direction by Shawnee Calhoun.

For a lot of us, Labor Day means the park. Overton. Glenview. Coolers and folding chairs and somebody's uncle guarding the grill. It's one of the few days parents get a whole afternoon with their kids and everybody else's kids. It's rest that was earned.

It's also a holiday with a history most people never learned. That history runs straight through Black Memphis.

A holiday signed while the strike was still being broken

Labor Day became a federal holiday on June 28, 1894, two days after the Pullman boycott began.

Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company outside Chicago had walked off the job. The company laid off 2,200 workers and cut the wages of those who remained by a quarter to a half. It refused to lower rents in the company town where it made its workers live. At the same time, the company was sitting on a surplus of about $4 million and still paying dividends to its shareholders.

The American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, backed the strikers by refusing to handle any train carrying a Pullman car. A quarter of a million railroad workers struck in support. President Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day bill two days into that boycott.

Six days after he signed it, he sent the Army into Chicago. More than 14,000 armed federal troops, marshals and police were deployed across 27 states. Some 34 people were shot dead, dozens more were wounded and hundreds were jailed. The strike was broken in under five months.

So the country gave labor a holiday first, then sent soldiers to break the strike that was still going on.

Who the porters were, and why they couldn't join

Here's the part that gets left out. The Pullman Palace Car Company was, at its height, the largest private employer of Black workers in America.

A Pullman porter worked the sleeping cars on overnight passenger trains. He carried luggage, made up berths, shined shoes, served food and looked after passengers through the night, frequently 400 hours a month with no overtime. After the Civil War, George Pullman recruited formerly enslaved men for the job specifically. He was selling white passengers the experience of being personally attended to. Those passengers called porters “George,” after Pullman himself, rather than learning their names.

Porters did work comparable to conductors, but were paid and ranked well below them. Porters had no path to promotion or seniority, and much of what they earned came from tips. Their income depended on whether a white passenger felt generous that night.

When the American Railway Union struck in 1894, its constitution barred Black members. The company's roughly 2,000 porters couldn't walk out with the union, couldn't picket and couldn't bargain through it. When the trains stopped, they lost income anyway.

They had reason to stay quiet, too. Between 1900 and 1925, porters tried to organize repeatedly. The company crushed every attempt through firings, blacklisting and threats.

So they built their own, in secret. On Aug. 25, 1925, about 500 porters met in a Harlem hall and formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. They elected A. Philip Randolph president for a practical reason. Randolph didn't work for Pullman, so the company couldn't fire him.

Pullman fought back for 12 years. The company planted spies in union meetings and fired hundreds of workers connected to the Brotherhood. It pushed a company-run “Employee Representation Plan” as a substitute. In 1932, it imposed a retaliatory $5 pay cut. It refused to recognize the union even after Congress passed the Railway Labor Act.

Pullman signed in 1937. It was the first contract between a major American corporation and a Black-led union. That's the load-bearing wall of Labor Day, not a footnote to it.

From the porters to the Mall to Memphis

Randolph didn't stop there, and the line from what he built runs to Memphis.

In January 1941, the country was arming for war and Black workers were shut out of defense plants. Randolph called for a mass march on Washington. He named it the March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense, and organized to bring as many as 100,000 Black Americans to the Lincoln Memorial.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Randolph and NAACP head Walter White on June 18 and asked him to call it off. Randolph said he would, on one condition: an executive order. On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802. It banned racial discrimination in defense industries and the federal government, and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to monitor hiring. It was the first major federal action on racial inequality since Reconstruction.

But Roosevelt gave up less than that sounds like. The order barred discrimination in hiring and left segregation alone. Randolph had also asked him to desegregate the military, and he refused. President Harry Truman did that seven years later.

Randolph revived the march in 1962 and brought in the major civil rights organizations. He handed the organizing to his protégé Bayard Rustin. On Aug. 28, 1963, roughly a quarter of a million people came to Washington for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Jobs came first in the name both times, in 1941 and again in 1963. The man who conceived both marches was a labor organizer before he was anything else. He'd learned on the sleeping cars that a right you can't earn a living under isn't a right yet.

Five years later that argument arrived in Memphis, in the back of a garbage truck.

Now bring it home

Memphis has its own chapter, and the country knows it by four words on a picket sign.

On Feb. 1, 1968, sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death by a malfunctioning compactor on a city garbage truck. They were doing a job Black men in Memphis took because it was frequently the only job available to them. They earned roughly $1.60 to $1.90 an hour, with drivers at the top of that scale. Full-time workers qualified for food stamps. The city gave them no uniforms, so men walked home in their own clothes, covered in what they'd hauled.

Eleven days later, roughly 1,300 workers walked off. They wanted union recognition, higher wages, safety measures, overtime, sick leave and pay for the rainy days the city sent them home without it.

Historian Michael K. Honey has documented how sanitation work in that era sat somewhere between the plantation economy and the modern city. Historian Jason Sokol notes that in 1960s Memphis, 86% of Black men worked low-paid manual jobs.

The signs didn't say “Raise our wages.” They said I AM A MAN.

The strike ran 64 days. Larry Payne, 16, was killed by police during a march. The Rev. James Lawson called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and asked him to come. King delivered “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” at Mason Temple on April 3 and was assassinated the next day. The strike ended April 16. The city recognized the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1733 and raised wages.

Memphis didn't just participate in labor history. Memphis is where the argument over whether Black work counts as work got settled, at the cost of several men's lives.

The stereotype, and the women it was built on

The stereotype of Black people being lazy, after centuries of forced unpaid labor in this country, is an enigma unto itself.

And it isn't just a pop-culture staple. In Black homes it worked as a harsh warning, and the warning got passed down by women. Grandmothers who worked as maids came home and raised their daughters and granddaughters to be housekeepers. In many homes sitting was a luxury to be earned. Girls were taught that keeping a man meant cooking and keeping a clean house. That kind of child rearing did a number on the mental health of the next two generations of young women and girls.

The federal record explains why those grandmothers held on so tightly.

When Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, domestic workers were excluded by name. No minimum wage. No overtime. No old-age benefits. No unemployment insurance. Southern lawmakers demanded those carve-outs, and everyone understood at the time what they were for.

By 1930, roughly two-thirds of employed Black women in America worked as domestic servants. Roughly 90% of Black working women got no benefit at all from the New Deal laws that created a minimum wage, maximum hours, the right to organize and help for the unemployed and elderly. Domestic workers weren't covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act until 1974.

So when a Black woman cleaning a white family's house in the 1950s had no sick days, that wasn't her employer being harsh. That was federal law. There was no floor under her. If she got sick she lost the day, and if she lost enough days she lost the job. That's why she so often brought a daughter of working age along with her, or in place of her.

“She didn’t have a maid. She was the maid, and she was raising a daughter to survive the same arrangement.”

— Shawnee Calhoun, Editor-in-Chief, Scarlett's Media

What the next generations did with it

From the 1940s through the mid-1980s, young Black mothers stepped back from traditional motherhood in numbers, and grandparents raised the children. That story gets told across this city in households with no connection to one another. The women handing off were daughters of women who'd been worked past exhaustion. The grandparents taking those children on were the same generation that had been pushed hardest.

What happened next is documented.

Those grandchildren, the millennials, went into business for themselves in large numbers. Part of the reason was to get away from the stress and disrespect that came with service work.

Black women are now the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. Between 2024 and 2025, Black women-owned employer businesses grew 13%, while women-owned businesses overall grew 4.4%, according to Wells Fargo's Impact of Women Businesses report. From 2014 to 2019, the number of businesses owned by Black women grew 50%, the highest rate of any group of women.

Researchers are direct about what drives it. High rates of Black women's entrepreneurship reflect, in part, a lack of opportunity in the traditional workforce. Many start businesses to survive rather than to chase an opening in the market. Black women are also more likely than any other group to fund those businesses themselves, because the capital doesn't come.

That same generation moved away from finding their identity in physically intensive labor, and became the first in many families to sit down with a therapist. American Psychiatric Association figures show 35% of millennials have received mental health treatment, compared with 26% of Generation X, 22% of baby boomers and 15% of the Silent Generation.

Where Memphis stands

Unemployment in the Memphis metro was 4.8% in June, essentially flat from a year earlier. That number sounds fine. It hides the thing that matters.

The metro's average weekly wage was $1,359 in the last quarter of 2025, against a national average of $1,569. Memphis workers earn about 87 cents for every dollar the average American worker earns. This is a city whose defining industry is moving the country's freight.

Now look inside that.

In Shelby County, median household income for Black households is $47,180. For non-Hispanic white households it's $94,971. Black households here earn 50 cents for every dollar white households earn. Inside the city limits the gap narrows, but only because white income falls with it: $42,269 against $75,485, or 56 cents on the dollar.

Poverty runs the same way. In Shelby County, 25% of Black residents live in poverty against 8% of white residents. In the city it's 27.9% against 10.8%. Among children it's worse: 39.5% of Black children countywide, 42.7% inside the city.

Those figures come from the 2025 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet, produced annually by Dr. Elena Delavega of the University of Memphis School of Social Work and Dr. Gregory M. Blumenthal, using 2024 American Community Survey estimates.

Two more findings from that report belong in any honest Labor Day story about this city.

First, the direction. Poverty fell nationally from 2023 to 2024, but rose here. It rose in Memphis, in Shelby County and across the metro, overall and for children and for every minority group. The authors write that Memphis poverty looks structural rather than cyclical, and that it's out of step with the rest of the country.

Second, the causes they name. A labor market built on low-wage warehouse work. No adequate public transportation. Out-of-town firms buying up Memphis housing and renting it back at inflated prices. And a wage floor that hasn't moved in 16 years. Tennessee has no state minimum wage and takes the federal $7.25, unchanged since 2009. The minimum anchors the wages above it, so that freeze holds down what Memphians earn well past the bottom of the scale.

The Memphis metro now ranks second in overall poverty among the country’s largest metro areas, behind only Fresno, California, and first in child poverty. The city ranks second among large American cities in both, behind only Detroit.

What's being unwound right now

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14173. It revoked Executive Order 11246, the 1965 order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson that required federal contractors to maintain integrated workplaces.

On Feb. 15, 2025, the General Services Administration told civil agencies to stop including clause 52.222-21 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, “Prohibition of Segregated Facilities,” in new contracts. That clause had required contractors to certify they didn't maintain segregated restrooms, dining areas, drinking fountains, waiting rooms or transportation. NPR reported the change on March 18, 2025.

Segregation is still illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to every company holding a federal contract. A GSA spokesperson said contractors remain subject to civil rights law and called the clause duplicative. What came out was the explicit contractual prohibition, not the ban underneath it.

Legal scholars didn't shrug it off. Melissa Murray, a constitutional law professor at New York University, told NPR the change is symbolic, but that the symbolism is meaningful. Excluding those provisions from what the government requires of its contractors, she said, speaks volumes.

What improvement requires

A wage floor that has moved this century. Tennessee has no state minimum and takes the federal $7.25, frozen since 2009. Delavega and Blumenthal identify that anchor as one reason Memphis wages stay low across the board. The sanitation workers won recognition in 1968, and somebody should ask what that contract is worth now.

Ownership, not just employment. Black women are starting businesses faster than anyone in the country, and paying for them out of pocket because lenders and investors won't. That gap is where the policy work is.

Union strength. Tennessee is a right-to-work state, and that carries a cost. It ought to be named out loud in the city where the labor movement's most famous strike happened.

And the public payroll. Government has been one of the few sectors where Black workers reliably found stable middle-class wages. It's the sector currently being cut.

The point

The cookout isn't the problem, and neither is rest. Black Memphians have earned a day off more thoroughly than almost anyone in this country.

The problem is a holiday that honors labor while the labor movement it commemorates wrote Black workers out of its own constitution. The problem is a federal government that built a safety net and left Black women standing outside it for 36 years. The problem is a city that turned all of that into a national reckoning, then went back to paying Black households 50 cents on the dollar.

Randolph spent 22 years threatening a march to make this country say in writing that Black people could work. Sixty years after he finally marched, the government is taking the writing back out.

Two men died in the back of a garbage truck to make this city admit what its workers were. The least the rest of us can do on a Monday in September is say their names.

Echol Cole. Robert Walker.

 Sources & Further Reading

2025 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet — Dr. Elena Delavega and Dr. Gregory M. Blumenthal, University of Memphis
U.S. Department of Labor Hall of Honor — Workers of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
National Civil Rights Museum — Lorraine Motel, 450 Mulberry St., Memphis
AFSCME Local 1733 — the union Memphis sanitation workers won in 1968
NPR — reporting on the removal of the federal segregated-facilities clause

Scarlett's Media✍🏾📝

Monday, September 7, 2026