Surviving strikers to get $900K

City pledges $50K to all 14 for MLK50

Nearly 50 years after the Memphis sanitation strike, the city will offer the 14 living strikers $50,000 each in grants and will also contribute more to active sanitation workers’ retirements, Mayor Jim Strickland announced Thursday.

Strickland made the announcement inside the National Civil Rights Museum, home to the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, as the city prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of King’s death and the strike next year.

Workers went on strike over working conditions and low pay after a garbage truck malfunctioned and fatally crushed sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

“We should have had this a long time ago,” said Elmore Nickelberry, 85, one of four active city employees who participated in the strike. The 10 other living strikers are retired.

The city will cover the $900,000 cost of the tax-free grants with money from its reserves, said Strickland.

The grants don’t make up for the city’s failures of the past, said LaSimba Gray Jr., pastor of New Salem Baptist Church — but it’s a start.

Gray said he approached Strickland’s administration with the idea for the grants about a year and a half ago and Strickland, to his credit, began researching the possibility of offering the grants.

In settling the strike, sanitation workers opted to receive Social Security benefits rather than a city pension. Over the