fc694ec77b928c0a0e85479a0014fb1c.jpg

LAWRENCE: Building a future on old lessons

By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
Jesse Epps, a civil rights and labor activist, was one of the last men to see the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. alive before the civil rights leader was assassinated in 1968 on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tenn.
    Tuesday night, Mr. Epps recounted the events leading up to Dr. King’s assassination to about 50 people at the Bart Luedeke Theater at Rider University. The 72-year-old was the keynote speaker at the university’s celebration of Black History Month.
    “I have the privilege of having some uniqueness,” Mr. Epps said. “I was born and reared in a foreign country — Mississippi. It was a disadvantage, but at the end of the day it was an advantage. We truly had a communion of community. We never locked our doors, but if I got out of line, a neighbor five miles away would call it to my attention.”
    “Most people (today) don’t know their neighbors. What does that have to do with what you (expected) me to address this evening? Unless we remember where we have come from and our mistakes, we are destined to repeat them.”
    Growing up in Dublin, Miss., serenity existed because everyone — blacks and whites — “knew their place,” Mr. Epps said. But one incident is etched in his memory, and almost turned him into a racist, he said.
    Every Saturday, blacks and whites would come to town to shop, Mr. Epps said. There was a 10- or 12-foot-wide sidewalk in front of the handful of stores, and if a white person was walking on the sidewalk, blacks had to step down into the street until the white person had passed by.
    One afternoon, one of the town’s wealthiest white citizens was strolling on the sidewalk with his two daughters. Mr. Epps said. He came up to a black man, who refused to step down. He addressed the black man by a racial epithet and told him to get off the sidewalk.
    The black man refused and told the white man, “There is plenty of room for you and your family to pass.” Enraged, the white man went home and picked up a gun. He returned and shot the black man, and then kicked his body off the sidewalk and into the street. He was never prosecuted.
    “I said, ‘If ever I become a man, I’ll kill every white man I see,’” Mr. Epps said. But he soon realized that if he chose that path, he would not be any different than that white man.
    As an adult, Mr. Epps became a labor organizer with Local 320 of the International Union of Electrical Workers in Syracuse, N.Y. He later became the assistant to the international president of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and was sent to Memphis, Tenn., to help sanitation workers settle their strike against the city.
    The strike was triggered by the deaths of two black sanitation workers — or garbage men, as they were called in Memphis — in the back of a garbage truck as they were trying to get out of the rain. Blacks were not allowed in the cabs of the trucks, which were operated by white men, Mr. Epps said.
    The black sanitation workers attempted to organize and join a union, but the city opposed it, Mr. Epps said. The men sought higher wages and better working conditions. He was sent to Memphis to help negotiate a settlement with city officials.
    Negotiations bogged down, and Dr. King was invited to lend his support to the effort, Mr. Epps said. The Rev. King traveled to Memphis, where he stayed at the Lorraine Motel.
    Mr. Epps said he went to the hotel, where Dr. King and the other leaders began to lay out an action plan. Mr. Epps left Dr. King on the balcony as he went down to his car when “history tells the rest of the story. The assassin did his job.”
    “The matter is in our hands (to carry out) what Dr. King advocated,” Mr. Epps said. The United States must live up to what has been written on paper in the U.S. Constitution, he said — that all men are created equal.