The Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike

Memphis sanitation workers stayed off the job starting January 12, 1968 in a strike that lasted for nine weeks. This was the strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated on April 4 of that year.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We are
coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Memphis Sanitation

(00:21):
Workers Strike. After voting the strike on February eleventh night,
Memphis sanitation workers stayed off the job starting on the
twelfth and a strike that lasted for nine weeks. This
is a strike that brought Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
To Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated on April four
of that year. And for a lot of folks, that
is really what they know about the strike. They know

(00:43):
it's the reason that Dr King was in Memphis that day,
but his assassination also really overshadowed the strike itself, which
had been going on for a month before he arrived
on the scene. So today we're going to talk about
the strike which started out as an effort to secure
better pay and conditions for sanitation kers in Memphis, but
really came to be considered part of the greater civil

(01:04):
rights movement and the movement for economic justice. Memphis sits
along the Mississippi River in West Tennessee, and today its
population is majority black, but in the nineteen sixties his
population was about forty black, and about sixty of those
black residents were living in poverty. More than eighty percent
of black men living in Memphis were employed doing menial

(01:26):
labor for very low pay. Many had moved to the
city from nearby rural areas, leaving behind sharecropping cotton in
the hope of a better life. When Memphis City schools
desegregated in nineteen sixty one, things progressed without the level
of violence that struck so many other parts of the South,
staring school desegregation. By the late sixties, the city government

(01:49):
included some elected and appointed black officials as well, but
at the same time, Memphis really still had something of
a plantation mentality. This mentality was particularly obvious in the
city's Department of Public Works, especially when it came to sanitation.
The workforce for waste collection was overwhelmingly black, with the

(02:11):
only white employees working as supervisors or drivers. In bad weather,
employees who worked outside who were predominantly black would be
sent home without pay, while their supervisors, who were white
were allowed to stay on the job. Even though there
really wasn't much for them to do. Most of the
garbage collectors made minimum wage, which was a dollar and

(02:32):
sixty cents an hour for forty hours of work a week.
There was no overtime pay, but you were expected to
work for as long as it took you to finish
your collection route, no matter how long that took. So
a lot of the men were working more like sixty
hours a week for forty hours of pay. This was
just not enough money to make ends meet. About of

(02:53):
memphisis sanitation workers qualified for welfare assistance, hundreds were on
food stamps, and some had second jobs. But there was
a perception in Memphis that sanitation workers had a benefit
that made up for this. They got so called handouts
from households when they collected garbage. This was generally cast
off clothing given to the workers rather than just throwing

(03:16):
it away. Aside from the pay, sanitation workers had a dehumanizing, filthy,
and physically demanding job and most parts of town trash
wasn't brought out to the curb on collection day, and
workers had to go behind every house to retrieve a
fifty five gallon metal garbage can or a tub and
then haul it back to the truck. For the smaller tubs,

(03:36):
you could ease some of the strain on your arms
and your back by carrying it on your head or
on your shoulder. But this was before the days of
using plastic liners and trash cans, so the cans leaked
everything from filthy water to maggots on the people who
were carrying them. Sanitation workers had nowhere to shower or
change clothes on the job, so they had to go

(03:58):
home at the end of the day in this same
filthy clothes and take off as much as they could
before they got into the house. They had no clean
place to eat lunch, no paid time off, no grievance process,
and no workers comp if they were injured on the job.
In fact, if you were injured on the job, you
ran the risk of being fired for it. In addition,

(04:18):
I'm not having a clean place to eat lunch. They
didn't have anywhere to wash their hands before eating lunch. Uh.
And there are like oral histories and and other interviews
where they talked about like we would find a scrap
of soap that had been thrown away, and like try
to use that to wash our hands before we ate
collecting garbage is still i would say, not a pleasant job. No,

(04:39):
but it was worse in the sixties. In Memphis in
the sixties, a former sanitation worker named t O. Jones
had started trying to organize a union. Jones had been
a sanitation worker himself from ninety eight to nineteen sixty three,
and he had led a spontaneous walk out of thirty
two other workers that year. All of those work, including Jones,

(05:01):
were fired. Most of them eventually got their jobs back,
but rather than returning to work for the city, Jones
turned his attention to labor activism. In August of nineteen
sixty four, after months of work, the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees or Asked Me, granted the sanitation
workers a charter as Local seventeen thirty three. I'm not

(05:22):
sure if this is actually intentional, but a lot of
the like the local lore about it is that thirty
three at the end of the number is in reference
to those thirty three workers who had walked out and
been fired in uh in nineteen sixty three. The city, however,
did not recognize this union or allow it to negotiate
on behalf of the workers. The city also refused to

(05:45):
deduct union dues from members paychecks, which is known as
dues check off. Dues check off can be a contentious
issue in the world of labor relations, but it allows
the union to collect dues efficiently without workers having to
keep up with or make in visual payments to the union,
and in this case, it's something that the union members
specifically wanted. In nineteen sixty six, the sanitation workers tried

(06:09):
to go on strike for better working conditions, but the
city petitioned the court for an injunction to stop to strike.
The resulting court order forbade any future strikes or demonstrations
by municipal employees. A lot of the workers were also
really reluctant to make waves even if they had joined
the union. That mass firing in nineteen sixty three made

(06:30):
it clear that their jobs would be at risk. Then,
in nineteen sixty eight, two events shifted things for Memphis
sanitation workers. The first was that Henry Loebe was sworn
in his mayor after being elected in a runoff in
nineteen sixty seven. Loebe had served as mayor from nineteen
sixty to nineteen sixty four as well, and both times

(06:50):
he had run on a campaign of so called white unity.
He was a conservative, anti union segregationist, and in the
runoff election he had to feated incumbent William B. Ingram.
Ingram's record on race wasn't all that progressive, but he
had spoken to black church congregations, and he had a
reputation for treating black defendants fairly in his work as

(07:13):
a judge. And the election that led to that runoff,
Artie Walker Willis, known as a w had also been defeated.
Willis was a black civil rights activist, a lawyer, and
a businessman who had helped desegregate Memphis public schools. So,
with the defeats of both Willis and Ingram and the
election of Henry Loebe, the nineteen sixties seven mayoral election

(07:34):
felt like a huge step backward for the black community
in Memphis. The second event was the tragic and horrifying
deaths of two sanitation workers on February one. Ecle Cole
and Robert Walker had taken shelter in the back of
their garbage truck to try to get out of a
heavy rain. A short circuit caused the truck's compactor to
start without warning, and they weren't able to escape. These

(07:57):
trucks were well past the end of their life expect
to see, and the workers had been raising concerns about
their safety for months before this tragic event happened. Cole
and Walker were both in their thirties. They both had
families and children, and the city gave each family five
hundred dollars to cover funeral expenses along with a month's
pay for Cole and Walker. They got no other compensation,

(08:20):
no other insurance pay out, and no one from the
city attended either man's funeral. The city also did nothing
to address whether the same malfunction could happen again in
all these trucks that were still on the road. After
the two men's deaths, union leaders stepped up their efforts
to get the city to officially recognize the union and
to allow the union to negotiate a contract for the

(08:42):
sanitation workers. Mayor Loebes steadfastly refused. This refusal is what
ultimately led the men to strike, which we are going
to get to after a quick sponsor break. On February eleventh, nineteen,
after talks with the city failed to reach any kind

(09:03):
of resolution, the Memphis Sanitation Workers Union voted to go
on strike. Ed Gillis, who was one of the workers,
became their main liaison with t O. Jones, and Jones
became the workers representative with the city. Going on strike
was a risky decision. On top of the inherent risk
in walking off the job and the loss of income
that comes with it, Striking workers often face harassment, intimidation, threats,

(09:27):
and even violence. Then there was also the injunction prohibiting
municipal employees from going on strike. The workers also voted
to strike without discussing it with National ASTHMY leadership. They
knew that the national organization wasn't really likely to support
this decision. In general, garbage strikes are a lot more
effective in the summer because it's hot and the garbage

(09:49):
is a lot stickier, and the public gets a lot
more on board with getting things resolved quickly. The National
organization also didn't have a fund that could support the strike.
Knew that the city already had a strong anti union sentiment,
and it was a union of black workers and a
majority white Southern city with a segregationist mayor. So at
the beginning of the strike, the Memphis sanitation workers were

(10:11):
essentially on their own regardless. On Monday, February twelve, most
of the city's hundred sanitation workers did not go to work.
According to reports, two hundred or so state on the job,
but fewer than forty of the city's fleet of one
eight garbage trucks rolled out that day. From the very beginning,
Mayor Loeb maintained that the strike was illegal and that

(10:34):
he would not negotiate with the men in any way
unless they returned to work. The strike progressed, along with
meetings and protests to try to draw attention to the
workers demands. Uncollected garbage started to pile up around the city.
Some residents hauled their own garbage to the dump, while
organizations like the j c S raged bulk pickups. By

(10:55):
February fourteenth, the few garbage trucks that were still on
the road were traveling with police escorts. The Memphis branch
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
that is, the a CP, endorsed the strike on the
sixteenth of February. On the eighteenth, asked ME national president
Jerry Whorf arrived in Memphis to help with the negotiations,

(11:16):
having been convinced that the strike should go ahead. There
wasn't much progress between the city and the union, though.
On the eighteenth, Rabbi James Wax tried to mediate one
of the many meetings that would take place over the
course of the strike. Talks went on until five am
with nothing resolved. After a sit in at City Hall,

(11:37):
a city council subcommittee voted to recognize the Sanitation Workers union.
This took place on February twenty two, and the committee
recommended an increase in the workers pay as well. They
passed all these recommendations up to the mayor, who again
stated that he would not negotiate with the union. On
the twenty three the full city Council was scheduled to

(11:58):
vote on the sub committee resolution. The striking workers arranged
a nonviolent march to City Hall to coincide with this vote,
but in the end, the city Council voted to support
the mayor rather than supporting the striking workers. The crowd
of about people was of course disappointed and angry at
this decision. They started their return march from City Hall

(12:21):
back to Mason Temple, Church of God in Christ, but
as they were marching, police started nudging their cruisers into
the marchers. Until one eventually rolled over a woman's foot.
People nearby responded by pushing and rocking the police car.
Then police broke up the march with indiscriminate use of
mace in what came to be known as the Mazing

(12:42):
of Main Street. Seven protesters were arrested and jailed the
next day. In response to this, about a hundred and
fifty local clergy formed the Community on the Move for
Equality or COME to act as allies to the striking
sanitation workers. They plan to use non violence of disobedience
to put more pressure on the city and to raise

(13:03):
more awareness of these issues. The Reverend James T. Lawson,
activist and pastor at Sentinary Methodist Church in Memphis, led
this new organization. Before moving to Memphis, Lawson had a
long history with the civil rights movement, including helping to
coordinate the Freedom Rides in nineteen sixty one. He's one
of the civil rights leaders still alive as of when

(13:25):
we are recording this podcast. Over the course of the strike,
Come printed its own newspaper called The Appeal, to keep
the community informed about what was happening and offer guidance
about how to stay involved and to rally the greater
community around the cause of the striking workers. This included
daily marches and protests with the intent of filling Memphisis

(13:46):
jails with non violent demonstrators. Another of the organization strategies
was a boycott of all downtown Memphis businesses, especially the
ones that had connections to the mayor and his family.
A lot of this episode today is really focused on men,
because the striking workers and many of the city and
civil rights leaders involved were men. But here's where we

(14:08):
should note that women were an active part of this
strike as well. Overwhelmingly, women were the ones maintaining this
boycott of downtown businesses. The mayor and his family had
a lot of businesses downtown, so this was affecting the
mayor directly. Women were also active in the church community
and civil rights organizations that were arranging demonstrations and aid

(14:28):
for the striking workers. Women prepared food, they laundered and
donated clothing, and they participated in the marches, sit ins,
and other demonstrations themselves as well. This strike really could
not have continued without the involvement of women. Even with
Memphisis religious community increasingly supporting the strike, the stalemate between

(14:49):
the union and the city continued Local seventeen thirty three
drafted and distributed an apology letter to the city. It began,
to our fellow citizens, we apologize for the inconvenience created
by the mayor of your city. He has refused to
recognize the basic human needs of the workers who provide
vital services to you and your family. Every Man should

(15:11):
receive a decent wage for his labor. Every Man should
have the right to have his grievances resolved in an
orderly fashion without fear of reprisal. Every man who performs
his work should have security on his job. Every man
should have adequate insurance to meet the needs of unexpected
illness or death. And the letter went on from there

(15:31):
and it concluded that these were not issues of race relations,
that it was about economic justice and dignity for all
of those who work for a living. On February twenty nine,
the mayor published a letter of his own in the
Memphis Press Scimitar, in which he maintained again that the
strike was illegal and that no negotiation would happen until
everyone returned to work. Only after everyone went back to

(15:53):
work would he meet with representatives of the Public Works Department,
And in his words quote make our meaning full grievance
procedure even more meaningful. The letter said that the mayor
would recommend an eight cent raised, but it also made
it clear that he would not approve dudes check off.
The mayor also sent letters to every striking worker, and

(16:15):
each letter invited that man back to work that day
without union recognition and without any other concessions. The union
filed a suit against the city in federal court, but
the court rejected that suit on March one. The same day,
the mayor's home was vandalized and he blamed the striking workers.

(16:35):
By this point, the Memphis strike had started to gain
more attention among national civil rights leaders. Reverend Lawson and
was a friend and colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
And he had been in touch with him about the strike,
and on March five, the announcement came that King was
coming to Memphis. We're gonna talk more about this part
of the story. After we first paused for a little

(16:57):
sponsor break. In March of nineteen sixty eight, tensions in
Memphis were escalating. Ten union leaders had been jailed for
contempt of court. On the sixth, demonstrators held a mock
funeral at City Hall to symbolically mourn the depth of
freedom in Memphis. Trash fires had broken out in South

(17:19):
Memphis on the eight and the National Guard had started
holding drills at the Mayor's suggestion a day later. By
mid March, national civil rights leaders had arrived on the scene,
including n double a CP executive secretary Roy Wilkins and
Bayard Rustin, who is the subject of a two part
podcast in our archive. Ralph David Abernathy and James Bevel

(17:41):
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Memphis to
work with the strike as well. On March fourteenth, Roy
Wilkins met with a crowd of about ten thousand people
and encouraged them to approach the strike as a non
violent protest, and on the fifteenth he held a news
conference expressing the national civil rights movements support of this strike.

(18:02):
At this point, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Was working
on the Poor People's Campaign. This is a planned series
of protests for economic justice, jobs, education, and housing which
were to culminate in a takeover and mass occupation of
the National Mall in Washington, d C. During this occupation,
people would live on the mall in a shantytown to

(18:23):
emphasize the disparities and wealth between rich and poor people
in the United States. King had begun to conceive of
the Poor People's Campaign after visiting some of the poorest
parts of the South, after which he refocused his own
advocacy to include economic inequality in addition to racial inequality.
And even though the Poor People's Campaign was ultimately focused

(18:44):
on Washington, King saw how compatible the Memphis strike was
with it, so he decided to basically make the Memphis
strike part of the Poor People's Campaign. He arrived in
Memphis on March eighteenth, more than a month into the strike,
which is really when the strike started to become national news.
On the eighteenth, he addressed a huge crowd at Mason Temple.

(19:05):
Estimates of the total attendance very I saw it and
marked as anywhere from fifteen thousand to twenty five thousand people,
regardless though it is believed to be the largest indoor
gathering of the civil rights movement. The address King delivered
that day laid out why he saw them at the
strike is so compatible with the Poor People's Campaign, and

(19:26):
in it he asked what good it did to sit
in an integrated lunch counter if you could not afford
to eat there. He went on to address the workers themselves, quote,
you are demanding that the city will respect the dignity
of labor. So often we overlook the worth and the
significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of
those not in the so called big jobs. But let

(19:48):
me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged
in work that serves humanity and is for the building
of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth. One
day our society he must come to see this. One
day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker
if it is to survive. For the person who picks
up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant

(20:11):
as the physician, for if he doesn't do his job,
diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity. The plan was
for King to return on March twenty two, but an
unexpected snowstorm forced it to be rescheduled to the twenty eight.
In the interim, the city and the union agreed to
mediation and round the clock talks, but by those talks

(20:33):
had once again fallen apart, so by the time they
thrived the situation in Memphis had become incredibly tense. About
twenty two thousand students skipped school to be part of
the march, and before the march actually began, some of
them were spotted throwing rocks at police. King was also
delayed and arriving because of a bomb threat, and by

(20:55):
the time he got there everyone was really on edge,
and video footage from this mark he was also obviously exhausted.
Early in the march, violence broke out someone and it's
not clear who started breaking windows. Looting and fires followed.
Organizers took King to a hotel as chaos spread through Memphis.

(21:16):
Over the course of the day, sixty two people were injured,
nearly all of them black, and an unarmed sixteen year
old named Larry Payne was shot and killed by police.
Organizers tried to control the crowd and get them to
return to Claybourne Temple, African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was
being used as the headquarters for the strike, but once
they did, police surrounded the church through tear gas through

(21:39):
the windows and clubbed people with nightsticks as they escaped.
About two hundred and eighty people were arrested following the
incidents of march, the state legislature implemented a seven pm
curfew in Memphis. The mayor placed the city under martial law,
and four thousand National Guard troops were called to the scene. Initially,

(22:01):
the violence that had broken out at the at the
march was blamed on an organization of young black activists
known as the Invaders, but one of their leaders, Charles Cabbage,
met with King and had denied that he had been
involved in any way, and other interviews other members maintained
that they knew about and followed King's commitment to non
violence at the march. So it's I mean, it's just

(22:23):
really not clear who started the rock throwing in the
first place. The striking workers continued their daily marches on
the twenty nine, now proceeding past tanks and National guardsmen
armed with bayoneted rifles. Many of them carried signs that
simply read I Am a Man, a slogan credited to
William Lucy known as Bill from the National Ask Me Office.

(22:45):
Before he went back to Atlanta, King gave a press
conference and which he was asked why he had abandoned
the march. He said that he hadn't abandoned anything that
he had always said that he wouldn't lead a violent demonstration,
he found himself under really heavy criticism from all sides.
To the white community, he was an outside agitator who
had come to Memphis, start up trouble and left. Critics

(23:08):
in the black community said that he was out of
touch with the people of Memphis and what their needs were,
and that if he didn't connect more with the local
communities he came to, he would have the same problem
everywhere he went. After all of this, King debated whether
to go back to Memphis. On the one hand, this
situation was obviously volatile. He could not be associated with

(23:28):
violent demonstrations, nor could the Poor People's Campaign or the
greater Civil Rights movement. But it seemed just as damaging
to have gone to Memphis, left in the wake of
an outbreak of violence, and then stayed away without finishing
what he started there. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was
also divided about what Kings should do, but on March
Thirtie finally agreed to support his going back to Memphis.

(23:52):
He arrived on April third, at which point the curfew
and Memphis had been lifted for two days. The plan
was for him to give an address on the third,
then then lead a march on the fourth. King delivered
this address at Mason Temple. The crowd was enormous in
spite of a terrible storm. In this speech, which is
known as I've been to the Mountaintop, King said, I've

(24:13):
seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you,
but I want you to know tonight that we as
a people will get to the Promised Land, and we
will link to the entirety of that speech in the
show notes to this episode. Yeah, a lot of people
describe it as as prophetic in hindsight, because it's clear
in this speech that King thought someone was going to

(24:35):
kill him. There were plenty of threats that had led
up to this moment, but like it is really obvious
from the text of this speech that he was speaking
as a man who knew that he was going to
die in service to try and to get justice for
other people. I don't think that he knew he was
going to die tomorrow. The next day, April four, King

(24:59):
was at the Lorraine Mote All getting ready for dinner.
He left his second floor room and leaned out over
the railing to talk to people below where he was
shot at six o one pm. King was pronounced dead
a little over an hour later. James Earl Ray pleaded
guilty to the crime, but he later recanted that confession,
and ongoing questions linger about whether or not he acted alone.

(25:22):
Shock and outrage followed the assassination, and demonstrations and riots
swept through cities throughout the United States. In Memphis, Mayor
Loebe still refused to negotiate. President Lyndon Baines Johnson ultimately
sent his Secretary of Labor, James Reynolds, to Memphis to
settle the strike. Reynolds started holding meetings on April six.

(25:43):
Southern Christian Leadership Conference leaders and Coretta Scott King, King's widow,
led a silent march in Memphis on April the eight
to honor Dr King and to support the Memphis sanitation workers.
Ahead of this march, Reverend James Lawson wrote out instructions
to the participants. They began, quote, doctor King came to
Memphis to help all of us, and especially to help

(26:05):
the sanitation workers win economic justice. We asked him to
come because we wanted to win this strike as human
beings and as men, not as animals who used violence.
Doctor King died in Memphis trying to help us. Today,
we honor doctor King for the great work he did
for all people, and particularly his great love and sacrifice

(26:26):
for us. Lawson's instructions went on to ask how is
it best to honor him now? And they answered to
make sure that sanitation workers in Memphis won their rights
without violence. Then they directed the marchers to carry themselves silently,
with pride and dignity. The instructions final line read, let
us march in peace that there shall be peace. More

(26:48):
than forty people were part of the silent march. Martin
Luther King Jr's funeral took place in Atlanta the next day,
April nine. After King's death, the strike continued until negotiates
finally reached a deal on April sixteenth. Nine. Terms included
to pay increases totaling fifteen cents an hour, recognition of

(27:09):
the union, and dues check off. The terms also promised
the creation of grievance procedures and promotions based on seniority
and merit. Striking workers were to report for duty, with
anyone not back on the job by April removed from
the city payroll. The so called Memorandum of understanding was
essentially a contract which would expire on June nineteen sixty nine.

(27:33):
Although the city did recognize the union, it didn't set
the sanitation department up as a union shop. In other words,
employees did not have to join the union. This gave
employees freedom to choose to join the union or not,
but it also gave the union less leverage since it
didn't necessarily represent all of the employees when trying to negotiate.

(27:53):
After the Memphis strike, other municipal and service workers in
the South started to unionize. Asked Me became one of
the largest unions in the country, and Local seventeen thirty
three became the largest union in Memphis. On April twenty nine,
two thousand eleven, the Memphis Sanitation Workers were inducted into
the U. S Department of Labor's Labor Hall of Fame.

(28:16):
In twenty seventeen, the city of Memphis announced that it
would compensate the nineteen sixty eight sanitation workers who were
still living with a tax free grant of fifty thousand dollars.
The city council eventually increased this to seventy thousand dollars.
This is basically in lieu of a pension and their
initial negotiations, the union had opted out of the city's

(28:37):
pension program in favor of social security. It only became
clear that social security alone would not be enough money
to secure a person's retirement later on, and this led
to years of negotiations and a complicated legal tangle that
was never successfully resolved. The mayor's twenty seventeen announcement also
included plans to improve retirement benefits for current solid waste

(29:00):
workers in the city. When the city initially made this announcement,
it knew of fourteen surviving strikers, and that number has
since grown to at least twenty six. On December eleventh,
surviving sanitation workers helped break ground on the I Am
a Man Plaza at the historic Claybourne Temple. This is
a memorial for the strike and it's expected to be

(29:22):
completed before the April anniversaries of King's assassination and the
strikes end. Then Double A CP honored the strikers at
their Image Awards on January nine with the Vanguard Award,
and William Lucy received the Chairman's Award. On January fourteen.
Surviving workers were in attendance for the ceremony, four of

(29:42):
whom were still employed as sanitation workers for the city
of Memphis. There are, as as obvious, a lot of
facts involved with this still alive. There's also a lot
of video footage. There is a documentary that I watched
as part of the research for of this, which is
called at the River I stand. Um, the Route is

(30:04):
doing a video series about the strike, really focused on
the workers themselves. UM. A lot of those videos. I
don't think any of them are actually out yet as
of when we were recording this podcast, but they were
going to start coming out over the coming weeks, so
that I'm sure we'll be very interesting to watch. Um.
We should note that a lot of the conditions that
were being protested during the strikes still exist. There are

(30:26):
still jobs where you can work full time and still
qualify for things like snap which is what food stamps
are called now. So, as is so often the case
with things that we talked about on the show, Uh,
conditions that were being protested in still exist in the
country today. Do you have a little bit of listener mail? Sure?
New This is from Sarah, and Sarah wrote to say,

(30:51):
dear Holly and Tracy, you guys are the best. I
never thought I would enjoy podcasts until my best friend
recommended yours, and it's been an obsession ever since. I
started listening to the very beginning of the series back
in September, and by December, only four months later, I
had gone through the complete archive and was completely caught up.
As I went through the series, I had a long

(31:11):
and comprehensive list of topics I wanted to add my
two cents to, but then it lost its importance, mostly
until I listened to a recent podcast on the NORAD
Santa Tracker. You mentioned the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs,
and I had to write in. You see, I grew
up as a military brat GO Air Force, and I
never knew that there was another underground military site like

(31:33):
the one in my hometown of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
It's called Raven Rock Mountain Complex r r m C,
also known as Site Are Because actually wasn't the first
time I wanted to plug my little hometown in your podcast.
The first time was way back when there was a
Wallace Simpson episode and I knew she was born here
and I was waiting for my town to be heard
on the podcast when lo and Behole, all was said

(31:55):
was that she was born in Pennsylvania. The second time
was the Gettysburg Battle podcast, because of the Battle of
Monterey Pass, happened when the Confederates were retreating from Gettysburg.
Not to mention, my town also has one of the
oldest golf courses in the country. Funny that we only
have a population of a thousand people and there's so
much history packed into our little area. It does help
that we are located near Gettysburg, Camp David, Fort Detrick,

(32:18):
and only a few hours from Washington d c uh
And then she suggests, uh, not necessarily a podcast about
her hometown, but maybe about some of the other secret
underground military facilities or some of the less known battles
of the Civil War. Thank you so much, Sarah, I
in fact was not aware that there were multiple underground

(32:41):
under mountain secret military bases. Now I do so thank
you Sarah for writing in about that. If you would
like to write to us about this or any other podcast,
were History podcast that How Stuffworks dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in History.
Our Twitter is miss in History. Our Pinterest name is
miss in History, our Instagram, amazmos and history missed in

(33:01):
History all over the place. You can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where you will
find show notes for all the episodes that Holly and
I haven't done together. The show notes for today's episode
will include linked to the text of Martin Luther King's
last speech and so you can do a whole that,
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
ms history dot com. For more on this and thousands

(33:28):
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.