On 28 March 1977, over 1,300 mostly Black sanitation workers in Atlanta walked off the job for a 50-cent-an-hour pay increase. The city's first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, who had come to power on the back of the civil rights and Black power movements and to whom the workers looked for support, sacked them all.
Business leaders, white and Black-owned newspapers, churches and even many former civil rights leaders supported the mayor. Martin Luther King Sr (not to be confused with MLK Jr, who was assassinated while supporting a strike of sanitation workers) strongly supported the firings, saying: “fire the hell out of them.”
The workers were replaced with scab replacements, but the strikers fought on, setting up picket lines around the city, fighting with strikebreakers and police, and dumping rubbish on the steps of city hall. But Jason Schultz argues in his analysis of the strike that the:
"union also could not ideologically defeat the city bosses for Jackson had already painted them as run by greedy, white Northerners bent on driving the city bankrupt while making the city’s first Black mayor look bad in the process. Civic pride among everyday Black folks was a major reason they rallied around their mayor, protecting him against a perceived outside threat. This spelt doom for Black sanitation workers seeking broad popular support."
Eventually, the workers were forced to return and reapply for their jobs in defeat, some of them at lower wages, and by the end of the year, most of the strikers had been rehired.
To some activists, it was an early lesson that having representatives of colour did not necessarily benefit working-class people of colour. Modibo Kadalie, who was active in supporting the strike, later commented:
“There is no such thing as all-Black unity… We felt the need to make sure that people understand that Maynard Jackson was not for everyday, ordinary, working Black people.”
Atlanta sanitation workers strike - WCH | Stories
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