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Category: Sanitation Workers
Posted inSanitation Workers

On Feb. 1, 1968, two Memphis sanitation workers were crushed in a city garbage truck

by Wendi C. Thomas

On Feb. 1, 1968, an especially rainy Thursday afternoon, city sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker took shelter in the back of a garbage truck when it malfunctioned. They were pulled into the compactor, heads first. Pulling their mangled bodies from the vehicle was a “gruesome chore,” wrote one historian. For years, black sanitation […]