Decades After King's Death, Memphis Jobs at Risk They rode the streets of Memphis in creaky, dangerous garbage trucks, picking up trash from home after home, toiling for a sanitation department that treated them with indifference bordering on disdain. In 1968 those workers took to the streets, marching with civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to demand better working conditions, higher pay and union protection. Forty-five years after King was killed supporting their historic strike, some of the same men who marched with him still pick up Memphis' garbage - and now they are fighting to hold on to jobs that some city leaders want to hand over to a private company. "It looks like they're trying to take us down again," said 81-year-old Elmore Nickleberry, one of the original strikers who still drives a garbage truck at night for the sanitation department. Nickleberry is expected to take part in a Thursday march to honor King's sacrifice on the 45th anniversary of his death. But city council members who favor privatization say the city can't afford to ignore a chance to save $8 million to $15 million in a tough economy. As the leaders and workers stake out their positions on today's jobs, the shadow of the struggles of 1968 looms over them. FILE -In this March 28, 1968 file photo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, right, lead a march on behalf of striking Memphis, Tenn., sanitation workers. Forty-five years after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed supporting a historic sanitation workers strike in Memphis, the city's garbage and trash collectors are fighting to hold on to jobs that some city leaders want to hand over to a private company. (AP Photo/The Commercial Appeal, Sam Melhorn, File) Close Forty-five years ago, Nickleberry and Memphis' 1,300 other sanitation workers were overworked and underpaid, picking up others' grimy, leaking waste without proper uniforms. They faced the daily risk of severe injury or death while working with malfunctioning garbage trucks. They took a job no one else wanted, mostly black workers picking up the trash of white people, serving in what some scholars liken to an urban extension of plantation life on the cotton fields that fueled Memphis' economy. Their demeaning nickname: "walking buzzards." After two workers were crushed to death in a truck's compactor, the sanitation workers went on strike Feb. 11. They demanded a raise that would take them off welfare lines. The situation had obvious racial undertones: Most of the workers were black, and city officials standing against the union were white. With the slogan "I am a man," the workers also wanted the respect and dignity that comes with doing a low-paying, back-breaking job with great pride and effort. King came to Memphis to support them. He delivered his last public speech April 3, declaring, "I've been to the mountaintop." The next day, standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, King was killed by a rifle bullet fired by James Earl Ray from a boardinghouse across the street. The assassination led to riots in Memphis and several U.S. cities. But the strike, stained forever with King's blood, turned to victory when the city acquiesced to a 10-cent raise and succumbed to other demands, including unionization. Labor scholars call it a watershed moment. "It signified the close relationship between labor relations and civil rights and human rights," said Thomas Kochan, an industrial relations professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Dr. King epitomized a leader who recognized that relationship, and that's what brought him to Memphis. Much has changed since then. Memphis has had a black mayor since the early 1990s, and today's city council is majority black. But in 2013, the power of unions in America isn't what it was in 1968. And the lure of privatization is strong for cash-strapped public officials.