Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon

Author:Robert Gordon [Gordon, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00EME5MMG
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2013-11-11T13:00:00+00:00

Jesse Epps, left, assumed leadership of the AFSCME union after T.O. Jones. (University of Memphis Libraries/Special Collections)

By late May, when Stax was hosting its soul explosion, Epps led a “spread the misery” campaign in an upscale white shopping center. His followers intended to fill parking lots to prevent commerce; to fill shopping baskets and abandon them; to fill stores and not shop. Several businesses, seeing blacks amassed at the entryway, simply locked their doors and closed early. By mid-June, a strike looming in two weeks, the city announced that garbage trucks would be placed at central locations where citizens could dump their trash. Various other fail-safes were being planned when, with only days left, a settlement was reached. The city agreed to the two-dollar hourly minimum and conceded the direct dues checkoff (paying union dues from Public Works paychecks instead of indirectly through the credit union); the union gave the city a year to implement the raise, and extended the agreement’s term for three years, having long insisted it be only for two. The sanitation workers ratified the agreement with jubilant cheers. While everyone was assembled, the union won an additional dollar per month per member, bringing members’ total checkoff to six dollars per month; the additional dollar was designated for a community-action program in Memphis that Epps said “would work to feed hungry children and to give aid to the poor and those less fortunate than us.”

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