Bill Lucy, Pioneering Labor and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 90

He helped popularize “I Am a Man” as a demand for respect during the 1968 strike by Black sanitation workers in Memphis.

Bill Lucy, a trailblazing Black union leader who fought for civil rights in the American South and against apartheid in South Africa, and who pressured organized labor to address concerns about equal treatment for minority groups, died this week at his home in Washington. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Phyllis Lucy, who said he died in his sleep either late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

Mr. Lucy was not as famous as many other figures in the civil rights movement. But he was instrumental in popularizing a four-word evocation of self-esteem and dignity — “I Am a Man,” which doubled as a demand for respect — that was embraced by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 and evolved into a national hosanna.

He was organizing the workers for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees when he and the Rev. Malcolm Blackburn, the white minister of Clayborn Temple, were brainstorming what message to place on the protest signs the church had promised to print. They then recalled how the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., another lion of the movement, had defined racism a few days before.

“And finally we came up with four words,” Mr. Lucy said in an interview with the HistoryMakers Digital Archive in 2012.

“While it means different things, I’m sure, to different people,” Mr. Lucy added, “it meant I’m standing up for my rights; I will speak out; I am speaking back to someone who I have historically held fear of; and I’m, I’m confronting the system. And I’m, I’m not asking for a whole lot, just to be treated with respect and dignity. And we didn’t have any idea that this thing would hit like it hit.”

The strike, by 1,300 Black workers who were protesting low pay, poor working conditions and demeaning treatment, lasted 65 days. It was punctuated by the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had arrived in Memphis to support the workers, and ended with the City Council’s recognition of the union. Mr. Lucy and the others who were involved in conceiving the slogan could not foresee that it would be immortalized as a metaphor for the civil rights movement.

In 1969, Mr. Lucy became an assistant to Jerry Wurf, the president of the predominantly white union, and three years later he was elected secretary-treasurer, a position he held until he retired in 2010. He also strove vigorously to integrate white-dominated unions and to amplify Black voices when labor leaders made political endorsements.

In 1972, exasperated with the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s public neutrality in the presidential race between Richard M. Nixon, whom most Black labor leaders considered anti-union, and George McGovern, he was a founder, with Charles Hayes, Cleveland Robinson, the Rev. Addie L. Wyatt and others, of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.

At the time, he was quoted as saying: “We don’t want anybody to be making decisions for us any longer, because we are quite capable of making decisions ourselves. We don’t want to be a thorn in anybody’s side, but we don’t want to be a pivot for anybody’s heel.”

Mr. Lucy was elected the coalition’s first president and served until 2013.

In the 1980s, Mr. Lucy organized economic boycotts to oppose apartheid in South Africa. In 1990 he welcomed Nelson Mandela, who led that nation’s emancipation from white minority rule, to the United States. In 1994 he became the first Black president of Public Services International, a federation of union members who work in social services, health care and other government and civic positions around the world.

William Lucy was born on Nov. 26, 1933, in segregated Memphis and raised in Richmond, Calif., in the Bay Area. His father, Joseph, worked as a laborer for Memphis Light, Gas and Water, then as a welder in the Kaiser shipyards in California during World War II and later as an auto mechanic and a ranch foreman. His mother, Susie (Gibbs) Lucy, was a seamstress and managed a restaurant.

After graduating from high school, Bill was hired as a dock rigger at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, Calif. He later joined the Navy and studied civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1953, he married Dorotheria Rader; she died in 2000. In addition to his daughter Phyllis, he is survived by another daughter, Benita Lucy Marsh, and four grandchildren. A son, William Lucy Jr., died in 1977.

In the mid-1950s, after being hired as a materials and research engineer, testing highway materials for Contra Costa County, Mr. Lucy gravitated to union organizing. He joined Local 1675 of the civil service union in 1956 when he was 23. Ten years later, he was elected its president.

In 1966, Mr. Lucy left his job in civil engineering at Contra Costa County to work full time for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’ national office in Washington as the associate director of the legislation and community affairs departments. At the time he was one of the most prominent Black elected union officials in the nation.

Lee Saunders, the president of the federation, hailed Mr. Lucy in a statement after his death as “one of our greatest warriors ever for civil rights, labor rights and human rights.”

Reflecting in the HistoryMakers interview on the impact of the words “I Am a Man,” Mr. Lucy said that for the striking sanitation workers, “it was their sort of fight-back statement, you know, to all of the problems they’ve ever had for the all the years they’d ever lived there, worked there, or grew up in the South.”

“In the South,” he added, “you could go from boy to uncle to grandpa without ever passing the position of man. We didn’t have to say nothing else. I mean their commitment to this thing was locked in.”