William "Bill" Lucy

William Lucy was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1933 and raised in Richmond, California. He took an engineering job with Contra Costa County, joined AFSCME Local 1675, and within a few years was running it. By 1966 he was on the national AFSCME staff. By 1972 he was the union's Secretary-Treasurer — the second-highest office in AFSCME — and he held the chair for thirty-eight years.

In February 1968, two Memphis sanitation workers — Echol Cole and Robert Walker — were crushed to death in the back of a malfunctioning garbage truck. The 1,300 Black sanitation workers of the City of Memphis walked off the job. Bill Lucy flew in from Washington. He sat with the strikers, listened, watched the city refuse to negotiate, and gave the strike its visual language. The signs the workers carried for the next sixty-five days, the signs Dr. King saw the night he was killed, the signs that became the most iconic image of the American labor movement — I AM A MAN — were Bill Lucy's idea.

Four years later, in 1972, Lucy co-founded the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists with Cleveland Robinson, Charles Hayes, William Simons, and Nelson Jack Edwards. CBTU was the inside organizing vehicle for Black union leadership inside the AFL-CIO. Lucy served as its president for forty-two years.

He was president of Public Services International — the global union federation of public sector workers — from 1994 to 2002. He served on the AFL-CIO Executive Council. He chaired the Free South Africa Movement that led the U.S. anti-apartheid divestment campaign. He testified before Congress more times than he could count.

Lucy never lost his Memphis line of sight. The Kellogg's lockout began in October 2013 — a 295-day fight that BCTGM Local 252G carried on the Memphis line. In March 2014 Mr. Lucy came home to a strike meeting at the AFSCME Local 1733 union hall on 485 Beale Street — the same hall the 1968 sanitation workers had built — and stood before the locked-out Kellogg's members and spoke to them about the 1968 strike. He told them how their elders had endured, what the strike had cost, and what it had won. He returned to Memphis in April 2018 for the 50th anniversary of the strike he had helped lead. On April 3 — fifty years to the night after Dr. King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech — Mr. Lucy spoke from the pulpit at Mason Temple, the same Church of God in Christ World Headquarters where Dr. King had stood that final night. Two days later, on April 5, 2018, he joined Rev. James Lawson, former sanitation worker Leslie Moore, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, and designer Cliff Garten for the ribbon cutting of the I AM A MAN Plaza — a permanent public monument to the strike Lucy and Lawson had led from opposite corners of the campaign half a century earlier. The phrase Lucy printed on signs in 1968 was now cast in steel on a Memphis plaza in 2018. Throughout the Kellogg's fight in 2013 and the BCTGM strike of 2021 — when the company locked out workers at all four U.S. plants, with the Memphis line on Frisco Avenue — Mr. Lucy was always available to President Kevin Bradshaw via phone with strategy, with patience, with what 1968 had taught him about endurance. The handset was the link from 1968 to 2021.

Bill Lucy died in 2024 at age 90, still calling the Memphis strike the proudest work of his life. He is buried in his hometown. The Memphis labor movement walks every march under his shadow.