William “Bill” Lucy, who served as secretary-treasurer of AFSCME for nearly four decades and was one of the most respected and revered Black labor leaders in the world, died at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 90 years old.
Lucy was a heavyweight of the American labor movement in the second half of the 20th century and a fierce defender of civil and human rights. In 1968, he traveled to his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, to help resolve the sanitation workers’ strike, marching shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as the workers sought the city’s recognition of their union, AFSCME Local 1733. He was the co-founder and longtime leader of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) and a co-founder of the Free South Africa Movement(FSAM) that launched the successful anti-apartheid campaign in the United States.
For more than half a century, Lucy was a voice for social justice and worker freedom, one that echoed here and around the world. He was the first African American president of Public Services International (PSI), the world’s largest union federation, and served on the executive council of the AFL-CIO, the federation’s highest decision-making body. He served on the boards of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), TransAfrica and the Africa-America Institute (AAI). Throughout his career, Lucy received countless honors and was named more than once by Ebony magazine as one of the 100 most influential Black Americans.
A man of humble origins, Lucy was more inclined to deflect praise about his accomplishments than to bask in it, reflecting back on his life in a 2019 interview with journalist Roland Martin about the “lucky break” that he got in “being able to develop some understanding, some skills, a little bit of commitment that was valuable in helping others find a way to join a struggle for a better life.”
Lucy was born on Nov. 26, 1933, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Susie Bell and Joseph Lucy. Lucy’s father was a self-taught mechanic and part-time musician whose unsteady income often forced the family to move from one part of the city to another. His mother was a seamstress and later ran a soul food restaurant.
Lucy attended elementary school in Memphis until the United States entered World War II, at which point his father was recruited to join the war effort. The family moved to Richmond, Calif., where Lucy’s father worked in the shipyards, and remained there after the war ended. Lucy graduated high school in 1951 and worked for the U.S. Navy during the Korean War at a naval shipyard in California.
In 1953, Lucy was encouraged to apply for an entry-level position in the Contra Costa County, Calif., Public Works Department. That first job in public service marked Lucy’s initial exposure to labor issues. Shortly after joining the county government, he became active in an employee association that represented county workers but did not provide them a true voice on the job or a seat at the negotiating table.
Lucy was among the association’s members who set out to change that. They felt that as county workers they had a right to weigh in on employment decisions, have a seat at the negotiating table and participate in every aspect of their work life.
In the mid-1950s, they succeeded in transforming their employee organization into a true trade union, affiliating with AFSCME as Local 1675.
In 1965, as president of his local union, Lucy caught the attention of AFSCME International President Jerry Wurf, who invited him the following year to work at union headquarters in Washington, tasking him with setting up the new Department of Legislation and Community Affairs. It would be the beginning of Lucy’s involvement in labor issues at the national and international levels.
In 1968, while in Detroit overseeing the administratorship of Council 77, Lucy was asked to travel to Memphis to investigate an impasse between the city and its sanitation workers, who were seeking recognition of their AFSCME local union. The workers earned poverty wages and did not have access to safe equipment. When a malfunctioning garbage truck crushed two workers on Feb. 1 — Echol Cole and Robert Walker — killing them, the other sanitation workers went on strike for more than two months.
Lucy played a key role in gaining wider public acceptance of the strike and gathering community support for the workers. He and a local pastor are credited with coining the now-iconic “I AM A MAN” slogan, which was embraced by the workers, emblazoned on signs, and soon became ubiquitous. The slogan was inspired by the words of the Rev. James Lawson, who had talked about racism as the treatment of a man like he is not a man.
In 1972, after serving as Wurf’s executive assistant, Lucy was elected AFSCME secretary-treasurer. In the same year, he founded CBTU, an organization devoted to representing the interests of Black workers within the trade union movement. It became the first labor organization in the United States to condemn South Africa’s apartheid regime.
In the 1980s, Lucy became heavily involved in fighting apartheid. Along with other Black leaders and intellectuals, he formed FSAM, which became the primary anti-apartheid movement in the United States. The coalition of community organizations, labor unions, students and others led protests and demonstrations against the oppressive government and pressured consumers to boycott companies that invested and traded with the regime.
After his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela toured several U.S. cities, a trip partly organized by FSAM members, making a stop at the AFSCME International Convention in Miami. In 1994, Lucy led an AFL-CIO delegation to monitor the 1994 South African elections in which Mandela became president.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Lucy continued to expand his leadership roles in the national and international labor movements. He became president of PSI in 1994 and was elected to the AFL-CIO’s executive council a year later.
Lucy retired as AFSCME secretary-treasurer in 2010 after 38 years in the position. At the International Convention held in Boston that year, he urged AFSCME delegates to continue the fight for social justice.
“We’ve always known that there’s a crisis,” he said. “It may be more intense now, but there’s always been a crisis for millions of people not as lucky as we are in this room. There’s a daily crisis in their lives, as they struggle to put bread on their tables, to put clothes on their backs, to have a roof on their heads. We have a responsibility to help them out.”
In Bill Lucy’s memory, AFSCME will continue to heed those words, pursue that vision and answer that call to action.