Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Bill Lucy
By Lee Saunders
On September 25, the labor movement and the nation lost a giant when AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus Bill Lucy passed away at the age of 90.
He was one of the most accomplished and influential labor leaders in U.S. history. He first made his mark as a young AFSCME staffer, when our union's president, Jerry Wurf, sent him to Memphis in the winter of 1968 to provide support for 1,300 Black sanitation workers who had gone on strike to protest poverty wages and the most degrading working conditions.
With his even temperament and diplomatic skills, Bill was just the right person to help manage this explosive situation. But he wasn't afraid to speak truth to power, leading the sanitation workers to City Hall for a confrontation with the intractable mayor, Henry Loeb. And it was Bill who helped come up with the strikers' defiant and iconic slogan: I AM A MAN. Despite the tragedy of Dr. King's assassination, the strike succeeded – in large measure because of Bill's tenacity and vision.
Bill Lucy was more than a labor leader; he was a global humanitarian. As co-founder of the Free South Africa movement, he was one of the driving forces behind tearing down the apartheid regime and making Nelson Mandela a free man. In the 1990s, he became the first Black president of Public Services International, one of the world's largest labor federations.
Bill Lucy believed in the power of Black civic engagement and participation. He knew that advances on civil rights and labor rights depend on bold, aggressive political mobilization. That was one of the calls to action he issued when he came together with other labor leaders to create the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists in 1972, the same year he began his 38-year tenure as AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer.
Even in his final months, Bill understood the urgency and high stakes of the 2024 elections. And if he were still with us, he would encourage us to make our involvement the highest priority.
It will take a huge turnout from Black voters to defeat Project 2025 – an extreme, divisive agenda drawn up by right-wing activists that would be devastating for the African American community.
Project 2025 calls for the elimination of public service worker unions like AFSCME, which have helped close the racial wealth gap and created avenues of economic opportunity for generations of Black families. Project 2025 would roll back affirmative action in education and hiring practices in the federal government and weaken civil rights protections. It would undermine the Affordable Care Act and drive up health care costs, including the price of prescription drugs for seniors. It would eliminate public education funding for low-income schools, and it targets poor families by going after Medicaid, nutrition programs and Head Start.
All the progress we've made because of leaders like Bill Lucy hangs in the balance in this election. It's not an exaggeration to say that Bill Lucy's legacy is on the ballot. In his honor, summoning the courage he showed throughout his life, let's spend the next few weeks organizing and mobilizing in overwhelming numbers to elect leaders who will continue the fight for racial, social and economic justice.
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Lee Saunders is the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, with 1.4 million members in communities across the nation, serving in hundreds of different occupations – from nurses to corrections officers, child care providers to sanitation workers.