James J. Reynolds

Who was James J. Reynolds?

James Joseph Reynolds, Jr. was the Undersecretary of Labor for Labor-Management relations during the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration in the United States. Earlier he served as Assistant Secretary for Labor-Management Relations from 1961–65, initially for President John F. Kennedy. Reynolds was an industrialist, and had been a member of the National Labor Relations Board under President Harry S. Truman.

One of his most well-known moments came in April 1968, when Martin Luther King had gone to Memphis, Tennessee to support African-American garbage workers during the Memphis Sanitation Strike. They had walked off the job to "protest unsafe conditions, abusive white supervisors, low wages, and to gain recognition for their union." King was assassinated on April 4. The next day, President Johnson instructed Undersecretary Reynolds to go to Memphis to mediate the conflict and settle the strike. It took him two weeks. The strike had been at a standoff given Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb's adamant refusal to authorize automatic payment of union dues from the sanitation-workers' paycheck.