I want you to stick it out so that you will be able to make Mayor Loeb and others say yes, even if they want to say no.
—MLK, speaking to Memphis garbage workers, March 18, 1968
IF MEMPHIS WERE a thumbtack on a map of the United States, it would pin down a spot where the borders of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee converge. Memphis and the region surrounding it are commonly called the Mid-South. Memphis sees itself apart from both the Deep South and the Border States, like Kentucky to the north. Viewed through the lens of the Civil War, Memphis stands roughly halfway between Issaquena County in the Mississippi Delta (which once had the highest concentration of slaves anywhere in the United States) and the southernmost edge of Kentucky (a slave state until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, though it never seceded from the Union).
King did not know Memphis well. Over the years he had breezed into the city for one purpose or another, a speech to a Baptist convention or a brief stopover en route to a nearby state. He was always, more or less, passing through.
The SCLC waged campaigns in many southern cities but steered clear of Memphis. Everyone knew that Memphis was a NAACP town. The Memphis chapter of the NAACP championed a civil rights agenda of its own under the leadership of accomplished African Americans. Prominent among them was lawyer, minister, and later judge Benjamin Hooks and Maxine Smith, who held a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont and who served as executive director of the NAACP in Memphis.
Unlike some other chapters of the NAACP, the one in Memphis did not turn to the SCLC for help—until 1968. As Andrew Young said years later, reflecting on the prevailing view at the SCLC toward Memphis: “They had it all together, and I said, ‘They don’t really need us.’”1
Memphis differed from southern cities like Little Rock and Birmingham in having navigated the turbulent years of racial tension during the late fifties and sixties without major strife until 1968. Yet in its racial profile it was undeniably deeply Southern. “Keep Memphis Down in Dixie” was the bumper-sticker slogan of a prominent mayoral campaign in the late fifties.2
A visitor to Memphis in 1968 need look no further for confirmation of the city’s down-in-Dixie tradition than the prominent statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The lofty statue of Forrest sitting erect in the saddle stood in a downtown park bearing his name. A plaque memorializing Forrest noted his “heroic raid to recapture Memphis from federal troops.” What the plaque did not say was that he was one of the city’s most successful slave traders in the years before the Civil War. The commerce at “Negro Mart” on Adams Avenue, where he dealt in slaves, was highly lucrative. One of his slaves could fetch as much as $1,000, a huge sum at the time.3
Once King accepted the invitation to support the strike in Memphis, he had much to learn about the city. It seems likely that he knew little about Henry Loeb, who had been mayor only three months. The perfect source for guidance about what made Loeb tick was Methodist minister Frank McRae. But King did not know McRae and was not in touch with him.
When the strike began in mid-February, Mayor Loeb turned to McRae as his confidant. The lanky, affable McRae and the mayor were old friends. During the crisis Loeb would invite McRae to the white-marbled city hall for lunch several times a week. Loeb would send out for hamburgers. The two men would eat in the mayor’s office while two or three policemen in plain clothes stood vigil nearby. “He was so cheap he’d never buy anything but hamburgers, but I loved him,” McRae would remember.4
Loeb’s red-carpeted, wood-paneled office was spacious and handsomely appointed in a modern, manly style. The mayor sat in a high-backed leather chair at an oversize desk that seemed to magnify his bigger-than-life persona. Loeb, who stood six foot five, cut a strapping, square-jawed figure. “You knew damn well he was in the room when he was there,” Joe Sweat, who was the city hall reporter for the Commercial Appeal, would recall years later.5
Loeb thought so highly of McRae that he asked him to officiate at his wedding and swear him in as mayor. Loeb was not a Methodist. Born a Jew, he had married an Episcopalian and in 1963 converted to his wife’s faith. Loeb might have chosen an Episcopalian priest or a rabbi to marry him or swear him in. McRae presided at both ceremonies.
McRae was thirty-seven, ten years younger than the mayor, but they belonged to the same generation that came of age in the years before and during World War II. They grew up in a Memphis defined both by a high regard for courtly Southern manners and a rigid allegiance to white supremacy. When, decades later, McRae looked back at the Memphis of his youth, he spoke in fond superlatives. Memphis had been the cleanest, safest, quietest city in America, he would say.
The view of Memphis as an upright, exceedingly livable city was a general point of pride among its residents. It motto officially was the City of Good Abode.
It had not always lived up to its self-image. Before the Civil War, according to historian Joan Beifuss, it was “a brawling, muddy, Mississippi River town, jumping off place to the frontier Southwest.”6 Its mosquito-friendly swamps made the city an inviting host for yellow fever. During the 1870s, an epidemic of the mosquito-borne disease killed many thousands of residents and led to a mass exodus from the city.
The city flourished anyway. Its location as a favored port for paddle steamers plying the Mississippi advantaged its economy. It emerged, notably, as a bustling market for the trade in cotton. Its brokerages on Main Street handled not just cotton but also, as in the case of Nathan Bedford Forrest, slaves. Another leading slave trader, Wade Hampton Bolton, placed this ad in the Memphis Appeal in 1846: “I have for sale plenty of boys, men and women and some very fancy girls. I intend to have a constant supply through the season.”7
The Memphis of McRae’s youth was strictly segregated by race. He knew well the oddities and grotesqueries of Jim Crow life. There were water fountains for “whites,” separate ones for “colored.” Blacks had to sit in the back of buses even if there were no white passengers riding in them. Black women could shop for dresses in stores but couldn’t try them on.
One Thursday in the late 1950s, a black chauffeur drove two grand dames from Greenville, Mississippi, to a special art exhibit at the Pink Palace art gallery in Overton Park. Upon their arrival the ladies discovered, to their dismay, that Thursday was “Negro Day” at the Pink Palace. Barred from entry, they returned to their car. All was not lost. They dispatched the chauffeur to enjoy the art exhibit in their stead.8
In 1967 McRae was named superintendent of the Methodist district for Memphis. He had a mandate from his bishop to address the poverty and other disadvantaged circumstances of the city’s African American inhabitants. He took the assignment to heart. But when the sanitation workers’ strike began the next year, McRae opposed it. He viewed it as an illegal, wildcat strike against the city. State law prohibited strikes by most public employees, including garbage collectors. McRae, moreover, was not aware of any grievance that would justify a step as extreme as a strike to shut down a service as vital to public health as garbage collection. Nor did McRae trust the garbage workers’ union. Like many Memphians he was wary of organized labor.
McRae loyally sided with his good friend, the mayor. They had become acquainted through Loeb’s wife, Mary. McRae had met Mary when they were students at Memphis State University, as the University of Memphis was then called. Mary, a stunning redhead, had been a Cotton Carnival queen. It was an honor reserved for attractive young women of high social standing. Her father owned large tracts of cotton-growing land in Arkansas and headed a large cotton brokerage in Memphis.
Loeb’s marriage to Mary Gregg linked two of the city’s wealthiest families. His family owned a large business, Loeb Laundry Cleaner Company. Its logo was conspicuous in brilliantly blue letters on its storefronts and the sides of the company’s trucks that roamed city streets. Loeb may have been a homegrown Memphian, but he had attended elite schools in the East: Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Like John F. Kennedy, he had commanded a PT boat as a naval officer during World War II. On the wall of his mayoral office he proudly displayed a photo of a PT boat a quarter century after his navy days.
As reporter Sweat would remember, Loeb retained a sailor’s command of “salty language, full of goddamns and son-of-a-bitches, and he enjoyed a good, bawdy story.” But Loeb had an old-fashioned Southern manner in the company of women. Sweat would put it this way: “He had this gallant thing about women. If a lady was coming into his office, he’d put on a coat.”9
After military service Loeb joined his father and brother in managing the family laundry business. His involvement in local civic affairs, including the Memphis Civitan Club and American Red Cross, kindled an interest in politics. In the early sixties, he launched a political career, first as public works commissioner, then mayor. As mayor from 1960 to 1964 he grudgingly complied with court orders to desegregate schools and other public facilities. But there was a limit to how much racial progress he was willing to accept. Rather than desegregate the municipal swimming pools, he simply closed them down.10
His father died in the mid-sixties, and Loeb quit city government to resume his work at the laundry. Not for long. In 1967 he plunged into a hotly contested mayoral race. His principal opponent was William Ingram, the incumbent mayor and, by comparison to Loeb, a racial moderate. Loeb presented himself as a “law and order” candidate. He had scant black support. He took office on January 1, 1968, under a restructured city government, in which a city council system replaced a five-member commission. The change resulted in three African Americans being elected to the council while vesting greater power in the mayor.
Just six weeks later, the garbage workers went on strike. As the strike took hold and garbage piled up throughout the city, the mayor reacted swiftly, sternly. He denounced the strike as illegal and demanded that the strikers return to work. “As a precondition to any rearrangement of wages and working conditions, the strike must end,” he wrote in a letter to the workers that the Commercial Appeal published on February 29.
Loeb was adamant on another point. He maintained that under no circumstances would he yield on either of the strikers’ central demands: recognition of their union as the workers’ bargaining agent or introduction of a dues checkoff.
The support among whites for Loeb’s tough stance seemed virtually unanimous. “Henry would go to the Rotary Club,” McRae would later say, “and, man, they’d give him a standing ovation. And everywhere he went the people were applauding him.”11 King’s embrace of the strike did not impress the white population. On the contrary, the prevailing view among them was that King was a menace, a radical troublemaker with communist leanings, who was inciting the city’s blacks to violence.
As the mayor’s friend and a community leader by virtue of his rank in the Methodist hierarchy, McRae had a close-up view of the strike. He came to see it as a transcendent racial conflict, and his and the mayor’s views diverged. He began to question, in his words, the mayor’s “bullheaded” position.
By mid-March, he was taking issue squarely with Loeb during their lunchtime chats. McRae recalled, “He wanted to live by the rules. I think he was hiding behind them somewhat.” McRae would remember one day as particularly awkward: “I said, ‘Henry, you’re a compassionate person. This is wrong.’ And Henry said, ‘No, it’s against the [Tennessee] law to strike against the municipality.’ And I said, ‘Henry, it doesn’t matter.’”
That the mayor would invoke Tennessee labor law as his line in the sand seemed shortsighted and legalistic to McRae. It was a logic that McRae shared with King. As King would say in his speech at Mason Temple on March 18 defending the strike: “You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights.”12
As the tensions in Memphis escalated, McRae became all the more alarmed. He tried to persuade Loeb that the situation was urgent. He would remember saying, “Henry, you’re sitting on a powder keg. Please realize this.”13 But the mayor refused to yield to what he perceived as lawless intimidation.
Whites siding with Loeb saw King’s speaking and marching in support of the strike as part of the lawless intimidation that might lead to violence. King’s critics had a point when they accused him of deliberately provoking a violent reaction from Southern segregationists in elected office. That strategy had served him well in Birmingham. That city’s public safety commissioner, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, had cracked down brutally against protesters in the name of maintaining public order. Police sicced snarling dogs on youths, and firemen blasted them with powerful hoses. The sheer horror displayed on TV screens had galvanized public support for the civil rights cause. (Afterward, in a White House meeting with King, President Kennedy quipped: “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, in his way, he has done a good deal for civil-rights legislation this year.”)14
But Henry Loeb was no racist caricature, no Bull Connor. He behaved respectfully, graciously toward blacks and whites. As Sweat would say years later, “Every Thursday he had an open house, and black kids would come looking for a job. He would open the newspaper and pore over the classifieds with them.”15 When a firebombing left a black family homeless, the mayor offered an apartment to them rent-free.16
Fred Davis, an African American city councilor, would say about the mayor: “He was in many ways a racist, like other white folk at the time. But in a paternalistic sort of way, Loeb had a real concern for the workers. He considered them ‘his men.’ And he felt like the union was selling the men out for the dues checkoff.”17
As Loeb saw it, even his refusal to recognize the garbage workers’ union was protecting them from harm. He regarded the national union officials who were in town demanding the city’s recognition of Local 1733 and a dues checkoff as paving the way to exploit the workers, and he would not allow it.
Loeb came to his anti-union bias naturally. His father broke a union that sought to organize workers at the Loeb laundry. Sweat would explain: “He grew up in a home where his father told him, ‘If you can just keep the trucks rolling, you can break the back of a strike.’”18 The Loebs’ anti-union attitude was widely held in Memphis. According to historian Michael Honey, union organizers had to contend with racial division, court injunctions, and police violence in the city. Such impediments were “standard fare to break unions in Memphis.”19
The mayor resolved to break the garbage workers’ strike. King’s return to Memphis on April 3 and the march he was planning for Monday, April 8, promised to inject new energy into the strike. Loeb was pursuing a counterforce: a federal injunction to stop King from marching.
A similar injunction had stymied King’s campaigns in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and Selma, Alabama, in 1965. In those cases King obeyed federal court orders that stopped him from leading marches. (In Selma he had turned marchers back halfway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge rather than proceed to Montgomery, as originally intended. Federal judge Frank Johnson ruled that King did not violate his injunction.)
If Loeb’s hard line was breaking the strike, as seemed more likely each day, why should he settle on the union’s terms? In the November mayoral election he had received only 2 percent of the black vote.20 If he surrendered to the strikers’ demands, he would offend the voters who had elected him. He would be yielding to coercion from the union, the black community, and Martin Luther King. In the view of many of his white constituents it would be a political betrayal.
The mail flooding into city hall was running one hundred to one in favor of his stand against the strike.21 The city’s two daily papers, the Commercial Appeal and Memphis Press-Scimitar, were stoutly behind him. “Memphis garbage strikers have turned an illegal walkout into anarchy and Mayor Henry Loeb is exactly right when he says, ‘we can’t submit to this sort of thing!’” the Commercial Appeal editorialized on February 23.
Not everything was going the mayor’s way. Strike supporters were soon boycotting downtown stores. Sales were down, and merchants were pressuring Loeb to settle the strike. A few of Loeb’s friends, especially Frank McRae, were whispering to him about the risk that racial tensions in the city could boil over into widespread civil unrest.