Run tell your mama,
Run tell your papa,
Run tell your grandma too,
I’m goin’ up the country,
Goin’ where they don’t ’low you.
—Blues song heard on Beale Street in the 1920s
MEMPHIS STANDS HIGH ON BLUFFS OVERLOOKING THE Mississippi River, part of the transportation network linking cotton and agricultural production in the fertile Mississippi River lowlands and floodplains to national and world markets. With labor stolen from Africa and land stolen from the Chickasaw Indians, slave traders literally sold black people “down the river” for a profit, and entrepreneurs used slavery and then racial segregation to control labor and keep costs low. As black Memphian and scholar C. Eric Lincoln put it in 1968, “Psychologically, Memphis has always been in Mississippi. Its presence in Tennessee is a geographical accident.”
As in Mississippi, blacks and whites understood their common history very differently. Near the center of downtown Memphis, in a park named in his honor, stands a corroding, cast-iron statue erected in 1904 “in the honor of the military genius of Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA [Confederate States Army].” It doesn’t tell us that Forrest made his fortune selling slaves, that as a Confederate general during the Civil War he presided over the massacre of hundreds of black and white Union soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, or that he organized the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize black voters and their white allies after the war. Generations of whites paid homage to him as a war hero, while blacks remembered him as a mass murderer.
After the war, African Americans who could not get land of their own ended up as sharecroppers or day laborers, or sought to get “upcountry”—out of the plantations and to the city. Emancipation unleashed a flood of former slaves into Memphis, where they competed for jobs with whites. Irish workers at the bottom of the white labor hierarchy, as well as middle-class whites, terrorized these black Delta migrants during an 1866 white race riot in which forty-six blacks and two whites died. But when blacks obtained civil rights and the right to vote during Reconstruction, through amendments to the federal Constitution, even Nathan Forrest had to seek their support to get elected to office. African Americans made up 30 to 40 percent of the city’s voters and elected more blacks to the City Council and legislature in the 1870s and 1880s than they ever would again until the 1990s. Blacks and whites in the Republican and Populist Parties throughout the South taxed the wealthy to fund public schools and services until the better-off divided farmer–labor movements with racist “white supremacy” campaigns, lynching, disenfranchisement, and segregation.
In Tennessee, white Democrats passed laws separating “the races,” and instead of taxing wealth, they put a tax on the right to vote that accumulated every year it went unpaid—until poorer whites and blacks could not afford to vote. Racial division set back and nearly destroyed efforts to organize southern labor.
In Memphis, a series of yellow-fever epidemics also killed or forced out German and Irish workers, the most pro-union elements of the city’s white working class. “Mother” Mary Jones, an Irish woman who lost her family to the plague, might have organized in Memphis but instead left to lead egalitarian crusades for unions and workers’ rights across the country. Most blacks stayed and survived, but new generations of Memphians came almost entirely from the Mississippi Delta, the hard core of cotton plantations and white supremacy. By 1900, the city’s white business leaders consolidated their control, eliminating blacks and most working-class whites from political power and entrenching segregation and anti-unionism.
African Americans nonetheless continued to fight for equal rights, build churches and businesses, publish newspapers, and demand work and decent pay. Black women played a crucial role. Ida B. Wells was physically thrown off a train for refusing to ride in a blacks-only section, and she published a newspaper exposing how whites used false cries of rape to justify the lynching of black men. She raised a storm of protest when a white mob murdered three black Memphis businessmen in 1892, and angry whites burned down her newspaper offices and forced her into exile. To overcome black resistance, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, allowed states to enforce segregation (also known as Jim Crow), despite the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution grants equal citizenship rights to all.
Legalized segregation set white workers against black workers and kept them both poor. If whites and blacks could not meet, go to school, ride the trains, vote, or use public facilities equally, they could hardly be expected to organize unions together. Jim Crow laws and racial-economic divisions encouraged racism from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Whites of all classes murdered dozens of black sharecroppers and day laborers when they organized a union in Elaine, Arkansas, at the end of World War I, as white racial violence raged across the land. In the Memphis suburbs, on May 22, 1917, the front page of the Commercial Appeal announced that whites would lynch Ell Persons, a black youth falsely charged with raping a white girl. Historians described the grisly scene:
Vendors were on hand to sell pop, sandwiches, and chewing gum. Women wore their best clothes to the event. Parents wrote notes to schoolteachers requesting their children be excused to witness the lynching. An estimated five thousand spectators gathered as Persons was tied to a stake in the ground, then drenched with ten gallons of gasoline and burned alive…. Later that afternoon Persons’s head and one of his feet were thrown from a passing car into the midst of a group of African Americans standing near Beale Avenue….*
Such nightmarish violence aimed to produce black passivity, but blacks continued to resist Jim Crow. Robert Church, Jr., son of the first black millionaire in the South, who bought up land during the yellow-fever epidemic and later sold it for a fortune, helped organize a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It operated as a nearly secret organization and remained pitifully weak until the 1940s, but black business leaders, educators, and clergy continued to push for better schools, black workers still organized, and rural people moving to the city created a unique, expressive urban culture of blues, gospel, and jazz. The black freedom struggle did not die.
THE HIGH POINT OF SEGREGATION came in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, when one man did more than any other to control and stabilize this wild river town. Sanitation worker Ed Gillis recalled E. H. Crump as “the big dog” of Memphis politics, who ruled almost single-handedly from the 1910s until his death in 1954, shortly before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education overturned the Plessy decision. Raised in Mississippi, Crump left in 1894 with twenty-five cents in his pocket. He worked his way into politics and business, and married into wealth in Memphis. With his bulbous nose, a shock of red (later white) hair, his stocky frame pressed into bankers’ clothes, a combative personality, and hyperbolic language, Crump almost seemed comical. But there was nothing comical about Crump’s virtual one-man dictatorship.
Crump was first elected Memphis mayor in 1908; thereafter, he built his political machine by collecting money from illegal gambling dens, houses of prostitution, and, during Prohibition, from illegal liquor joints. Crump’s ward and precinct heelers used these funds to pay for people’s poll taxes and for city employees to get people out to vote for his candidates. Under Crump, “The colored people, they voted plenty,” recalled Republican black political activist George W. Lee. In fact, he said, “People’d vote four and five times,” and they voted just the way Crump wanted them to. Crump modernized city services while entrenching segregation, and his control over the most populated city in Tennessee increasingly gave him power over state and national elections and the Democratic Party.
Generations of whites mythologized Crump as a great leader, but as a labor journalist wrote, under Crump there was “no Bill of Rights in Memphis.” Crump put Ku Klux Klan leader Cliff Davis in charge of the police and then made him a congressman for thirteen terms. Only a handful of blacks worked in the police department until the 1960s, mostly on Beale Street, and they could not arrest whites or testify against them in court. On the other hand, white police officers, many of them straight from the plantation districts, functioned like Klansmen in blue uniforms, brutalizing and insulting African Americans and union organizers with support from white judges, FBI officials, and federal attorneys. Robert Church fled the city in 1940 when the Crump machine cracked down on civil rights activity and thugs beat up several independent black ministers with lead pipes. Fear and conformity, pervasive mistrust, and avoidance of independent thought and action had become hallmarks of Memphis life—for whites as well as for blacks. Police “snitches” kept Crump informed of all civil rights and labor activities.
In return for their “cooperation,” Crump offered black leaders a greater degree of funding for social services, schools, and public housing (all segregated) than in most southern cities. Like a plantation father figure, Crump claimed to take care of “his” people as if they were children: he rewarded them as long as they obeyed and punished them if they did not. Some called this paternalism; most black folk called it “the plantation mentality.”
As he became a millionaire through real estate, banking, insurance, and investments, Crump gained overwhelming white business and middle-class support. He offered tight control over blacks, clean streets, efficient city services, and a mostly nonunion environment. White employers banned blacks from better jobs and relied on them for low-wage labor in domestic employment, woodworking, cotton, laundry, and manufacturing. The Memphis Furniture Company, started by the descendants of slave owners in Mississippi, built a fortune by paying black workers as little as possible, as did the Loeb Laundry Cleaner Company, founded by a Jewish immigrant. Real estate investors, cotton brokers, bankers, railroad and riverboat owners, and local manufacturers all supported Jim Crow and Crump; it was profitable to do so and dangerous not to.
Under this regime, the income of unskilled workers, both white and black, averaged less than half of the average in the rest of the country. Yet most white workers resisted joining unions with blacks, even in industries where they both worked at rock-bottom wages, producing profits for industry but misery for the unskilled. The city’s elite of organized white craftsmen, on the other hand, profited from Jim Crow. During slavery, blacks did much of the skilled work in cities such as Memphis, and after Emancipation, white craftsmen organized unions that removed them. This created a scarcity of skilled labor and pushed up wages for a relatively small group of white building tradesmen in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Blacks held a few jobs in the trowel trades and in laboring jobs, controlled by strictly segregated unions that met in the old slave servants’ quarters behind the AFL headquarters on Beale Street. On the railroads, white brotherhoods forced black workers out of the good-paying jobs by killing or brutalizing them; in 1919, 650 white railroad workers from Memphis led a five-day wildcat strike in an attempt to eliminate blacks from the industry. AFL unions routinely excluded blacks from skilled work, even in federally funded construction jobs during the New Deal.
The mix of segregation, low wages, anti-union sentiment, and machine politics in Memphis created a particularly deadly legacy for public employees. Crump turned the city’s elite of white AFL craftsmen into allies by allowing city government to set wages at union scale through contracts with the city’s builders’ association. But the city never formally recognized unions or signed a union contract; when white firefighters, teachers, and police officers tried to organize unions, the city fired and blacklisted them. Crump did not want organized workers exercising any independence or raising the costs of their labor, and opposition to public-employee unionism became a tradition in Memphis. Even President Franklin Roosevelt excluded government workers from the right to organize during the New Deal.
All of this created huge obstacles to black worker organizing, but during the Great Depression, farmers, workers, poor people, and a dispossessed middle class overwhelmingly elected Roosevelt as president in 1932, pressuring him to do something to end poverty and unemployment. In 1935, the federal government enacted the Wagner Labor Relations Act, which established citizenship rights on the job by allowing workers to freely support or reject unions in secret balloting protected by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Southern congressmen prevented the Wagner Act from covering government, agricultural, and domestic workers (in the South, blacks made up the vast majority of the last two groups). The federal government looked the other way as planters crushed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), across the river from Memphis, and took no strong actions to stop lynching in the South. The New Deal was hardly paradise for African Americans, who suffered egregious discrimination under its policies.
But hope emerged as a group of unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and pledged to organize all workers regardless of race, gender, nationality, or political beliefs. African Americans became the CIO’s strongest supporters of interracial organizing, aided by assorted white radicals. Despite all the obstacles, workers in Memphis during the late 1930s and throughout World War II built CIO unions in cotton and food processing, on the waterfronts, in lumberyards, and in factories, but they often paid a terrible price for their activism. Whites beat and nearly killed Thomas Watkins, a black longshoreman who led a strike of black and white Mississippi River workers in 1939, as Crump denounced the CIO as “nigger unionism” and “Communism.” Company thugs and white workers fearful of losing their jobs brutally beat white union organizers at the Ford and Firestone factories. Even black workers, fearful their company would close if they unionized, slashed open the stomach of fellow worker Clarence Coe when he tried to organize them. “You had to fight for every inch—nobody gave you anything,” he recalled. “We couldn’t meet in no single place together. They would kick all our asses,” and police “beat the white worse than the black” when they held a CIO meeting on the waterfront. Employers continued to divide workers by race. “You couldn’t hardly trust a guy that you couldn’t meet with. Twenty years after we had the union, you couldn’t trust certain people.”
George Holloway, a black worker at Firestone, saw unions as his one hope for a better life. He hated the fact that his grandparents had been slaves, and he hated the segregated schools, theaters, buses, cinemas, restaurants, neighborhoods, and jobs in Memphis. His father, who belonged to A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had improved his family’s situation through union wages. Holloway followed his father and Randolph, hoping for an alliance between unions and blacks that would enfranchise workers and get rid of Jim Crow. Martin Luther King, Jr., would nurture the same hope.
THE BLACK IMPULSE to resist Jim Crow took many forms. During a seemingly hopeless era of discrimination, black workers created something very special in Memphis. The city’s reputation as a wide-open river town with a strong, expressive black culture attracted people from the plantations in a continuing rural-to-urban migration (the “Delta flow,” some called it) that channeled people such as Memphis Minnie, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and many more into an area tucked between the ghetto and downtown. As Muddy Waters put it, “Beale Street was the street. Black man’s street…. So many slick people came from down that way, learnt how to gamble, learnt how to con, how to cheat, from down in that part of the country. And Beale Street was the main line.” Here, in the “home of the blues,” men and women sang and played guitars, banjos, pianos, and whiskey jugs, and even made a living doing it. Black cultural identity emanated from the churches but also from Beale Street, where sanitation strikers marched repeatedly in 1968.
One of the Beale Street bluesmen was Walter (“Furry”) Lewis. His parents separated before he was born—in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1893—and he ended up at the age of six on Brinkley Avenue in Memphis. Fending for himself, Furry picked up a guitar and made his money singing on street corners; he formed his own band and traveled the South with medicine shows. Lewis survived by his wits, but in 1916 he lost his leg in an accident while trying to hop a freight train. Unable to do heavy labor, he found a job in 1923 with the sanitation division of the Memphis Department of Public Works. Starting at two in the morning, he swept city streets with a broom and hauled garbage with a mule-drawn trailer. He slept in the daytime and at night played in taverns and at private parties, even at the police station. He developed a large repertoire of songs with his clear singing voice and clean, sure, finger-picking style. He picked blues into the night and picked up garbage until dawn.
Lewis recorded classic blues songs in the 1920s, but the blues as a commercial enterprise nearly disappeared after the Depression struck Beale Street. In 1940, Crump shut down its illegal juke joints as a way to clean up his image with white voters, and businesses there took a further downward slide. Furry kept sweeping streets until Sam Charters rediscovered and rerecorded him in 1959, as an icon of the lost days of Beale Street. In the 1960s, white musicians beat a path to Furry’s door, seeking the roots of the blues.
Like most bluesmen, Furry rarely sang directly about his trials and tribulations as a worker. He sang about being unjustly accused of crimes, about trying to avoid the death penalty or the penitentiary, about hateful love affairs, about trains and living on the road, about the pleasures of women and wine. When he sang about work, it was about John Henry, who could outwork a machine but died doing it. He believed the best work was no work at all:
I left Memphis to spread the news,
Memphis women don’t wear no shoes,
Had it written in the back of my shirt,
I’m a natural-born lover, don’t have to work.
Sometime during or after the 1968 strike, Furry retired from sanitation work, but by then the world of black labor had changed immensely. During World War II, Memphis had offered rural blacks something more attractive than the blues: jobs. Suddenly, war industries needed black workers, including black women, and A. Philip Randolph threatened a mass march on Washington in 1941 unless President Roosevelt opened industrial jobs to blacks. Through executive order, the president called for employers to end Jim Crow on the job; then he set up the War Labor Board, which penalized industries for interfering with the right to organize or join a union. Crump met his Waterloo when the federal government threatened to take away federal contracts if he did not leave the unions alone.
Crump finally let Randolph speak in Memphis in 1944 (he had banned him earlier), by which time many blacks and whites had joined forces in the CIO. The United Rubber Workers (URW) became the CIO’s largest union, with 7,000 members during and about 3,000 after the war, about a third of them black. Increasing numbers of white workers realized that unions could not effectively organize factories unless they organized all the workers into one union. From fewer than a thousand members before the war, CIO unions expanded to more than 32,000 members at its end. AFL unions had even more members.
White workers, even in the CIO, continued to resist black equality at every turn, yet the CIO gave black workers a form of leverage they had never had before. The 1940s became the “seedtime” of the civil rights revolution, as the NAACP called for a “double victory” campaign against Hitler fascism abroad and Jim Crow fascism at home. Black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois called on CIO unions to democratize American life, and black workers increasingly demanded equal access to jobs, to elected union positions, and to skills and advancement. Union wages spurred bigger donations to churches and civic groups, and Coe, Holloway, and other black CIO members joined civil rights groups, voter registration drives, and black civic clubs to challenge segregation. NAACP membership ballooned in heavily unionized places such as Detroit, and the Memphis NAACP became one of the largest chapters in the South. Black soldiers returning home from the war demanded equal rights, and many of them used the GI Bill and union wages to create a new generation of college-educated youth demanding their due as citizens.
Black women like Irene Branch, a domestic worker who became a Firestone employee, also joined unions during the war as a ticket to a much better life. “Those supervisors would curse you, call you names, do you any kind of way. They’d call you ‘nigger’ and everything else, and spit on you. Blacks was really treated bad.” But union grievance committees changed this. “We didn’t see freedom until we got that union in!” Even though many black women lost union jobs after the war, they continued to play increasing roles in service work and public employment, supporting sanitation workers and others who demanded unions. Some 80 percent of black women wage earners worked as domestic workers in Memphis before the war; by 1960, less than half of them did.
Although the CIO unions kept it quiet, Communists also played a crucial role in the upsurge of unions and civil rights demands in the 1940s. Leftist CIO activists led Local 19 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers’ Union of America (FTA), Local 282 of the United Furniture Workers of America (UFWA), and the National Maritime Union (NMU) and provided the key supporters of labor and civil rights organizing. After the war, CIO leftists practiced “social equality” (integration) in their union halls, elected black officers, created active rank-and-file shop-steward councils, socialized over beer and on picket lines, called each other “brother” and “sister” in meetings, and in other ways challenged white supremacy. At Firestone and in most industries, blacks and whites still had separate departments and seniority lines, denying blacks promotion into the better jobs, yet an increasingly active “civil rights unionism” also made headway.
In 1946, the CIO generated great hopes when it announced Operation Dixie—a million-dollar campaign to organize southern workers, support equal rights for blacks, and eliminate reactionary politicians through a voting coalition of black and white working-class voters. This projected voting alliance—coupled with industrial growth, black migration and urbanization, and unionization—threatened to change race relations as the Memphis population swelled from 300,000 to 500,000 between 1930 and 1960 and became nearly 40 percent black. The rise of black-run radio stations WDIA and WLOK, the black-owned newspapers Memphis World (begun in the 1930s) and Tri-State Defender (begun in 1951), and increasing education and assertiveness among black ministers all ushered in a rising demand for black freedom in the postwar period.
THIS BUDDING REVOLUTION of labor and civil rights was stifled in its infancy, as the nation made a great political U-turn after the war. Lynching of black war veterans, which the young Martin Luther King protested in a letter to the Atlanta Constitution in July 1946,* demonstrated that segregationists would strike back hard against black aspirations. At the same time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared that there were “two great menaces to the U.S., Russia abroad and unions at home,” and a new breed of Republicans in Congress, such as Richard Nixon, portrayed CIO unions and New Deal Democrats as part of a Communist conspiracy.
Lubricated with money from right-wing oilmen in Texas and supported by segregationists across the South, the rhetoric of anti-Communism throttled social change. One white minister, speaking before the Memphis Lions Club in 1947, said unions had to be stopped to keep Communists from secretly taking over. Southern groups such as “Christian America,” the Southern States Industrial Council, and the Christian fundamentalist Harding College in Arkansas, put out blizzards of anti-Communist, anti-union, and anti-integration propaganda on college campuses and military bases. Klansmen, police, and vigilantes arrested, kidnapped, and beat CIO organizers, and many employers routinely fired workers for joining unions.
The climate for unions worsened in 1947 as a more conservative Congress emasculated worker protections under the Wagner Act. The Taft-Hartley Act, section 14(b), allowed states to outlaw the “union shop” that made union membership a condition of employment. It also prohibited secondary boycotts of employer goods, enmeshed organizers in a maze of legal requirements, required union officers to sign an anti-Communist oath or lose the right to participate in NLRB elections, and restricted union political contributions. The Tennessee legislature promptly passed a “right to work” law, allowing workers to gain benefits from a unionized workplace without joining the union or paying dues. “Free riders” made it very difficult for unions to maintain their memberships in an increasingly fearful, anti-union environment.
At the time that Ed Gillis moved to Memphis in 1948, Crump’s days as a political boss were numbered, because many unionized workers could now afford to pay their own poll taxes and vote against his candidates. Attorney Lucius Burch, who would serve as attorney for Dr. King in 1968, organized a coalition of blacks, middle-class reformers, and unionized workers that elected Democratic liberal Estes Kefauver (and later Albert Gore, Sr.) to the U.S. Senate. Crump’s reactionary candidate failed to decisively carry Shelby County for the first time, a sign that unions had become a major factor in Tennessee politics. But things also took a turn for the worse during the 1948 election. Left-wing unions and many civil rights activists supported the independent Progressive Party presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, formerly the vice president under Roosevelt, who ran the first truly integrated national political campaign in the South and called for an end to nuclear testing and a peaceful détente with the Soviet Union. Nineteen-year-old Martin Luther King and many other blacks hailed Wallace’s commitment to integration, as Progressives ran black and white candidates on the same ballot and held integrated rallies. In Memphis, the famous baritone Paul Robeson held a concert for Wallace at Mason Temple, where sanitation strikers would rally twenty years later.
Harry Truman and many anti-Communist liberals disregarded the grassroots character of the Wallace campaign and maligned him as a surrogate for the Communist Party. The CIO did not like Truman but supported him as the lesser evil against Republican Thomas Dewey, and Truman won mainly due to labor support. But after the election, a great “Red scare” swept the nation as Truman and the Democrats led bipartisan repression against the Left at home and national independence movements in the former colonial world. The CIO joined in, purging eleven unions with nearly a million members for having Communists in their leadership. The CIO also cut its financial support to the integrationist Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and to Highlander Folk School when it refused to ban left-led unions, the strongest supporters of integration. The “Red scare” nearly silenced demands for integration within organized labor in Memphis and the South for the next twenty years.
Attempts to organize southern workers, still the least unionized in the country, fell to pieces, setting precedents that would make organizing black workers extremely difficult during the 1960s. In Memphis, a court injunction forbade workers from picketing and helped the Greyhound Bus Company break a strike in 1946. In 1949, the Memphis Furniture Company fired a black union leader and withdrew union recognition and dues-checkoff rights that workers had won during the war, thus forcing black women—many of them single mothers—to strike. They walked the picket line for months, some of them with burlap bags tied around their feet because they lacked winter shoes. The police escorted strikebreakers into the plant in buses decorated by red, white, and blue banners, and they threatened picketers with long clubs tooled inside the plant by scabs. The segregationist white CIO leader Red Copeland stepped up efforts to purge from the CIO leftists and civil rights advocates, including an important young black leader, UFWA president Rudolph Johnson.
The defeat of unionists at Memphis Furniture set off an employer campaign to decertify other CIO unions. Owners of the American Snuff Company tobacco plant, one of whom later became a prominent John Birch Society activist, provoked a strike of 350 women (most of them white), employed police violence, and replaced union workers with scabs (many of them black), thereby destroying the union. Injunctions against picketing, prohibitions of secondary boycotts (in which nonstriking unions boycott the goods of companies under strike), racial divisions, the use of scabs, and police violence once again became standard ways to break unions in Memphis.
Civil rights advocacy within organized labor soon became practically forbidden in Memphis. U.S. Senator James Eastland, one of the largest plantation owners in Mississippi and a leader of the white supremacist White Citizens’ Council, held Memphis hearings in 1951 attacking labor’s civil rights supporters. He was particularly angry that black Local 19 members had gone to his state to protest the frame-up of Willie McGee, a black truck driver who had a consensual love affair with a white woman but was nonetheless executed on a rape charge. Leroy Boyd and other protesting Local 19 members were arrested and barely escaped Mississippi alive. Eastland’s hearings forced Local 19’s white business agent, Ed McCrea—an integrationist and one of the CIO’s most able organizers—to leave town. Boyd observed, “If a white person took too much time with a Negro, they’d always call him a nigger lover…and also Communists.” Eastland again held hearings in Memphis in 1957, attacking, among others, Grace Lorch, a white woman who saved black teenager Elizabeth Eckford from a mob during the school desegregation struggle in Little Rock.
Combined “Red scares” and “Black scares” not only killed union organizing but silenced support for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling on May 17, 1954, which overturned segregation as the law of the land. The Communist “conspiracy” remained a staple news item, as did a drumbeat of support for the American military intervention in Korea and elsewhere. As the great reversal of the 1950s shut down public debate, a more bureaucratic, conservative, business style of unionism replaced the thriving CIO labor movement of 1946, and segregation reigned in most southern unions. By the time the mostly segregated AFL unions merged with the mostly biracial CIO unions in 1955–56, organizing had practically stopped—a fact the Memphis Press-Scimitar emphasized with a headline in 1955: LABOR? MANAGEMENT? NO ONE COULD TELL THEM APART. AFL and CIO unions in Memphis probably had a respectable 50,000 members among them, but union membership sharply declined as unions ceased to organize the unorganized.
Integrationists tried to use the contradiction between Jim Crow at home and America’s espousal of freedom in the world as leverage to make civil rights demands on the federal government, but cold war anti-Communism undermined civil rights as well as unions. The cold war did not create a favorable climate for change; instead, its pressures caused the NAACP increasingly to narrow its framework, away from a broader social and human rights agenda to what people called civil rights. Top NAACP leaders like Thurgood Marshall collaborated with the FBI in rooting out “Reds” from the Movement, just as did the AFL-CIO, thus proving their loyalty to American foreign policy dictates. But purges did not protect the NAACP from the anti-Communist and segregationist backlash.
Memphis NAACP membership had jumped from about 400 in the late 1930s to more than 4,000 in 1947, but by 1949 it dropped to about 1,000 and remained at low ebb for the next ten years. The NAACP nationally and in Memphis ostracized leftists and steered clear of the Willie McGee case, while the Memphis Urban League, ostensibly a supporter of civil rights, cooperated with Eastland to kill Local 19, the most racially progressive CIO union in Memphis. “Memphis is a hard spot,” wrote the NAACP branch president in 1954; NAACP regional organizer Ruby Hurley later wrote to her national office: “I could really cry about Memphis.” Memphis NAACP President Harold Lockhart in 1955 decried the local NAACP’s “pronounced apathy and lethargy,” but when he tried to get black teachers to organize youth chapters, the school superintendent put a quick stop to it by accusing the NAACP of being a Communist front. In Mississippi and Alabama, white officials actually declared the NAACP illegal.
THE COLD WAR’S crushing assaults undercut organizing and uncoupled unions from the civil rights struggle. In the South, white supremacy still reigned. Unions failed to reach out to organize the largest group of the unorganized—black workers—and civil rights groups steered clear of union organizing, leaving the black working poor with few champions. The light that CIO unions had once cast upon demands for labor solidarity and workers’ rights flickered and faded.
One glimmer of light still shone from Memphis, as blacks and whites from working-class and rural cultures created rock ’n’ roll, country, blues, and soul music that helped many American youth break the cultural mold of segregation. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, B. B. King, and “a surprising number of the performers recognized immediately anywhere in the world came from Memphis and its environs,” wrote historian Pete Daniel.
More importantly, the Red scare could not stop the emerging civil rights revolution, led in part by the young Martin Luther King, Jr.