The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement…. Together we can bring about the day when there will be no separate identification of Negroes and labor…. Some will be called reds and Communists merely because they believe in economic justice and the brotherhood of man. But we shall overcome.
—Martin Luther King, Jr., Fourth Constitutional Convention, AFL-CIO, December 11, 1961
IN 1957, TIME MAGAZINE PROCLAIMED KING ITS “MAN OF THE Year.” It characterized him as an “expert organizer” but “no radical”—a Christian civil rights leader, presumed to be quite different from 1940s black socialists with labor politics like Randolph, Du Bois, or Robeson. In reality, King never confined his politics to civil rights. He had clear links to working-class and poor people through his family, church, and community, and from an early age he advocated an economic-justice agenda that went far beyond civil rights. He also developed a labor perspective and connections to unions that influenced his strategy for change.
White journalists may have seen the well-dressed, highly educated, eloquent “Dr. King” as the quintessential middle-class leader, but he came from a line of people, including slaves, who struggled fiercely against poverty and Jim Crow. His grandmother took in washing and ironing for whites but was not afraid to beat up a white man who had assaulted her son, Martin’s father. Martin’s grandfather on his maternal side, A. D. Williams, lost his thumb in a sawmill accident and was no stranger to hard work. He escaped from plantations and peonage in the countryside by migrating to Atlanta and turning a minuscule congregation of former slaves at Ebenezer Baptist Church into one of the city’s largest black churches. Along with Dr. Du Bois, the renowned black scholar at Atlanta University, Williams protested the bloody white race riot of 1906 that killed twenty-six African Americans in Atlanta. He developed the local chapter of the NAACP and led church and civil rights activities there for many years.
“Daddy” King, Martin’s father, also escaped lynching terror and low wages by moving to Atlanta from rural Georgia. He married A. D.’s daughter Alberta, and when A. D. died, he boosted a declining membership at Ebenezer and led local NAACP fights for voting rights, desegregation, and increased salaries for black teachers. Preaching a religious Social Gospel aimed at elevating the black urban poor, he took his son Martin—born in the year of the stock market crash of 1929—to see the unemployed people standing in food lines, so that a young man being raised in relative material comfort would understand the privations of the poor.
Martin wrote that he learned at an early age that “the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice,” and that he developed “anti-capitalist feelings” as he witnessed dreadful southern poverty and labor exploitation during part-time summer work. He had an optimistic belief in the goodness of human nature and the power of America’s democratic ideals, but, like other African Americans, he was constantly tested by the deep-seated racism of most whites. As an undergraduate in sociology at historically black Morehouse College between 1944 and 1947, King studied the systemic links between racism and poverty and how they might be overcome through democratic action. As a master’s-degree student at Crozier Theological Seminary outside of Philadelphia, and then as a Ph.D. student at Boston University, King became familiar with Social Gospel indictments of economic inequality and read about Gandhi and his campaigns of nonviolent direct action. He disagreed with Karl Marx’s atheism but adopted his biting critique of capitalism as damaging to the poor and workers. King used Hegel’s dialectical reasoning to envision a Christian-democratic “third way” between capitalism and Communism, and he adopted an optimistic theology of “personalism,” in which a God who valued the sanctity of the individual aided humans who struggled to overcome evil through concerted group action.
King belonged to a generation of highly educated black Christian preachers who came into their own during the labor-based progressivism of the 1930s and 1940s. When he met Coretta Scott in Boston, he found another black Southerner (raised in rural Alabama) who wanted to change the world and who remained a peace advocate all of her life. During the Depression, whites had robbed her father of his earnings and later burned his sawmill to the ground; she did not grow up with a middle-class shield such as the one that had protected Martin. She was a fine soprano, and as a student at Antioch College, she sang in a concert with Robeson, whose singing and acting career was destroyed by the Red scare. She moved on to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met and married Martin in 1953. In September 1954, less than four months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned school segregation, they moved to Montgomery, Alabama.
Their lives changed on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and touched off a new kind of mass movement. Parks had recently attended workshops at Highlander Folk School, an interracial meeting ground for CIO unionists in the 1930s and 1940s and for civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. She had long worked as an assistant to E. D. Nixon, past president of the Montgomery NAACP and a leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and she also led NAACP youth groups. Her refusal to give up her seat led to her arrest, which set an example that energized black working people—the majority of those who rode the buses. They boycotted them for 381 days, walking or getting rides in car pools to their jobs, using a black bricklayers’ union hall as headquarters. Nixon got Parks out of jail, steered King into Movement leadership, and shamed black ministers into taking a forthright public stand against Jim Crow.
King had qualities that allowed him to lead a mass movement that joined working-class people to the middle class through the black church. In a remarkable few moments in his first speech at the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), King put the struggle against segregation into a moral and world-historical context. “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” and have to organize, he said. Unions had set the precedent: “When labor all over this nation came to see that it would be trampled over by capitalistic power, it was nothing wrong with labor getting together and organizing and protesting for its rights.” King’s call for unity in a struggle for “freedom and justice and equality” that he said would reverberate worldwide had a powerful effect in creating the Montgomery movement, which in turn became King’s model for a democratic, nonviolent revolution.
Nixon embodied the connection between labor and civil rights, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars as treasurer of the MIA by appealing to union members across the country, and by helping to connect King to Randolph and the world of civil rights unionism and pacifism. Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) came to Montgomery to help King sharpen his understanding of nonviolent direct action, and they convinced him to give up the “arsenal” of guns he had in his home to protect his family. King came to know A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther (the social-democratic president of the United Automobile Workers union, the UAW), and leftist Ralph Helstein, president of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). The AFL-CIO did nothing to support the Montgomery movement, but these unions with large black memberships donated heavily to the MIA, and in the future King repeatedly would turn for support to them as well as to Local 1199 Hospital Workers and District 65 of the UAW in New York City. Cleveland Robinson, Moe Foner, Carl and Anne Braden of SCEF, Myles Horton of Highlander, and others associated with civil rights–oriented unionism and the labor Left became King’s staunch allies.
Racists blew up King’s house, the house of E. D. Nixon, and the residences and churches of other activists. Senator Eastland and the White Citizens’ Council subjected blacks and their white supporters to economic intimidation and fear, yet the Montgomery movement stayed united and won a Supreme Court ruling against segregation in transportation. King’s religious framework, his stunning eloquence, his learning, his ability to place his demands within the framework of the Constitution and the American creed of freedom—all made him a powerful spokesperson, and the mass media gave King phenomenal attention.
In 1957, King and other ministers held a conference on desegregating transportation through boycotts and other protests, producing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a ministers’ group that sought to end Jim Crow and “redeem the soul of America” through nonviolent organizing. Black labor activists such as Russell Lasley of the UPWA, as well as New York City leftists Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison, helped King formulate a platform and tighten his ties to civil rights and labor advocates. King also went to Ghana to celebrate its independence from British colonialism, and he visited India to learn more about nonviolence. Indian Prime Minister Nehru spoke with him about democratic and socialist anticolonial movements in the developing world. King gained an increasingly global perspective and specialized in linking issues. At Highlander Folk School’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in September 1957, he called for a coalition between organized labor and Negroes to end Jim Crow, adding, “I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which will take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”
A month later, he spoke to Helstein’s UPWA members in Chicago: “The forces that are anti-Negro are by and large anti-labor, and with the coming together of the powerful influence of labor and all people of good will in the struggle for freedom and human dignity, I can assure you that we have a powerful instrument.” King defined integration as “complete political, economic and social equality,” and said achieving it required “a whole series of measures which go beyond the specific issue of segregation.” This idea of a grand alliance to extend democracy to racial and economic spheres became a fundamental concept for King, as did his strong belief in American democracy—what King called “the right to protest for right.” Although the media tended to portray him as almost solely a civil rights leader, demanding equal rights within American capitalism, his views went much further than that.
American conservatives and segregationists, on the other hand, increasingly attacked him as a covert Communist. Georgia’s Commission on Education sent an undercover agent to take a picture of King sitting next to a reporter for the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker, at the Highlander gathering. Right-wing groups turned the photo and headline, “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School,” into the most famous billboard of the era. The Commercial Appeal ran a picture of the billboard, the John Birch Society sent it out as a postcard, and Billy James Hargis and the Christian Crusade used the allegation against King in its pamphlet titled, Unmasking Martin Luther King, Jr., The Deceiver. Bob James, a white Memphis City Council member, recalled that his impression of King as a subversive rabble-rouser first began with this depiction of him as an associate of Communists. Segregationists campaigned for years to close the integrationist Highlander and claimed that King’s association with the school proved that he was Communist—and that the school’s association with King proved it was Communist.
Congressional investigating committees and southern segregationists used the circular reasoning of anti-Communism against King for the rest of his life, imposing guilt by association when he insisted on defending other people’s civil liberties. He petitioned to free integrationists Carl Braden and Frank Wilkinson from “Communist” charges made before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a congressional committee led by Southerners trying to destroy the integrationist movement. Drawing on HUAC reports, the FBI noted King’s efforts to free Junius Scales, the last imprisoned victim of the anti-Communist Smith Act (his conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court), and Morton Sobel, convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, as well as his support for black Communist Henry Winston, a Smith Act victim who lost his sight while in prison. King was not a Communist by any means, but he did not see them as demons; he was friendly with people such as Benjamin Davis, a black Communist former city councilman from Harlem who was born and raised in Atlanta, and Jack O’Dell, a black former Communist and CIO activist.
King was not the dupe of anyone. Rather, he viewed civil liberties and civil rights as indivisible, and he recognized that denying freedom of speech for leftists inculcated a climate of fear aimed at silencing all movements for change. Along with other leading black intellectuals, such as Morehouse College President Benjamin Mays, King called for the abolition of HUAC, Eastland’s antisubversive Senate committee, and other efforts to suppress freedom of speech and thought. Like Mays, he also recognized the failures of capitalism for people of color; encouraged by Coretta, he increasingly opposed America’s interventionist militarism abroad. And, like numerous black intellectuals of the CIO era, he continued to appreciate the value of an alliance between the progressive wing of the labor movement and the black community.
King had a broad perspective on issues, but he also recognized that until a people’s movement overturned Jim Crow and blacks gained the right to vote, few other meaningful changes could occur. With King’s fame as a civil rights leader growing, media accounts often suggested that he alone could almost magically design and lead one victorious movement after another; people besieged him with speaking requests, and he had little time to think or plan an organizing campaign. He developed a reputation as a leader of the masses, but his reputation went far beyond his resources or his experience. The Montgomery movement fell into disarray and division after King moved to Atlanta to become co-pastor of his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and president of SCLC. King could not export the bus-boycott model to other communities, segregationists stifled grassroots voter-registration drives, and King floundered in his efforts to organize a mass movement. His search for viable tactics and strategies would haunt him for the rest of his life, as he continued to expand his view of the nature of the problems and the possible solutions confronting the freedom movement.
KING FIRST WENT to Memphis on July 31, 1959, to speak at a massive freedom rally at Charles H. Mason Temple, owned by the Church of God in Christ, a rapidly growing Pentecostal denomination. King’s demand—“Give us the ballot and we will change the South,” made at a rally of some 27,000 people in the nation’s capital in 1957—had especially resonated in Memphis, where more blacks already had the vote than in any other southern town and a voter-registration movement was going strong.
The Brown decision, Crump’s death in 1954, the Montgomery movement, and the murder of young Emmett Till in Mississippi had all galvanized a younger generation of black freedom fighters in Memphis. Black postal employee O. Z. Evers sued to end bus segregation even before the Montgomery bus boycott began. Clarence Coe and other black unionists at Firestone—represented by a labor attorney named Anthony Sabella, who later represented black workers in the 1968 sanitation strike—collected money to sue both their employer and their union for discrimination, using Brown as a legal precedent. After the Tennessee legislature repealed the poll tax in 1951, African Americans had also formed dozens of civic clubs to register black voters, whose numbers increased from 7,000 in 1951 to 39,000 in 1954.
Black unionists and civil rights supporters campaigned against police brutality and segregation and vowed to elect blacks to office, as they had in the late nineteenth century. Black minister Roy Love ran for the school board in 1954 and received 20,000 black votes, and attorneys Russell Sugarmon and A. W. Willis, Alma Morris, and others created the Shelby County Democratic Club to unify black voting clubs. (Black activists in Nashville took similar action.) After white officials disqualified Evers, Sugarmon ran for city commissioner and led an effort to elect a Volunteer Ticket to unify black voters. Three of the five candidates were ministers, a sign of growing activism among the black clergy. Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Little Rock’s Daisy Bates, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and SCLC’s Reverend Ralph David Abernathy all came to Memphis to support the campaign.
When King appeared on July 31 to support Sugarmon’s effort, more than 5,000 black people “rocked Mason Temple,” according to the Tri-State Defender, a black weekly, and they displayed the fervent spirit that became characteristic of the city’s mass meetings. Sugarmon said King’s speaking style electrified his audience. “He was tremendously eloquent…. I never heard anybody who could give voice to the emotions and aspirations like he could in the idiom of the Negro church.” King used a pattern of making a statement of fact and then saying, “We just want to be free.” He got about three of these statements out before the audience spoke back in a kind of call-and-response. “Every time he got to the refrain, five thousand people would join in. It was fantastic. You could feel the feedback…the rapport between him and everybody in that room.” Sugarmon added: “I’ll never forget that because you could feel the assemblage acquire a personality of its own. It was like a brain relating to the limbs.”
Like King, Sugarmon was born in 1929 and led an educated group of middle-class militants driving the civil rights movement forward in the late 1950s. Sugarmon remembered his first racial incident as a child, when police arrested him and slapped him around for riding a new bicycle, claiming blacks never had new bikes so he must have stolen it. “From that point on, a uniform was an enemy and I wanted to do something about it.” He recalled that Crump’s political machine had posted police officers outside the drugstore of his father’s friend, black pharmacist J. B. Martin, for expressing political independence, thus driving away his customers and putting him out of business. Sugarmon left Memphis to go first to Rutgers University and then to Harvard Law School, determined to return and change his hometown.
King told black Memphians he was “delighted beyond power of words to see such magnificent unity,” and added that he “had never seen such enthusiasm at a meeting of Negroes.” He suggested that something never seen in the Movement before would happen in this city on the river. Other speakers denounced blacks in schools, government, and anywhere else who maintained their allegiance to the old Crump establishment and said any black voting for Henry Loeb (at this point running for mayor) would be considered a “Tom” for the white man. A black reporter wrote, “The rally turned out to be a funeral for local Uncle Toms.”
But at-large districts and runoff elections made it impossible to elect black candidates unless a significant number of whites voted for them. Most blacks thought the best they could do was to collaborate with racially moderate whites, so they had voted overwhelmingly to elect a businessman named Edmund Orgill as mayor in 1955. But in return, Orgill endorsed not a single black candidate, failed to support integration, and then withdrew after the 1959 primary for health reasons. Blacks expected support from organized labor for their candidates in the August 20 primary, but the AFL-CIO didn’t support Sugarmon, nor did they support black attorney and minister Benjamin Hooks in his quest for a judgeship. In a move they would long regret, the AFL-CIO also supported Loeb in his race for mayor. Unionized whites and blacks together had previously elected Orgill, considered a racial moderate, but the Negro–labor voting alliance had come unglued.
In the 1959 primary, two-thirds of black registrants voted, and 90 percent of them voted for African American candidates; many followed Sugarmon’s “single shot” strategy of voting for only one candidate out of a field of many in order to bring a black candidate to the top when whites split their votes among competing white candidates. But almost no whites would vote for blacks, and whites even changed the rules so that all school board candidates had to run at large, making it impossible for a black to win. Blacks had built a strong voters’ movement, but “We won everything but the election,” complained Sugarmon.
Meanwhile, the segregationist movement advanced. Loeb, the outgoing Public Works commissioner, said, “A lot of good white men” might suffer if Sugarmon got elected as a commissioner of Public Works, and he called for a “white unity” ticket. In a stormy, closed-door meeting, Loeb forced various whites to withdraw from that race to avoid splitting the white vote. Bill Ferris, who became the sole white candidate running against Sugarmon, won. The two white-owned commercial newspapers campaigned against all of the black candidates, and although blacks made up nearly 40 percent of the electorate, none were elected to office. Loeb won the mayor’s race with overwhelming white support, destroying Orgill’s previous strategy of appealing to both working-class whites and blacks.
Southern whites had begun their historic desertion of the Democratic Party as a way to resist black civil rights. In the 1960 presidential election, the majority of Memphis whites for the first time voted for a Republican, Richard Nixon, while Memphis blacks voted two-to-one for John Kennedy, after he helped get King released after he was imprisoned in Georgia for his civil rights activities. “Though the white man is divided on many issues which affect our local scene, he is together on one issue—the Negro,” said black political activist (and Republican) George W. Lee, co-chair of the Volunteer Ticket Committee.
HENRY LOEB WAS a personable man and a natural politician. Born in 1920 to descendants of Yiddish-speaking Jews who left Germany and moved to Memphis in the 1860s, the six-foot, five-inch Loeb received an Ivy League education at Phillips Academy prep school in Massachusetts and then at Brown University in Rhode Island. The business-oriented Civitan Club gave Loeb its Outstanding Citizen Award and praised him for his sincerity and his “daily living” that “evidenced a faith in God.” Loeb and John F. Kennedy had been friends, and both served on P.T. (patrol) boats during World War II. Loeb’s presumed military heroism gave him enormous appeal among white male war veterans. In 1951, Loeb married Mary Gregg, the 1950 queen of the Memphis Cotton Carnival, an annual event that romanticized the bygone days of slavery and the Confederacy in an era when whites still celebrated the birthday of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Newspapers began touting Loeb as a possible unifying white politician and successor to E. H. Crump.
The gregarious Loeb was “the politicking-ist son-of-a-gun that ever came down the pike,” according to an associate, Frank Miles. He first gained attention by raising money as chairman of the American Legion’s Red Cross fund, shaking hands with people in elevators and hallways. Post Number One was one of the American Legion’s largest in the country, with 7,000 members, most connected to the Millington Naval Air Station outside Memphis. Devoting itself to “God and country,” law and order, and “100 percent Americanism,” Legion Post Number One provided a base for many aspiring white politicians. Although supported unofficially by Crump, Loeb said, “Nobody owns a piece of me.” He called for an end to one-man control of the post, a secret ballot, and a “two-party system.” He won the commander race in 1952 and made the American Legion his political base.
This segregated organization differentiated itself from the White Citizens’ Council by making Communism, not integration, its sole target. Loeb led “Americanism months” and public rallies against Communism and charged the Veterans’ Administration with “pushing socialistic aims” for insisting that its hospitals alone should care for veterans. Loeb emphasized a tight fiscal policy, saying, “The American Legion should realize that the cold war with the Communists is an economic war, and every time we spend money needlessly we lose a battle in that war.” He doubled the membership of the post, and his glad-handed approach to politics endeared him to many white middle-class and business leaders, as did his fiscal conservatism and appeals to patriotism.
Loeb first ran for the City Commission in 1955, and many blacks voted for him for suggesting that, as a Jew, he would be sympathetic to their plight. Each of the four elected commissioners ran a department of government more or less independently and had as much power as the mayor. Running the Public Works Department, handling drainage and sewage, repairing city vehicles, and doing road construction and repair and park improvements seemed the least desirable commission spot, but Loeb took it on with great zeal. He changed the name of the garbage department to the sanitation division and set out to run it as if he were running the city itself, holding open-office hours on Thursday afternoons. He made a reputation for penny-pinching, absolute honesty, and attention to the last detail of every transaction. Focus on the letter of the law became his trademark. He said city employees should not be forced to be ward workers for those in power—as they had been during the Crump regime—and he pledged to a black Boy Scout unit that he would improve public streets and gutters and trash collection for blacks as well as whites.
Loeb built up a following far superior to that of other white politicians by aggressively resurfacing streets, fixing potholes, improving curbs and gutters, draining ditches, clearing weeds and snakes from drainage pipes, undertaking huge trash collections, and beautifying the increasingly affluent white communities in Mid-Town and East Memphis. Loeb advertised his work to the white community by employing two full-time secretaries and dictating up to a hundred letters a day. The city engineer called him “Hurricane Henry” for his prodigious work routine.
However, black workers actually did the heavy lifting at all ends of the Public Works Department, and Loeb financed his expansion of services by increasing “efficiencies” that came at their expense. He hired black men with arrest records who were unlikely to organize, held down wages, and bought the cheapest trucks and equipment, which quickly grew obsolete. One of these obsolete trucks led to the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker in 1968. Worker morale declined and grievances accumulated throughout his tenure as commissioner of Public Works (1956 to 1960).
Loeb played softball with his employees and tried to establish the image of a friendly boss, but his relationship with blacks remained strictly that of an employer. He closely followed the business teachings of his father and his grandfather, who made the family fortune in the notoriously low-wage laundry business, where black women did the great bulk of miserable, hot, steamy work at poverty-level wages. Becoming the head of Loeb’s Laundry Cleaner Company in 1946, he had successfully resisted efforts by black workers to organize unions, tightly monitored his workforce, and kept his company’s wages low in an industry that remained a bastion for highly exploited and cheap black labor. When a white resident reported that black workers were selling scrap metal, rags, and bottles they picked up, Loeb charged them with infringing on the city’s “right of contract” and punished them with an extra hour of work every day without pay.
Loeb put the letter of the law above the basic human needs of his workers, who desperately needed raises. When Loeb went to speak to the men about donating from their meager wages to Shelby United Neighbors, a charity to which most government workers donated, they rather meekly asked him for improvements in their working conditions. He abruptly changed the subject and left. Loeb did make some improvements in worker conditions, putting canvas tops on open-bed trucks and improvising a pension system, but his reforms often came with a catch. He provided paid vacations for workers for the first time in 1956, for instance, but he made them work unpaid overtime to cover the benefit. His penny-pinching ways embodied the Calvinist tradition, according to his boyhood friend Ned Cook: “His household budget is always balanced. Everything is in order. Everything is in place.”
Loeb’s friends said that he knew few if any African Americans on more than a superficial level. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus made his political career by exploiting the Little Rock school-integration crisis in 1957, and, like Faubus and many other politicians of the era, Loeb increasingly espoused segregationist views in order to unify his base. He bluntly stated, “I am opposed to integration,” but he also said, “I believe in treating negroes [sic] fair,” which meant “separate but equal facilities and fair economic treatment.” But when Loeb ran for mayor in 1959, he vowed, “I would fight any integration court order all the way. I am not for anarchy.”
Black residents’ hopes that Loeb, as a Jew, would be an ally proved to be a great delusion. As the White Citizens’ Councils increasingly enforced white conformity, Memphis Jews remained largely silent. Southern Jews made up less than one percent of the South’s population, and many of them had fully assimilated into white supremacist culture. Few of them, especially businesspeople, would jeopardize their positions by speaking out for black rights. Loeb increasingly established himself as a dedicated, straight-talking segregationist who would do more to unite white voters against racial liberalization than any other politician after Crump.
Among whites, Loeb gained a reputation as hard-working, fiscally smart, and a dedicated and fair public servant; among blacks, he became a clear enemy. He shifted Memphis politics away from former Mayor Orgill’s formula of appealing to both working-class whites and black voters, in favor of appealing to white prejudices and ignoring blacks. In 1959, he supported Andrew Taylor, an overt segregationist running for governor, as part of the evolving “massive resistance” of white politicians to school integration. Saying he was not prejudiced, Loeb urged blacks to throw in their lot with white southern conservatives. But he also urged them to reject white Northerners posing as friends—as they supposedly did during Reconstruction, when black allies from the North “placed the Negro in places of political responsibility for which he was not prepared.” Insultingly, Loeb admonished them for “always asking and never giving,” and he urged them to reject the “shade tree” philosophy of the welfare state.
Whites elected Loeb as mayor in 1959 with the largest number of votes in the city’s history, and white voters sustained his mayoral career for the next sixteen years. Loeb converted to his wife’s Episcopalian religion in 1963, removing the sense that he was Jewish at all. Among blacks, Loeb’s popularity evaporated: he received 12 percent of their votes in 1956 but only 2 percent in 1959. Maxine Smith of the NAACP bitterly mocked Loeb’s early election appeals that Negroes and Jews should “stick together.” Instead of following that road, “somewhere along the way he thought it would be more expedient politically to become a segregationist. He’s just like all other politicians…. They do what’s politically expedient at the time.”
LOEB’S ELECTION as mayor occurred at a time when African Americans felt under siege. Racists had killed Florida NAACP leader Harry T. Moore and his wife Henrietta with a bomb on Christmas Eve, 1951, for registering voters; they continued regularly to blow up black churches and homes in Mississippi and “Bombingham,” and they demolished a public school in Clinton, Tennessee, to stop desegregation in 1957. In Memphis, police brutality remained the most oppressive form of white terror. A casual perusal of the Tri-State Defender on any given week at the turn of the decade documented shocking and random police brutality against blacks. When the newspaper’s black editor went to the police station in West Memphis, Arkansas, across the river, to bail out an employee involved in a minor traffic accident, a white police sergeant jumped over the counter and struck him repeatedly for questioning something the sergeant said.
Cases of police brutality before the NAACP included an instance in which white police beat up a young black man for having convulsions and another in which they attacked and arrested two teenagers merely for being at home and answering their door (officers apparently didn’t like their attitude). Police routinely used a long strap and clubs to beat up arrested blacks en route to the police station. Officers attacked U.S. Army veteran Everett Johnson at the door to his church after he urged a black woman being manhandled by them on the street not to resist arrest. The police called him a “nigger” and beat him so badly he went to John Gaston Hospital on a stretcher. They arrested him for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, and interfering with police—typical charges used to cover up police brutality.
Attorney Sugarmon, Firestone worker Matthew Davis, and many other black civic leaders used neighborhood and voting clubs to protest police violence, yet most whites seemed unaware of it. The editors of the two major newspapers, both members of the Memphis Committee on Community Relations (MCCR), kept stories of police brutality and black protest out of the white press, and few whites read the black press. One black man put it simply: There was “no justice for Negroes” in Memphis, and there also was no common understanding of the problem between whites and blacks.
In the workplace, blacks suffered in their own portion of hell. When Clarence Coe, playing the “Jackie Robinson role,” broke into a previously “whites only” machine job at Firestone, white workers nearly killed him in two separate incidents. When George Holloway at International Harvester also broke into a “whites only” job, someone sabotaged his punch press. “I was the committeeman for the man in the department who tried to kill me,” said Holloway. “That’s how relations were with whites at the time.” Holloway represented hundreds of whites as a union shop leader, yet some of them still called him “nigger.” The White Citizens’ Council took control of the union hall and resegregated it, forcing the national UAW to take over the local. White vigilantes broke out the windows of Holloway’s home; Coe said, “Here in Memphis, this was the worst place on earth,” and he kept a gun in every room of his house for self-defense. Most industrial unions failed to live up to nondiscrimination clauses in their constitutions and contracts, and NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill proved it, publishing several devastating reports on pervasive union discrimination that were widely publicized in the black press. Even industrial unions like the UAW preached equality but practiced white supremacy: blacks composed only 1.5 percent of its skilled members nationally in 1963.
Fortunately, in Memphis a distinctive cadre of activists emerged from the black middle class to organize a new civil rights movement. Said union organizer Alzada Clark, “We didn’t have CORE or SNCC or anything else, because we had sophisticated leadership with college degrees in Memphis. You had to have degrees to have any power here…. This made Memphis different than some cities.” These middle-class, educated activists were “prudent realists,” in the words of one historian, filing suits rather than organizing demonstrations. In some ways, though, they were very much in the King mold.
In a region marked by poor education, the NAACP’s college-educated cadre included former Army officer and accountant Jesse Turner, president of the black-owned Tri-State Bank; lawyer Russell Sugarmon and his educator wife, Miriam (Laurie) Sugarmon; attorneys Benjamin Hooks, A. W. Willis, and James Estes, among others. With an expanding black population to support them, they increasingly challenged segregation at every level and, by the early 1960s, created one of the most active NAACP chapters in the Deep South. They campaigned to desegregate all public facilities, including the city’s zoo, parks, playgrounds, and public libraries; petitioned the school board to end segregation; and pressed hard to elect and appoint African American leaders in the public schools.
When Maxine Smith teamed up with NAACP President Turner, they became driving forces to make the Memphis NAACP a fighting organization. Maxine—as African Americans affectionately called her—had a deep reservoir of anger. She remembered as a child trying to visit her sick father, a postal worker, at the local veterans’ hospital. “I want to see Mister Joseph Watkins,” she asked. The clerk told her, “We don’t refer to niggers as ‘Mister’ around white folks.” She was only nine when her father died; her mother worked as a secretary at the Baptist church, which provided a rock of support in her youth.
She met King when he was a student at Morehouse and she was a student at Spelman, and she remembered him as quiet, unassuming, and younger than most of his peers because he had skipped grades and gotten into college early (so had she). She later went to Middlebury College in Vermont because the University of Tennessee would not admit blacks into graduate school. There she found good white friends and obtained a master’s degree in French. She taught for two years at colleges in Texas, where she married Vasco Smith, a black Memphian in the Air Force. They spent two years living at various air bases before returning to Memphis, where he became a dentist. Maxine Smith joined Laurie Sugarmon, a Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College who also had a master’s degree in French from Middlebury, in applying to Memphis State University graduate school. It claimed they were “not qualified” to enter a state college. The two women sued, defeating segregation at MSU in 1959. Sugarmon went on to earn a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and to become MSU’s first black faculty member.
Smith and Sugarmon belonged to a group of black women at the center of black community and work life in the Mississippi Delta who drew on the fighting tradition of antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells. Ida Leachman, a distant relative named after her, migrated to Memphis from Mississippi, along with thousands of other black women whose discontent helped to fuel the city’s labor and civil rights movements. Leroy and Alzada Clark organized many of them in low-wage furniture-related shops in the 1960s, and black women of all classes kept movements alive in factories, churches, and neighborhoods. Alma Morris and other women organized clubs to get out the vote and later became involved in the 1968 Memphis strike.
Maxine Smith and a number of other women and men ultimately built the membership of the NAACP in Memphis into the largest in the South, while Jesse Turner initiated court suits challenging segregated facilities and obstacles to voter registration. They briefly ran a boycott against the Memphis Commercial Appeal for refusing to use honorific titles for African Americans. (Editor Frank Ahlgren said the paper used “Mr.” and “Mrs.” and other titles only for “people of substance,” without regard to race, but apparently very few blacks qualified for this status in the minds of white editors.) The power of the black vote forced the ruling elite to make concessions to the black community, and the white power structure refocused on dividing blacks, as Crump had done.
It angered Smith that the strategy worked. “There are folks that can be bought that have been bought; folks who bask under the smile on the part of the white man…. The white man has very effectively slanted us politically.” Mayor Orgill’s supposed moderation in the 1950s had done little for blacks, who became used to the idea of progress through biracial accommodations. Having an open enemy as mayor could be a kind of advantage, for Memphis clearly needed more than an election. It needed a movement, and Smith thought Loeb might stimulate one.
“SOMETHING IS GOING to take place that never took place before” in Memphis, King had said in his 1959 Mason Temple speech. And then, in March 1960, it happened: a direct-action campaign started by black students willing to go to jail for freedom. Black youth had been waiting impatiently for something like the Montgomery movement to come along, but not much had happened. On February 1, the first lunch-counter “sit-ins” began in Greensboro, North Carolina; weeks later, in Memphis, a handful of black students followed their example, sitting in and getting arrested for breaking the segregation laws at the city’s segregated public libraries. Industrial union member George Isabell’s daughter was among the first to go to jail.
Black high school and college students rallied at the city’s historically black LeMoyne College and Owen Junior College (later combined as LeMoyne–Owen College) and fanned out from there to “integrate” downtown stores. Student sit-ins occurred at department stores, lunch counters, restaurants, and the zoo and touched off daily mass meetings in black churches, picketing, and lawsuits by the NAACP. Black Memphians displayed what Sugarmon called a remarkable “religious fervor” in mass meetings, and at least 300 black students were arrested in the next several months. They even “sat in” at several white churches on a Sunday and at a citywide religious gathering in Overton Park. The city arrested them, claiming the United States would become a “godless” Iron Curtain country if whites lost their right to worship as they chose (without blacks). Black attorney Benjamin Hooks tried to persuade the court to be lenient by using the story of the Good Samaritan helping the less fortunate and citing the admonition, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” An all-white, all-male jury returned felony convictions.
When school let out and students went to work, the desegregation movement began to lose its steam, so adults began picketing the downtown stores; the direct-action movement among adults and students lasted a year and a half and perhaps produced more sit-ins than in any other southern city. Maxine Smith estimated that there were more than a thousand arrests over eighteen months, and, as membership secretary of the NAACP, she recruited 2,000 members in two years. The NAACP picketed segregated downtown stores and filed suits to desegregate public eateries, libraries, and stores. The direct-action movement transformed the consciousness of many black Memphians, undercutting old patterns of accommodation and “taking it.”
A new sense of citizenship and of urgency emerged as the result of direct action—in much the way that King had said it would. By this time, he had moved from Montgomery to Atlanta, and he played no direct role in instigating the sit-ins in Memphis or anywhere else. SCLC’s Ella Baker encouraged the youth to create their own organization—one less compromised by cautious adults—and they followed her advice by founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina, where King spoke. The sit-ins and President John Kennedy’s 1960 election gave many African American youth a new sense of optimism. Then, in May 1961, a new phase of struggle began, as young people led “freedom rides” to desegregate interstate transportation, suffering murderous beatings and frightening imprisonments.
King supported but did not participate in the freedom rides, yet his preaching for equal rights and freedom nonetheless had a tremendous effect, as African Americans and whites absorbed what he had to say via newspaper, radio, and television. The two weekly black newspapers (the Memphis World and the Tri-State Defender), the two black-run radio stations (WDIA and WLOK), and black ministers broadcasting on several smaller radio frequencies kept African Americans in Memphis abreast of the desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962; the Birmingham desegregation struggle and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963; and the Selma-to-Montgomery march for black voting rights in 1965. Black Memphians participated in all these struggles, which produced defining legislative victories in the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As the Movement overturned segregation laws, demands for desegregation of American economic structures came increasingly to the forefront in Memphis and everywhere else. When SCLC held a two-day board meeting in the Bluff City in 1963, it sought to build a broader base among black ministers to address a range of ills plaguing blacks. On April 30, King addressed 700 people at Metropolitan Baptist Church about the mass movement that he was currently leading in Birmingham to desegregate accommodations and employment in downtown stores. He said some 2,000 protesters had gone to jail, and masses of students left their schools to challenge Police Chief Bull Connor’s fire hoses, snarling police dogs, and armed police. They were following a strategy of “jail, no bail,” and filling up the jails—making it difficult for the white power structure to suppress the Movement, which he (correctly) predicted would spread rapidly across the South. The Memphis Press-Scimitar, which had not yet gotten around to capitalizing the word Negro, quoted King: “This is a quest for equal opportunity. We will promote selective buying where negroes will trade only with those who agree to employ negroes.”
In many of its details, Birmingham previewed the Memphis movement of 1968, which would also combine street demonstrations and mass protest meetings with an economic boycott to force business and city government to support justice for black workers. The Birmingham movement aimed at both desegregation of downtown stores and decent jobs in those stores for blacks, and it used an economic boycott during the Easter shopping season to pressure businesses and a newly formed city government uncertain of its powers. Bayard Rustin later wrote that Birmingham introduced the “package deal,” which required an array of measures for economic and social advancements, not just civil rights measures, and highlighted “the concept of collective struggle over individual achievement as the road to Negro freedom.”
In Memphis, economic issues could not be ignored, for black family income averaged one-third of the white average, while housing, education, and health issues cried out for solutions. Concurrent with the Birmingham campaign, the Memphis NAACP in the spring of 1963 focused on jobs, pressuring 100 retail firms to change their hiring policies and to desegregate at the same time; then it moved on to make similar demands of hospitals, restaurants, and hotels. Reverend James Lawson, an instigator of the sit-in movement in Nashville and a consultant to King and SCLC in Birmingham, had moved to Memphis the previous year. He and Jesse Turner led some 600 Memphis protesters, including high school students, in demanding black employment gains, desegregation, and an end to total white control over the school board based on an unfair, at-large election system. Lawson and black lawyers from Memphis aided the West Tennessee voting rights struggles as well, barely escaping Somerville, Tennessee, with bullets whizzing overhead, in July 1963.
Although not highlighted by the mass media, economic demands always remained a critical part of the civil rights movement. The NAACP in Memphis held workshops on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting employment discrimination, and the organization lodged many protests against both businesses and white unions for employment discrimination. Following the Selma-to-Montgomery march for black voting rights in March 1965, Memphis ministers and activists led a “mammoth” Good Friday march demanding black employment in downtown banks. This and other marches began at the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s Clayborn Temple and went through downtown to put pressure on both businesses and the city government.
One by one, the barriers to more-or-less-equal public accommodations fell. By 1964, some 250 blacks attended Memphis State University (today known as the University of Memphis), and the city had desegregated 131 parks, under court order, and 100 restaurants. The local NAACP chapter regularly received awards from the national organization for its activism and membership gains. Memphis became known primarily as “an NAACP town,” one in which the movement relied heavily on court suits and electoral politics. Some people now praised what they called the “politics of moderation” in Memphis, as the business-oriented Memphis Committee on Community Relations and the two major newspapers called for modest compliance with the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. The city did not experience the violent upheavals that marked the freedom movement in Birmingham, and blacks in Memphis already had the voting rights that black people in Selma and Mississippi would die to achieve. A certain self-congratulatory complacence set in among the city’s ruling circles, as the Southern Regional Council, a supporter of integration, reported in 1964 that Memphis “has begun to shine as a beacon of reason and decency in the Deep South.”
But the job problem had not been solved, and white thinking remained mired in the past. Out of 1,200 police officers, only forty-two were black. Like black workers in other jobs, they were concentrated at the bottom of the department’s hierarchy and worked in a dual, segregated justice system, with no opportunity for advancement. Blacks in both city and private employment could not find decent jobs, and the black working class remained stuck at the bottom of the economic order. Hence, many potential youth activists like Marion Barry (later the mayor of the nation’s capital) left and never returned. C. Eric Lincoln, who became a noted black journalist and scholar, said, “The police in Memphis represented to most black people the possibility, even the probability, of an incident which could lead to sudden death…. I left because, among other reasons, I felt that I could never live in Memphis and attain my manhood.”
HENRY LOEB RESIGNED as mayor at the end of 1963, in order to take over his father’s business after he died, and the Tri-State Defender hoped it would be the end of his political career.* This “young, handsome man with a backward look who afforded himself the folly of dreaming of turning the clock back to Ante Bellum days” had disillusioned blacks by taking “every opportunity to declare loudly and long in a coarse manner that he is a ‘segregationist.’” The newspaper blamed Loeb and other segregationist politicians for stirring up a violent political climate that led to President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.
For a moment after Kennedy’s death, things seemed to move in a promising direction. During the 1964 elections, voters overwhelmingly elected Lyndon Johnson as president and Democrats in Memphis replaced Crump’s Congressman Clifford Davis with George Grider, a supporter of unions, black voting rights, and Johnson’s War on Poverty. Blacks elected attorney A. W. Willis as the first black representative to the legislature since Reconstruction and joined with whites to elect William Ingram as mayor. Blacks thought that Ingram, a white judge who had served as a buffer between black defendants and the police, would be the truly moderate leader that they had hoped Edmund Orgill would be in 1955.
But the 1964 election proved to be another electoral mirage. Grider became a congressman only because nearly all blacks voted for him. A majority of the whites voted for Bob James, a favorite of the American Legion who had received a medal from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover for his efforts to “fight Communism.” White voters overwhelmingly supported Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who solicited the segregationist vote by supporting “states’ rights,” a code word for defending segregation. Alabama Governor George Wallace ran for president in the primaries, fomenting a rabidly anti-Communist and prosegregationist following. The John Birch Society (formed in 1959 by Robert Welch, who spoke in Memphis in 1961 and denounced Freedom Riders as Communists) opened a Memphis bookstore in 1965. It called for a return to the unfettered capitalism of the late nineteenth century, when neither workers nor African Americans had rights under the law and claimed that Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and perhaps even former President Dwight Eisenhower were secret Communists.
In a polarizing political atmosphere, a majority of working-class as well as middle-class white voters—except for many members of organized labor—switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, which in Tennessee jettisoned any pretense of support for civil rights. In 1966, Memphis white voters dumped Congressman Grider and replaced him with a militaristic, anti–civil rights, free-market Republican named Dan Kuykendall. According to the Memphis Union News, business groups led by the anti-union National Association of Manufacturers heavily bankrolled political action committees that put many such conservatives in power.
One consolation for blacks and unions seemed to be the election of William Ingram as mayor. But, even more than Orgill, he turned out to be a huge disappointment. He “completely captivated the black community in Memphis without doing anything for us,” Maxine Smith summarized. She thought Ingram was “the most dangerous thing that ever happened to the black community,” because he could control its vote while giving nothing back. Sugarmon, elected to the state legislature in 1966, and his Shelby County Democratic Club felt the same way. In 1968, they organized blacks to vote for black mayoral candidate A. W. Willis. Still supporting Ingram were O. Z. Evers and his allies in the Unity League, in alliance with T. O. Jones and others trying to organize the sanitation workers. Blacks split their votes.
Black political leaders, each on their own turf, were not united, and electoral politics alone could not alleviate the crushing burdens of poverty. The civil rights movement had made advances in Memphis through court suits, sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, and voting, but, said Smith, “The gains we thought were considerable have been only token gains.” By 1968, she thought white leaders of the city government had become even more racist, and the economic problems of blacks had scarcely been addressed. Young black males especially grew frustrated and angry that civil rights gains failed to alleviate their poverty and unemployment.
AS THE FREEDOM movement progressed, Martin Luther King increasingly stressed that voting and civil rights were not enough to emancipate African Americans from the effects of slavery and segregation. Following the lead of Rustin and Randolph, he turned repeatedly to what commentators often called the “Negro–labor coalition” as the core of a broad movement for change. In a 1961 speech at the National AFL-CIO Convention titled, “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins,” King said that blacks and labor remained historically tied in a common destiny, that the civil rights movement in the 1960s had picked up the spirit and many of the methods of nonviolent direct action and protest methods from the union movements in the 1930s. “Negroes are almost entirely a working people,” he pointed out. “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs, decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.” He optimistically projected a coalition in which registered blacks and organized labor would vote together to improve the conditions of all Americans.
Yet King did not shirk from condemning union racism, nor did Randolph and the NAACP, leading to open conflict with AFL-CIO President George Meany. The AFL-CIO could expel unions that organized blacks because their leaders were thought to be Communists, yet it refused to expel unions that openly banned blacks from membership. King warned that white racism could stop unions and civil rights from moving forward together. He also warned of “the ultra-right wing,” an alliance between “big military and big industry,” and “southern dixiecrats and northern reactionaries.” King said, “These menaces now threaten everything decent and fair in American life. Their target is labor liberals, and the Negro people, not scattered reds…. This period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency.”
King continued to urge unions to fully include blacks and other minorities and to build an alliance that could take political power and turn back the American Right. He told the United Electrical Workers in 1962 that freedom for blacks “is a key to unlocking the social and political machinery” for white workers as well, and he later suggested to Walter Reuther that it might be a good idea for the UAW to train the SCLC staff, so that “we will find the civil rights movement really engaged in the organization of both the workers and the unemployed.” Yet few unions moved in that direction—in a place like Memphis, the AFL-CIO barely mentioned the term civil rights—and King increasingly worried that the failure of a black–labor coalition would leave black workers and the poor in the lurch.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 (which he first delivered in June before union and civil rights supporters at a huge UAW-backed march in Detroit), King said the “promissory note” from the nation’s founders for full freedom and equality had “come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” As a result, “The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material abundance…an exile in his own land.” In a speech usually noted for its optimism, King issued a dire warning that without rectifying the disastrous economic effects of slavery and segregation, civil rights would not bring true freedom. The UAW, Hospital Workers Union Local 1199, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Distributive Workers District 65 endorsed the March on Washington, but the AFL-CIO did not, and most unions still failed to organize the South or to overcome racism in their own ranks. As King called for an economic bill of rights and a multibillion-dollar “Marshall Plan” to rebuild the cities, he could not rely on the American labor movement to support such demands.
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE Christmas in 1964, King stood on picket duty at midnight with black women strikers at the Scripto pen and pencil factory in his Atlanta neighborhood, known as Sweet Auburn. The workers made $400 a year less than the minimal poverty level—for full time, nonunion work—and had little chance to succeed in their struggle for union rights and wages without the help of the civil rights movement. C. T. Vivian, King’s director of SCLC affiliates, had always been a strong union supporter, and electrified a mass meeting of the workers, declaring, “The mainstream of America’s life is labor. Labor’s demands are our demands.” SCLC helped the workers to unionize and win their strike, and King concluded, “The time has come for the civil rights movement to become more involved with organized labor.”
Vivian said the victory at Scripto demonstrated that the civil rights movement by 1964 “had the ability to move the nation in another way that labor seemingly had lost the ability to do.” But neither civil and voting rights movements nor the unions could change the country by themselves. Even as blacks knocked down barriers to public accommodations and voting rights, the Movement had not yet made serious inroads on the problem of black poverty. The need for unions and the civil rights movement to jointly redress black economic grievances would be nowhere more obvious than in Memphis.