I felt that white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead…some have been outright opponents…all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows….
—Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963
KING WROTE HIS “LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL” IN MAY 1963 as an appeal to white “moderates” to take sides in the civil rights revolution, disputing a newspaper ad by eight white ministers who called the Movement’s protests and marches “unwise and untimely.” King rejected their implication that piecemeal improvements and time itself would change society for the better. “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
In the first days of the sanitation strike, Reverend Henry Starks, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Memphis, similarly noted an “appalling silence” among white religious leaders. “The individual or local congregation really found itself paralyzed” by the politics of race, he said. Reverend Frank McRae, a white “moderate” and Methodist district superintendent, born in Memphis and raised across the street from Henry Loeb, said this paralysis came from pervasive racism. “The [white] church was asleep” in “a sleepy southern town run by a plantation mentality.” While many “blacks knew the white community ’cause they worked in their homes and cut their grass,” most whites suffered from complacency, ignorance, and fear when it came to blacks. “I believe the most devastating fear I have ever known is the southern white man’s fear of the black man. Why does the southern white man fear the black man? Because he knows he has kept his foot on the neck of the black man all these generations.” He said whites feared blacks “would become a majority and rise up and take over.”
Of necessity, Memphians saw race relations in a religious context. It was said that Memphis had more churches (some 600 of them) than gas stations. Less than 10 percent of those attending religious services were Catholics, about 2 percent were Jews, and nearly 90 percent were Protestants. Of the latter, perhaps 100,000 whites and a similar number of blacks were Baptists. They preached from the same Bible and praised the same God, but they differed dramatically on what the stories in the Bible meant. Religion might have bridged the gaps between whites and blacks over the strike, but it mostly exacerbated them.
King offered an alternative to southern religious conservatism, preaching the Social Gospel of labor and social reform movements that had emerged with industrialization and urbanization. King demanded a righteous religion that resisted racial and economic oppression, and his version of the Social Gospel struck a rich chord among African Americans, who had used Christianity as a means to resist exploitation going back to slavery. But such talk had been largely rooted out of the southern white church. McRae said that most whites thought religion should be a salve to individuals locked in poverty but not a basis for social action to end that poverty. Fundamentalists believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible that could be read to include justifications for slavery, racism, and the idea that workers should be meek servants. White ministers were “fine to give invocations at football games and annual meetings,” said McRae, but their congregations and superiors commanded them “to leave social issues alone.”
White churches helped to run the abolitionists out of the South before the Civil War, as well as radical white preachers who sought to organize the “brotherhood of man” in the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s. By contrast, black churches and ministers had often (not always) welcomed CIO and civil rights organizers. Black communities, and Memphis in particular, had also been divided by a multitude of sects and institutions within churches, organized around strong leaders concerned about controlling their own turf. But in response to the sanitation strike, black ministers began to come together. Many of them had had some taste of black proletarian life. Reverend Roy Love of Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, previously a laborer in a hardwood flooring factory, in 1943 joined forces with the minister of the historic Beale Street Baptist Church, Reverend George Long, to bring black labor leader A. Philip Randolph to speak in Memphis. Long famously declared, “Christ, not Crump, is my Boss,” before the Crump machine ran him out of town. Love stayed, ran for the school board in 1954, and became president of the black Baptist Pastors Alliance. He had long supported sanitation workers’ efforts to organize.
On the second day of the strike, Love called a meeting of black Baptist ministers and appointed Reverend James Jordan, of Beale Street Baptist Church, to head a committee of seven black ministers to intervene in the strike. Jordan felt white ministers could settle this strike, and so he contacted white Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, and Jews to try to interest them in a meeting. He felt the basis existed for a strategic biracial alliance. Reverend Starks, Jordan, and perhaps fifteen other African Americans had previously “integrated” the Memphis Ministers Association, a group of more than a hundred white ministers, after the association mistakenly invited a black minister, thought to be white, to join. Starks not only belonged to the Memphis Ministers Association but he now presided over the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, which included nearly a hundred black ministers.
The nominally interracial Ministers Association had begun study groups on racial and economic problems after the near-riots in the summer of 1967. In May 1967, the ministers had elected Rabbi James Wax, the only Jewish member of the Memphis Ministers Association, as its president. Reverend Jordan and Father Nicholas Vieron of the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church also cochaired a race relations committee, and the association had even designated February 11—the very day that the sanitation workers met to call their strike—as Race Relations Sunday. The Ministers Association had previously issued a statement condemning racial prejudice as immoral. Apparently the white churches were not quite asleep.
Out of this mix, Jordan brought together a selected group of blacks and whites in a meeting held at Lane Avenue Baptist Church, chaired by Presbyterian Ray Dobbins of the Ministers Association social action committee. One white minister said the ministers should not get involved, and at this point Reverend McRae agreed with him. But the majority formed a small interracial committee to work on the issue. Reverend Starks followed this up by asking Rabbi Wax to initiate some action. Wax and his white colleagues had a “relationship with the power structure [that] is different from mine,” said Starks, and could “save the city a lot of anguish” by talking directly with Mayor Loeb. Black ministers decided to stay in the background.
Wax seemed like a good choice to take the lead. His broad concern for social justice set him apart from the more individualistic worldview of personal salvation held by most Protestant ministers. He saw how the ancient Hebrews’ struggle against slavery applied to African Americans, believed in the Social Gospel, and had an abiding admiration for Dr. King. Judaism, Wax said, dictated a “reverence for life,” which “means to be concerned with the conditions under which people live.” For twenty-two years he had been the rabbi of Reform Judaism’s Temple Israel in downtown Memphis. He had also become a pillar of the city’s respectable religious community. He had long worked with middle-class civic, religious, and business leaders to quietly improve government and race relations through the Memphis Committee on Community Relations (MCCR). This group included “moderate” blacks such as LeMoyne College President Hollis Price and Universal Life Insurance President Maceo Walker, as well as influential whites such as Commercial Appeal editor Frank Ahlgren and attorney Lucius Burch. Wax grew accustomed to “reasoning” behind closed doors. “That’s how we worked in this city for a long time,” he recalled.
Assimilation had long been a survival strategy of the southern Jewish community, which well remembered Leo Frank, a Jew in Atlanta falsely charged with rape and murder and then lynched by a mob. Memphis Jews maintained their own religious institutions but did not challenge the “whiteness” of the dominant population. Wax said, “Almost all native-born Southerners whose families lived in the South for two or more generations have segregationist attitudes,” and Jews were no different. He belonged to a Jewish community with an insular, middle-class quality and little familiarity with the black community. Jews owned Lowenstein’s and Goldsmith’s downtown department stores, which blacks had picketed in the early 1960s, demanding an end to segregation. Jewish business leaders, like others, had acceded to this demand but otherwise had provided little help to the civil rights movement in Memphis.
Although it had required picket lines and sit-ins to do it, Wax felt proud that Memphis had quietly taken Jim Crow signs out of the downtown stores and opened its parks, the zoo, libraries, and other public places to blacks. He believed in the city’s reputation for moderation. Tennessee’s Catholic Bishop Joseph Durick recalled that when he had lived in Birmingham in 1963, “All I would hear would be the great progress and strides that Memphis and Atlanta are making, that the businessmen and the city fathers have gotten together and they are not going to let racial difficulties get in their way of moving forward. And that was the story that we were getting.”
Unfortunately, this story was a delusion of moderate whites, particularly when it came to the churches. The Ministers Association mainly represented upwardly mobile congregations, and Wax’s was one of them, but almost no Baptist and fundamentalist sects—rooted as they were in the “vast lower middle class” of insecure, rural-oriented Protestants—belonged. Reverend Lawson and many other blacks scorned the MCCR for using studies and discussions as substitutes for action. Lawson presented the MCCR with a Freedom Manifesto in 1967, calling on it to act more boldly and to talk less, but Rabbi Wax, at that time the MCCR’s secretary, opposed it, and the NAACP’s Vasco Smith walked out of the organization, complaining that the MCCR wanted to put fires out, while he wanted to start them. Wax found it difficult to fully understand the black community’s anger; he believed talking with influential whites was more effective than picket lines. Like Isaiah in the Old Testament, Wax urged people to “come and let us reason together,” but Lawson thought “reasoning” in the Jim Crow South occurred best under the pressure of black community mobilization.
When such mobilization occurred, most white religious leaders typically responded with alarm, and so it was during the sanitation strike. After the collapse of talks between Loeb and AFSCME, Wax led a committee to see Ciampa at 10 PM on Friday night, February 16. Wax told Ciampa, “We have had in this city good race relations,” that “we have worked long and hard at it,” and that he didn’t want to see racial progress destroyed by the strike. He said he did not officially represent the Ministers Association, but he personally urged the union to end the strike for three weeks as a “cooling-off period.” In return, he offered to convene talks with the mayor.
Not quite the madman characterized in the media, Ciampa voiced his own fears of a racial disturbance, saying, “It is not gonna be too many days until the lid blows off…some hothead, and away we go.” But Ciampa knew the city would never negotiate if the strike ended, and said he did not have the power to end it even if he wanted to. Under AFSCME’s rules, only local union members could make that decision, and they weren’t about to end the strike. Ciampa did agree to hold more talks if the mayor would, and on Saturday, February 17, a group of white ministers, including Loeb’s friend Reverend McRae, went to the mayor. Loeb agreed to talk further with AFSCME as long as the ministers mediated.
ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18, at 7 PM, nearly two dozen men met in the midst of the city’s urban poverty, in the basement of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral. Loeb had stipulated that the news media must be present, and reporters and TV cameramen sat around the room. In the middle sat a U-shaped table, with Memphis City Attorney Frank Gianotti, his assistant Myron Halle, and Loeb on the left and an interracial group of union representatives (Ciampa, Lucy, Joe Paisley, Jones, and five strikers) on the right. In the middle sat Rabbi Wax, William Dimmick, dean of St. Mary’s, and Reverends McRae and Frank Tudor Jones, as well as Father Nicholas Vieron and one black minister, Reverend James Jordan. Wax presided and began by reading through the nine demands raised by the union, including recognition and a written contract, dues checkoff, a formal grievance procedure, pay raises, and various benefits.
City leaders began by saying they could not talk to people breaking the law and would not participate in talks unless the union representatives agreed immediately to end the strike—something only the full membership of Local 1733 had the power to do. This refusal to talk to strikers or their representatives nearly aborted the meeting, until Vieron suggested that Wax ask all the questions and that all answers be directed back to him. Ciampa objected, “Father, please! This is an exercise in futility…. We’re adults here. We’re struggling with serious problems. Are we going to play it like children?” Speaking directly to Loeb, Ciampa asked, three times, as if speaking to a deaf person, “Mayor Loeb, will you discuss the matter of recognition with me?” Loeb looked away from Ciampa as he responded: “I feel strongly about obeying the law…. There’s very strong inherent respect for the law in Memphis. I’ve gone about as far as I can go until we get to the point where the law is being obeyed…. My position with the union is well known. Mr. Chiampy understands this.”
Long before this meeting, “Chiampy” and Loeb had lost patience with each other. Ciampa asked in exasperation, “How can men talk when they’re not here on an equal basis? If we can’t agree to sit down and recognize the existence of one another?” Loeb said he would only talk to the ministers. Ciampa then asked Rabbi Wax to please ask the mayor, “What law would Mayor Loeb be violating if he discussed the problem at hand with the representatives of the people involved?” City Attorney Gianotti suddenly turned to Ciampa and blurted out, “Tell those men in no uncertain terms—not the way they’ve been telling them—that these men are violating the law!” Looking directly at the five workers in the room, with cameras rolling, he pounded his fist on the table and shouted, “Go back to work—immediately! I mean now!” Ciampa shouted back sarcastically, “Thank you for talking to our men!”
Rabbi Wax got the meeting back on track only by asserting the legitimacy of the absurd device of the two sides speaking not directly to each other but to him. As they did so, the mayor played primarily to the television cameras. “The right of these men to come in and see me will never be terminated,” he said, and the city wanted to “have the same happy relationship” with the sanitation workers’ union that already existed with other unions. “What is that relationship?” an exasperated Bill Lucy asked. For nearly five more hours, almost pointlessly, the parties talked around each other through the ministers.
Around midnight, AFSCME International President Jerry Wurf shambled in, with “rumpled gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses, one leg dragging slightly in a polio limp, gesticulating hands, the sharp clipped accent of New York,” strike historian Joan Beifuss wrote. Wurf did not look like a firebrand; indeed, he was exhausted. He had come directly from a full-bore organizing drive of public employees in Pennsylvania, a state with a collective-bargaining law and 100,000 public workers ready to join AFSCME, and he had profound misgivings about diverting his attention to Memphis. Privately, he had said, “You are stupid if you have a garbage strike in January or February…[and] you don’t go after a politician the minute he gets into office. You haven’t had time to get people mad at him…. [Y]ou are a fool to do it and I’m not a fool. I didn’t call the strike, and I would have advised anybody against it; but now they’re out, it’s got to be.”
Wurf did not welcome strikes, particularly not in the South, for they always spawned mistakes and confusion and exacerbated human weaknesses. The unplanned character of the Memphis strike made it “one of these situations where strategy was made by events instead of events resulting from strategy,” and he feared it could lead to a major defeat that would undermine AFSCME’s momentum nationally and undercut any hopes of ever organizing the South. AFSCME’s national communications director, John Blair, had been in town for a week and had already briefed him, in Wurf’s words, about “these ridiculous negotiating sessions in front of television cameras.”
Wurf also feared that his best organizer had blundered. A strike in the South “calls for diplomacy, sensitivity,” Wurf said later, but Ciampa had “played right into Loeb’s hands.” Ciampa’s blunt statements might work in Baltimore and Michigan, where “the first thing you do is call your boss four-letter words cause you’re rallying your workers,” but not in Memphis. “Maybe we will eventually have to holler and scream, but that should be last, not first…. The mere sound of his [Ciampa’s] name sends tremors, not only through the white community, but even through responsible elements in the black community.” Already, Wurf felt concerned about the appalling hate mail Ciampa was receiving at the Peabody Hotel.
Sensing disaster in the making, Wurf hoped to succeed where Ciampa had failed—by appealing to the “middle of the spectrum” in Memphis. To do this, he had to alter the “fishbowl” situation that made frank discussion impossible. “I sensed that Loeb was horsing around for the cameras, you know, this nonsense. You know it’s not possible to negotiate with television cameras and public officials…. There has to be confidential exchange, give and take, and men are not willing to show that they give and take. The role of the public official is that he has to take a position and never yield an inch because it’s essentially a moral position—however phony that stance is.” Wurf had to get the negotiations out of their confrontational, public mode.
Participants at the church took a midnight break as AFSCME staffers briefed Wurf, who concluded that Loeb had “missed the signal” from the union that it was “available for some wheeling and dealing” and did not want to sustain a strike under such unfavorable circumstances. Loeb had never engaged in full-blown labor negotiations, but surely he knew that a national labor leader would usually put his institution’s preservation above the interests of local workers. Indeed, with Wurf in the room, and after reporters went home, Loeb began speaking directly to him instead of to the ministers. He never spoke again to Ciampa, who now went silent during negotiations.
However, Wurf and Loeb made little progress. According to Dean Dimmick, the meeting went back and forth over the nine points in dispute “about 900 times,” and it all seemed childish to him. Loeb called for a cooling-off period during which the strike would end and he would stop hiring replacement workers—but this would have killed the union just as the failed strike of 1966 had done. After much talking, however, it appeared that solutions to some issues might be at hand. Dimmick thought the whole conflict could have been settled that very night. By four in the morning, disagreements had boiled down to only two points: formal recognition of the union and a means for checkoff of union dues.
Rabbi Wax now made an impassioned plea for compromise. As Wurf recalled his words, he said, in effect, “The red necks were coming across the bridge and the town would burn…. He really carried on, both in terms of the possibility of violence and…about the division that would take place between the races.” During a period of urban riots and Black Power, Wax’s argument really worried Wurf, who made what he called a “cold decision…to get down to the nitty-gritty and give our ultimate position” in order to end the strike quickly. Wurf proposed a memo of agreement rather than a contract, to get around Loeb’s opposition to full union recognition. And then he decided to “show our aces, give the Mayor his way out,” by dropping the demand for direct and mandatory deduction of union dues from the men’s paychecks. He proposed that dues could be deducted or not, voluntarily for each worker, through the credit union, which presumably operated independently of both the city and the union. For the first two years, AFSCME headquarters would turn over its share of the dues collected to local charities.
Wurf thought he had just proposed a face-saving compromise for Loeb: It would not be a union shop, in which workers had to belong to the union; the city did not have to participate in institutionalizing the union through dues deductions; it did not have to sign a contract, only agree to let the union function at the workplace.
Loeb said (erroneously) that the credit union had no standing separate from the city, and then he rejected the rest of the offer out of hand. Wurf thought that Loeb at least would leave the possibility of dues payment through the credit union as a later bargaining point, even if he wasn’t yet prepared to accept these proposals. Instead, Loeb rejected all of it; he “threw it away and then it was gone.” Wurf suddenly realized that Loeb “was not the least bit ready to deal…out of intransigence, stupidity, [or] lack of experience.” He felt foolish for having presented, so early in negotiations, an option that would normally be his last proposal for compromise, and he was angry at Loeb for his unwillingness to bargain. Exhausted, everyone went home as the dawn began to break.
AT NOON ON Monday, February 19, Wurf met nearly 1,300 strikers at the United Rubber Workers union hall. He presented Jones with a $5,000 check and said AFSCME would do everything necessary to sustain the strike. Reverends Jordan, Bell, and others made statements assuring the strikers that the community was behind them and they were on the side of right. That afternoon, Wurf and AFSCME representatives returned to more fruitless discussions with the mayor and his men. The Memphis Citizens Association, connected to the White Citizens’ Council’s crusade to preserve segregation, issued a statement of support for Loeb.
That night, AFSCME and the NAACP began a tactical alliance; Wurf and his organizers attended an all-night vigil, sponsored by the NAACP, starting at 6:30 PM with eighty people at city hall. The NAACP was already calling for an escalating stream of vigils and protests and an economic boycott of downtown businesses. A few black college students appeared and picketers sang, “We Shall Overcome,” and carried signs reading, “Watts also waited too late,” and “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.” At 3 AM, three black men were still picketing, finally quitting at 6 AM. On Tuesday, February 20, when workers held another noontime rally at the Local 186 union hall, Jesse Epps announced AFSCME support for a boycott of white businesses. These included Loeb’s Bar-B-Q, a chain of fast-food restaurants located in black communities, many of them attached to coin-operated laundries, and owned by the mayor’s brother William. (The two men were at odds, and Henry had divested his holdings in the company.) The boycott also included the Oldsmobile car dealership owned by City Council Chairman Downing Pryor. “Keep your money in your pockets and let the garbage stay in the streets and alleys until justice is done,” Epps declared.
The raft of speakers at the union rally that day included Taylor Blair, Paisley, Ciampa, Jones, Starks, Crenshaw, Bell, and City Council member J. O. Patterson, Jr. The former black Republican political leader George W. Lee said, “There will be no peace until the Iron Curtain is removed from Russia, the Bamboo Curtain from China, and Jim Crowism from the United States.” Reverend Baxton Bryant, director of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, also had entered the fray. Son of an Arkansas tenant farmer, a war veteran, a southern Methodist, and a populist Democrat who began preaching at age sixteen, Bryant spoke at this and subsequent union meetings and talked to everyone in city government who would listen, in his attempts to resolve the strike.
Wurf held more discussions with the city that afternoon, but he became just as frustrated as Ciampa, Lucy, and other AFSCME representatives. He also grew disillusioned with Rabbi Wax. Wurf said that Loeb “knew what I didn’t know…that Wax wouldn’t or couldn’t stand up” to him. Wax left for a previously planned trip to Florida and turned over discussions to Dean Dimmick, who seemed even less able to influence Loeb. Wurf also grew frustrated by the media. “The thing that I found hard to believe was…the absolutely, totally irresponsible attitude of the press…. I have never encountered what we encountered in Memphis…. They knew that the strike had come from the inside, that the outsiders had nothing to do with it. They knew the workers had legitimate grievances…. They knew what the real issues were and were unwilling to print it.”
That night, four young whites and seven young blacks, men and women, picketed Loeb’s home, sponsored by the NAACP.
Wurf gratefully accepted NAACP support, which had the potential of turning this into a community-based movement, but differences clearly existed. Kyles, Turner, and Maxine Smith felt this was a black issue, and they intended to mobilize the black community independent of union control. Even more than AFSCME, the NAACP had a clear fight with Loeb and held no illusions that he would make any compromises without intense black community pressure. T. O. Jones already felt some anger at black ministers and civil rights advocates for their emphasis on race, at a time when the union still hoped to resolve the strike as a strictly labor issue. Kyles said Jones had pressure on him “from the local union people,” but Jones clearly did not want black ministers and NAACP middle-class leaders to take away control of the strike from him and his members.
Yet the NAACP’s confrontational stance made increasing sense to Wurf. He had talked to Loeb for three days in various downtown Memphis churches, with no resolution in sight. Wurf wanted to leave town, but he found himself stuck in a tactical bind. Because black workers appreciated Ciampa’s obvious devotion to their cause, Wurf said, “I could not get Ciampa out of town then without doing serious injury to our stance or even our credibility with our rank and file membership.” He therefore could not replace Ciampa, but he also didn’t want him (or T. O. Jones) to run the Memphis negotiations. Wurf had no choice but to provide much of AFSCME’s leadership for the rest of the strike. And he, too, increasingly viewed this as a civil rights issue as well as a labor issue.
By Wednesday, February 21, a regular routine had been established: a union meeting of nearly a thousand strikers at noon, addressed by community supporters; a march to the downtown from Clayborn Temple; and mass meetings in various black churches. At the Local 186 meeting, Epps again echoed the NAACP’s original demand for a boycott of downtown businesses, saying, “We must stick together and God will help us win.”
ECONOMIC PRESSURES ON workers increased after they received their last paychecks on February 20, and so did temptations to go back to work. Costs to keep the workers going amounted to $15,000 a week—a heavy burden for an international union with no strike fund. O. W. Pickett led relief efforts and talked to the mayor’s assistant, who assured him that food stamps would continue for strikers. By the end of the first week of the strike, Loeb had hired approximately 150 scabs, increasing the strikers’ fear of permanent replacement.
That is why Reverend Bell kept emphasizing at the Local 186 meetings the possible misfortune that could befall people who took other people’s jobs. The tension between strikers and scabs became very evident to S. T. Thomas. He and a group of twenty-five to thirty strikers went in the mornings to the bus barns to see who was striking and who was working. One morning, with the police looking on, a nonstriker pulled out a .22-caliber rifle and pointed it at Thomas, who said, “What’s wrong with you, man?” The strikebreaker cursed Thomas viciously and threatened to kill him. Thomas responded, “You better be glad I ain’t got mine this morning. I’ll blow your goddamn brains out!” The police took the side of the nonstriker and began using racial epithets against Thomas. He barely avoided a beating. Police arrested him and charged him with “night riding” and “intimidating people.”
A judge convicted Thomas and told him he was going to send him to the Shelby County Penal Farm for eleven months and twenty-nine days, but the judge died before Thomas’s sentencing date came up, and a second judge gave him two years of probation instead. This and other confrontations suggested to Local 1733 members that they should avoid openly confronting strikebreakers at the gates of the sanitation depots. “The ones that the city was hiring at the time, we didn’t bother with them too much. Everywhere they’d go they had to have a police squad car escorting them,” said Taylor Rogers. Incidents of intimidation against strikebreakers occurred throughout the strike, but striking sanitation workers mostly used moral pressure. Said Rogers, “Some of the men was goin’ back in and we’d have a prayer meetin’ with them, and they didn’t go back no more. We’d talk to them and tell them, ‘It’s our job y’all are trying to take out there.’ We’d talk to them wherever we’d meet them. Right on the spot we’d tell them so, trying to tell them not to go back…. Some of them wouldn’t go back the next day. Some of them wouldn’t go. We never resorted to violence, to do anything to nobody.”
S. T. Thomas resented the scabs intensely, but he later absolved them for working during the strike. In his view, they had simply put their fears for their families’ immediate welfare ahead of their long-term advancement.
AFSCME staff members made a policy decision to avoid open conflicts with scabs in order not to give the police an excuse to attack strikers. Bell and many other community supporters, including students, yelled at strikebreakers and sometimes sat down in the street, but threats of full-blown civil disobedience in front of the truck barns failed to materialize. Social pressure from ministers, neighbors, and the larger black community remained the chosen method to prevent other black workers from breaking the strike. And labor–community solidarity began to take hold quickly.
Police surveillance intensified just as quickly. On February 20, Bill Lucy protested, “Twelve or 14 police intelligence men have been tape recording all union meetings with bugs and reporting everything directly to the mayor.” Black plainclothes police officer E. D. Redditt had attended the very first meeting held by the strikers at the Local 186 hall, and he continued to keep track of strike activities from his vantage point as a well-known “police–community relations” officer, and so did black officers Willie B. Richmond, Louis McKay, and Jerry Williams. Some of these men had more respect in the community than others, but anytime African Americans saw black police working undercover, they tended to associate them with the tradition of “snitches” employed by the Crump machine, whose reports had so often led to repression by those in power.
Yet these officers had their own labor grievances, for the Memphis Police Department (MPD) kept blacks in the same lowly, underpaid positions as black workers in general. Redditt sympathized with the sanitation workers and knew civil-rights and black youth activists on a first-name basis. Raised on Beale Street, and an all-city track star, he got a community college degree in health and education but had to join the military when he could not get a teaching job. He went to Korea and then came home to work for the MPD for lack of better opportunities, and opened its first community-relations center. He wanted to work with young people, but the MPD shifted him into plainclothes work, thereby putting him in an uncomfortable position in the black community. Everyone knew him, so he was not “undercover,” and yet he was assumed to be a “snitch.”
The use of plainclothes officers resulted from an escalation of “intelligence” activities in Memphis. The FBI had always worked closely with the MPD, but even more so after Frank Holloman became fire and police director in January 1968. Holloman had worked directly under J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI’s national office for twenty-five years before coming to Memphis, and he had also been in charge of the Memphis FBI for a short period. He made increasing police intelligence one of his top priorities. Police officers received training in crowd and riot control from the local FBI, and the MPD in turn provided undercover police to attend strike and community meetings.
Given the “antisubversion” orientation of top officials, FBI and police “counterintelligence” agents in Memphis could not accept the sanitation strike at face value—as a protest against racism and a demand for just compensation and treatment. Rather, they explained this struggle to Hoover and Holloman as something created by outsiders or conspirators to serve more devious purposes. The FBI took the names and addresses of white college students who attended the Saturday night rally and searched its bureaus around the country. The agency connected two students to the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs on the West Coast—presumably confirming the theory, enunciated by the Commercial Appeal as well as the FBI, that workers were “being used” by outsiders. FBI agents sometimes ignored the names of blacks listed in news stories, as if only white participation proved that radicals were involved. Such reports of course justified expanded surveillance.
But FBI agents also followed the strike through “racial sources,” some of whom saw the strike as a “power struggle” in which black leaders tried “to out-do the other in an effort to become the ultimate spokesman for the blue collar and heretofore unorganized Negro factions in the city of Memphis.” FBI agents pinpointed every sign of disunity. According to one FBI memo, “Negro leaders feel that the Union is not sincerely concerned about the welfare of the average Negro worker, feeling that the Union is more interested in getting Union dues and getting a power base established in the city of Memphis whereby it can later organize the City Hospital workers and other low-paid City employees.” Some in the NAACP, like the mayor and the City Council, felt uncomfortable that AFSCME or other unions might organize the South’s largest medical center for blacks at John Gaston Hospital, headed by a black man, Odell Horton.
FBI and police agents cultivated black ministers and NAACP board members, and a number of them regularly provided insights on the strike. Civil rights activists spoke to federal law enforcement officials in hopes that they would be more neutral than the Memphis Police Department. Some ministers also felt it was their duty to maintain dialogue with the police in hopes of minimizing violence, according to Lawson. While some NAACP members tried to open communications with the police and the FBI, AFSCME labor veterans thought they had too much: they had few illusions about intelligence agents, who apparently had already bugged their hotel rooms and tapped their phones. During labor and civil rights struggles in the past, white FBI agents had done very little to protect people’s rights to speak and organize, and Martin Luther King’s first altercation with Hoover occurred when King publicly pointed out how FBI agents often worked hand in glove with southern segregationists. FBI and police agents viewed civil-rights, Black Power, and union activists as subversive of the established order, and were not about to help out anyone in the Movement.
WURF VERGED ON walking out of the talks with the mayor by the end of the day on Wednesday, February 21. He had one hope left—that he might get through to the personable Loeb in a “man to man” dialogue. Unlike most politicians who said one thing in public and something else behind closed doors, Loeb remained consistent in his views—to a fault. Wurf thought Loeb was “wallowing in the confrontation” and had “allowed the bitterness of the quarrel, the outsider issue, the black issue, and so on, [to] obscure the very fundamental problems that were involved here.” Perhaps he could get the mayor to see that the welfare of the city and the workers required a compromise. Perhaps their shared Jewish heritage could break down personal barriers.
As the clergy-organized talks stalled out, Wurf said he took Loeb aside for a frank conversation: “I says to him, ‘Look, you silly son of a bitch, I’m not getting out of town; I’m going to fight you and you’ve won a few battles, but you know, in the long run you can’t win. And in the long run you’ve got to live with us…. I’ve mobilized the total union. If we spend money on nothing else—I’m bringing in anything that I have.’ And this was true and I said, ‘You’ve got to understand that we cannot walk away from these men. We just can’t.’” Loeb “began to give me this bull about if I was a Memphian, if I understood, and I told him that was a lot of shit. And he went on—but he was not in anger—and he said, ‘Son of a bitch, you’re getting to me. Look, why don’t we go to this banquet tonight…perhaps we can get talking to each other.’”
Thus it came about that the two men went to the Brotherhood Award banquet that night, put on by a local chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and attended by prominent business and political leaders. This event confirmed Wurf’s deep suspicions about the Memphis Jewish community. “‘Let’s take a Jew to lunch this week’ or something, you know, never impressed me as a substantial effort to save the world,” said Wurf. “By this time I was beginning to learn something about Memphis, that it always had a sort of redneck Jewish community, and incidentally a Jewish community that is totally alien to me.” Loeb was a Jew born to aristocratic privilege in the Deep South, and Wurf was a Jew born to polio and poverty in New York City. They saw the world from opposite ends of the social spectrum.
At this dinner, Commercial Appeal editor Frank Ahlgren received the Brotherhood Award for his supposed politics of moderation during the desegregation of the downtown in the early 1960s.
Most of the African Americans in the room were waiting on tables, but Eddie Jenkins, a Memphis State University student and a member of the black ROTC glee club, sang for the mayor and the other dignitaries. He felt like “a darkie on the plantation. There was a bunch of us token niggers down there—all of us clapping and saying ‘yeah! yeah!’” as Loeb acknowledged not just one, but two standing ovations, followed by muted applause for Wurf when Loeb introduced him to the audience. Loeb, said Wurf, “was showing me that although in some ways he was geshmadt,* that he had busted loose from the Jewish community in his own way [and that they] approved of what he was doing.” Said Jenkins, “I noticed Jerry Wurf didn’t stand up. He didn’t clap a lick.”
After singing, Jenkins sat next to Wurf and Loeb, whose glad-handed sincerity nearly floored him. As Loeb shook hands enthusiastically with Jenkins, however, the student asked him, “Why are you holding out on the strikers?” Loeb said he could not hear because of the din, but Wurf interjected, “You heard him. He asked you why you’re holding out on the strikers.” Loeb surprised Jenkins by taking down his phone number, calling him that very night, and then writing him a personal letter. Jenkins thought, “Gee whiz, maybe the guy ain’t so bad after all…. Maybe he is trying to be relatively fair. Maybe we got him all wrong.” He changed his mind after attending Loeb’s weekly open house at city hall, after which Jenkins realized Loeb was merely exercising a politician’s charm and wasn’t about to budge on the strike.
“Loeb…at that banquet was showing me he had the community on his part,” said Wurf. “And I, of course, told him at the banquet when he drove me home that, ‘So what?’ This had nothing to do with it. I was not running for mayor. I didn’t care if I had community approval and I didn’t care if I had establishment approval. But I pointed out to him…that these people would grow to hate him. Because the price he had to pay to win would hit these people where they lived.”
On Thursday morning, rather than returning to negotiations, Wurf and his men went down to city hall to talk to the City Council. He sent word that he hoped the mayor, too, would attend the council meeting. Loeb took offense and said that AFSCME had walked out of negotiations. He declared the talks over. Rabbi Wax’s “let’s reason together” strategy had failed. Loeb and Wurf would not talk face-to-face for the next six weeks.
Reverend Starks and the other black ministers had hoped white ministers would exert real pressure on Loeb, but Starks concluded that white ministers were “paralyzed” by the norms of white society. Men like Wax got their understanding largely “through secondary sources such as newspapers, and were swayed by what they read. They did not readily identify this as a struggle for justice which required their participation.” And they did nothing further to force Loeb to bend.
For his part, the more Wurf understood Memphis, the less he liked it. “It was clear that white workers would not have been treated this way,” and that Loeb “thought that these goddamned people were inferior; he understood that portion of his constituency that one would refer to as the cracker constituency, the redneck constituency, and pandered to them and at the expense of these men.”
In weeks to come, black ministers, the NAACP, and AFSCME would all be blamed for injecting the race issue into the strike. Said Wurf, “I didn’t make it a racial issue nor did Loeb make it a racial issue…. It was. It was the desire for a man to have access to a job that had been denied him…all of this spoke of one thing: that blacks were not worthy of social or economic concern by the establishment.”
THE FAILED NEGOTIATIONS with the mayor only made black minister James Jordan more angry about the plight of the sanitation workers. After the first all-night meeting at St. Mary’s Cathedral, he took home a worker who had not spoken up in the meeting. Jordan observed that, for “people of limited education…it’s pretty hard to try to express yourself in front of so much royalty, especially when you don’t have the words at your fingertip.”
In the car, however, the worker unburdened his feelings. He reminded Jordan of recent newspaper stories about the horrors of convict labor at Tucker and Cummings prison farms in Arkansas, and then told him, “That condition exists here in Memphis. We work under conditions worse than that.”
What Loeb did not understand, and what remained at the crux of the conflict, said Jordan, is that these men went on strike because “they worked as slaves before. Now they have a union.”