I was reared in Birmingham, Alabama. All of my ministry and work has been in the South. So I have 30 years of discipline…that comes to a black that has been born in the South and who has made any type of attainment in the South…and I have said all of this discipline of 30 years was lost in that moment….
—Reverend Ralph Jackson
MEMPHIS CITY COUNCIL MEMBER FRED DAVIS ENTERED into politics from the all-black enclave of Orange Mound, where he built an insurance company and then created precinct clubs from groups of policyholders. Growing up, he had picked cotton in Mississippi and waited tables at the Peabody Hotel, had served in the Air Force, and later picketed the Memphis fairgrounds and even had been arrested in order to end segregation in public accommodations. With thick black-rimmed glasses, a short haircut, and quiet mannerisms, he did not appear to be a fighter for black rights. In fact, he was not. Reflecting a district that was 52 percent white (Orange Mound was only one part of it), Davis entered the City Council in January 1968 as a conciliator. To that end, as chair of the city’s Housing, Building, and Public Works Committee, he scheduled a hearing on Thursday, February 22, at the newly built, lushly carpeted council chambers, hoping to find a way to a strike settlement via the council.
The hearing began calmly. Councilman Lewis Donelson allowed that the council did have the authority to pass an ordinance in response to worker grievances. He and the other committee members, Davis and black councilman James Netters, prepared to take questions from union leaders, ministers, and a few strikers. Council members Pryor, Blanchard, James, Chandler, and Awsumb came in and out of the meeting. Among the ministers was King’s close ally, James Lawson. Cornelia Crenshaw, who had been distributing food to the strikers, upset the council’s decorum by asserting that the city had denied the strikers decent treatment because they were black, as a white council member grumbled, “What has she got to do with it?” Union leaders got up next and spoke to the economic issues.
After listening impatiently, Davis finally said, “Now we would really like to hear from the men themselves. Do any of you want to speak?” Five sanitation workers sat in the audience, and several raised their hands. Jesse Epps did not know the men, and he feared they could have been planted to say that the men wanted to go back to work. T. O. Jones led them out of the room for a conference, and when they returned, Davis once again tried to get them to speak, but now they would not. Epps responded that the men “don’t feel comfortable in such plush surroundings,” and “they are not equipped to come in here and speak. That’s why they want to have some representatives to speak for them and that’s the union.” Jones later insisted that neither he nor the rank and file had prepared for this encounter with city officials, and he was afraid the workers might confuse the issues or be drawn into making statements they would later regret.
Davis was not satisfied. “We insist on hearing from the men themselves,” he interjected. Like many in the black middle class (including some NAACP leaders), he seemed to accept Mayor Loeb’s belief that the union simply was using these men to get their dues. Jerry Wurf thought Davis was using a despicable ploy to split the workers from their leaders, and he rebutted his question by saying, “There has been an attempt here today to distinguish between the union and the men…. [Y]ou’ve got to understand that the men are the union and the union is the men.”
The union made a tactical mistake by not bringing rank-and-file members and preparing them to speak, but Memphis Labor Council President Tommy Powell, sensing an opportunity, stood up and said, “Okay, if you want the men, we’ll get them here for you. They’re at the union meeting right now. Give me a few minutes.” While Epps and others monopolized the microphone for nearly an hour, striking workers left their daily meeting at the United Rubber Workers union hall and marched downtown. When they filed into the City Council chambers, a mass of boisterous union partisans confronted Davis and his committee. City Council members “thought they had been tricked,” said Epps. “They had not been tricked. They had tricked themselves.”
As some 700 men and women packed chambers designed to hold 407, the atmosphere in the room changed completely. Davis tried to keep order, repeating, “I will preside,” but he could not quiet the crowd. Someone shouted, “You didn’t trust us. Here are the men!” Ministers got up so workers could sit down. Reverend Zeke Bell moved to the back but shouted as he went, “You’re not going to put us back in the balcony. We’re out of the balcony. You’ve had us there for three hundred years and we’re not going back.” The sergeant-at-arms asked Davis to clear the aisles to meet fire codes, but the crowd ignored Davis’s entreaties to do so. Epps yelled to the men, “Do you want a union?” They shouted back, “Yes!” in unison. “I am up here” to keep order, Davis exclaimed, pounding his gavel. Reverend Lawson interrupted to shout, “You’re up there because we put you up there,” while someone else yelled, “And we’re going to get you down.”
For black City Council members, who had been in office only a little more than a month, the scene in the City Council chambers seemed like a nightmare. Suddenly, Netters felt, “I’m on the other side. It was the most weird feeling. I felt sick inside.” Davis tried again to appeal to blacks in the crowd by saying, “I have to walk both sides of the street” (representing the city and the black community). Lawson told him, “You can’t do it. You’re with us or not.” And the workers yelled, “You’re not with us!” A line had been drawn between black moderates and militants. “A whole part of what the black revolution and confrontation movement represents is that the old form of politics must go,” Lawson later recalled. “A black politician must be identified with the people.”
Seeing trouble ahead, Councilman Chandler arranged to move the meeting to the city’s much-larger Ellis Auditorium, but as workers got up to leave, someone shouted, “We ain’t going nowhere. We’re staying right here.” O. Z. Evers urged people to “stay until Council recognizes the union and recognizes they can overrule the Mayor. If they want to take someone to jail, they can take all of us.” Davis sternly intoned, “I do not recognize Mr. Evers,” but, one by one, Evers, Jones, Bell, Wurf, and others took the microphone to insist that they would not leave until they got justice. Workers began to sing, “We Shall Not Be Moved.” In the newly carpeted City Council chambers, wrote Joan Beifuss, “A combination union meeting, religious revival, picnic and sit-in began”—one that would affront the sense of propriety and ownership over city government by many of the city’s whites.
Hemmed in for years by paternalism, passivity, and the city’s feigned “good race relations,” workers and their supporters threw aside conventions, and a festival of resistance ensued. AFSCME organizer Joe Paisley led workers in singing, “We’re waiting for the council, we shall not be moved,” and “We’re waiting for the mayor, we shall not be moved,” as well as hymns and “God Bless America.” As 142 police officers and thirty or more squad cars surrounded city hall, Tennessee Council on Human Relations Director Baxton Bryant (from Nashville) suggested lunch, and Reverend Bell called his church to ask them to bring supplies. Wives of strikers cleared the table where the city’s lawyers normally sat, as union supporters brought in “a hundred loaves of bread, twenty or thirty pounds of bologna, fifteen pounds of cheese, ham, mustard, and mayonnaise,” according to Beifuss. While sanitation workers’ wives made sandwiches, ministers preached, and workers sang and shouted out their support for the union. City hall no longer belonged to the rich and white; the rancorous and unorganized voices of workers and their supporters took center stage.
White labor leaders Powell and Wurf met in a side room with several council members, trying to convince them to settle the strike right then and there. Councilman Donelson, conservative but also pragmatic, went upstairs to the mayor’s office and told Loeb that Wurf was losing the strike and probably would settle for a small wage increase and a limited form of union recognition. Why not give it to him? If the city did nothing, he warned, racial conflict would intensify. Loeb waved in Donelson’s face what he said were 500 letters supporting his stand against settling the strike, and he said his duty was to enforce the law. “Henry, I don’t think you were elected to count letters…. I do know how the white people feel. But you’re Mayor of the other 40 percent too,” Donelson responded. Loeb ignored this entreaty. Said Donelson, “After that he didn’t consult me very much.”
Meanwhile, police proved unwilling to try to dislodge 700 people from the City Council chambers. Their inability to control this demonstration rankled them and fueled plans for revenge. Council members Davis, Netters, and Donelson went back to face the crowd, but they still could not bring it under control. It was like “spontaneous combustion,” said Netters. Black ministers gave unscripted speeches connecting union issues to the historic struggle against black oppression, and no one could turn off the oratory. E. H. Arkin, the agent for the Memphis Police Department’s Intelligence Bureau, wrote: “The situation became rather tense because of some of the inflammatory speeches being made by Negro leaders” trying to one-up each other with militant rhetoric.
Sharp statements and disorder outraged white council members, as NAACP President Jesse Turner called on people to bring buckets of garbage to the City Council chambers, and others threatened dire consequences if the council did not act. But Reverend Bell won honors for the most “inflammatory” statement, pointing to the city’s insignia of Old South steamboats, industry, and cotton balls and its slogan, “City of Good Abode,” engraved above the City Council podium. Bell contrasted these idealized images to the city’s history of slavery and exploitation, of black women who “nursed white babies for hundreds of years,” of slaves sold on a downtown auction block, of black men fighting in Vietnam but denied their rights as citizens at home. He warned that toilets in the City Council chambers could not accommodate the overflowing crowd, and, pointing to the insignia, said, “I’m not going to get up there and tear it down…but I wouldn’t care if someone else tore it down.”
Accounts of his remarks in the next day’s papers enraged many whites who thought Bell had threatened to desecrate the new City Council chambers, as if blacks would urinate in the aisles. Councilman Tom Todd said, “Those people had been talking that ‘We’re going to burn the city down, tear the council chambers apart, and if you don’t give us what we want we’re just going to make this place a shambles.’” Bell corrected such reports, but he offered no reassurances: “I said that I would probably burn it down myself if I thought it were worth it, but I don’t think it’s worth it.” Bell played the role of “rhetorical conjurer of dark doom and destruction upon the collective head of white Memphis,” according to strike historian Beifuss. He was motivated not by radicalism but by anger at his father’s painful experiences with sharecropping and sanitation work, and at the obstacles that racism continued to put in the path of both middle-class and working-class blacks.
Few whites could understand the rhetorical fireworks of Bell and others who later made even stronger statements. Councilman James complained that protesters were rude and always making demands instead of requests: “The worst thing that happened was when the Council decided to hear some of the grievances.” Most whites were not open to hearing impassioned statements by blacks, and they fundamentally rejected the idea that injustices in the past placed obligations on them in the present. In this and subsequent protests, the apparent blindness of most whites to black reality pushed Bell and others to become more and more militant in their statements.
Davis recognized that he and his committee had to do something. Behind closed doors, Davis and Netters voted for, and Donelson against, a resolution to recognize the union and give it checkoff rights. At 4:15 PM, they told the assemblage that they would call a special meeting of the full City Council for the next day and bring before it this resolution to “recognize the union as the collective bargaining agent and that there be some form of dues check-off.” It took them an hour to convince Jones and others to accept this delay, but at 5:30 PM, Davis promised to forward the resolution to the City Council, and he adjourned the meeting. The audience stood and cheered.
It looked like a great victory. The people’s elected representatives would go around Loeb, and government would finally do right by the sanitation workers who had struggled for so many years. The “inflammatory” Reverend Bell stood up and said he was willing to put his faith in the word of “brother Davis,” but he also warned the strikers: “When you go home, don’t sleep too soundly. We may be calling for you again. I am coming up here tomorrow and I’m bringing my garbage because if the decision is not right, by jingo, I’m not going home.”
“COMMITTEE GIVES IN to Sit-in of Strikers, but Loeb Holds Firm,” read the Commercial Appeal headline on page one. Jerry Fanion, the white Shelby County human relations director, had witnessed the “picnic-in” and worried through the night. Sleepless, he picked up a copy of the Commercial Appeal before dawn: “It’s the Mayor’s Job,” read the lead editorial, to fulfill his duties as the city’s executive. “He is faced with an illegal strike, is representing the public, and through him the public is being pushed by scarcely veiled threats of ‘trouble’ for Memphis. Mr. Loeb’s stand is that we will maintain law and order and proceed through this situation in a lawful manner, and that is what this community wants.” Wednesday’s “belligerent show of force” should not “intimidate” or “stampede” the City Council into “imprudent decisions.” In effect, the news article and the editorial made the City Council look like weaklings and called on the mayor not to compromise.
Below the editorial, another one decried “Viet Cong Resistance” to the United States in Vietnam; to the right of it, an article headlined, “Vietnam Reds ‘Go For Broke’ in Test of LBJ,” highlighting the need for the country to stand tall against Communist aggression. The juxtaposition illustrated what Jesse Turner said: Whites fought sanitation-worker demands because they feared, much like American policymakers in Vietnam, a “domino” effect of increasing victories for insurgents. The accompanying cartoon by Cal Alley, titled “Beyond the Bounds of Tolerance,” suggested that, as in the case of Communist aggression, Americans should resist both unionists and blacks as threats to existing society. Alley depicted a thuggish character astride a garbage can labeled “City Hall Sit-In,” amid tipped-over cans and trash strewn about and the reeking odor of garbage. In contrast to the docile simpleton Hambone, Alley sketched a dark, animalistic figure wearing a long coat and slouched hat—part mobster and part bum—that looked much like the racist portrayals of supposedly corrupt black politicians during Reconstruction. In wavy letters over this sinister figure atop the garbage can hung the words “Threat of Anarchy.” This inflammatory drawing reverted to a racist image of black men as dangerous, almost bestial, and strike supporters would repeatedly hold up this cartoon as an example of media contempt for the workers, their union, and the black community.
That morning, police reported bomb threats to Loeb’s home and office and rumors that black student and military veteran John Burl Smith would lead disturbances at Owen Junior College. The City Council members held a closed session for four hours and rejected the resolution by Davis and his subcommittee that could have resolved the strike. They adopted instead a substitute that reiterated what the mayor had already agreed to: the right to join and be represented by a union, a better promotion procedure, continued hospital and insurance and pension coverage, and wage increases at some unspecified future date. But they rejected a dues checkoff through the credit union and left out any mention of a written contract. The mayor had come into their meeting several times, telling them that council action was not needed because this was an executive matter. To assuage his feelings, the council added a last sentence to its resolution, saying it “recognizes that the mayor has the sole authority to act in behalf of the city as its spokesman.”
Meanwhile, some 600 workers met at the Local 186 hall. Wurf waved the morning newspaper with its ugly cartoon and shouted, “The papers are still against us.” Jones urged people to march to city hall, but in a peaceful manner. “We don’t want to give the police no excuse to arrest us. So if you have been drinking, please don’t come down.” Powell, too, criticized the newspaper, and reiterated, “We are not coming down there for violence. We are coming in a peaceful manner, but determined.” Cornelia Crenshaw said she had received word from Councilman Patterson that the City Council had altered the settlement proposed the day before—a fact that Bill Ross confirmed. He added, “It’s about time for this city to realize that we are tired of being kicked around like dogs.” Reverend Bell said he had his sleeping bag and would not leave the City Council chambers until their demands were met.
That afternoon, about a thousand people—many of whom had not been at the City Council hearing the previous day—showed up at Ellis Auditorium, as did hundreds of police. Lawson and others who had not been to the noon union meeting had no idea that the proposed resolution to the strike had been altered. He said, “We thought the City Council was going to approve its sub-committee’s recommendation that the union be recognized and the dues check-off be given. In other words, we thought we had won,” bypassing Loeb to make an agreement with the council.
Strike supporters sat in stunned silence as council members quickly approved a resolution that ignored the strike’s major demands and endorsed Loeb as the sole decision-maker in the strike. The three black council members voted no, as did white conservative Tom Todd—but only because he thought the resolution did not give full enough support to the mayor. As workers rose to their feet, shouting in anger, police quickly switched off all microphones and began to escort the council members out. These actions, according to the FBI, “tended to antagonize the audience,” and “several inflammatory speeches were made.”
While police escorted the council members, Lawson called out, “Get us some mikes! Will you please listen to us? Will you please let us speak to you? Let us talk to our people! Please get us some microphones!” There were no microphones, and the only light in the room came from outside the building. Lawson jumped onto the dais and, in his loudest street voice, urged people to calm down and sit down. “Let’s look at it for a few minutes and see what we’re going to do next.”
Sitting nearly in the dark, Vasco Smith held up the morning paper: “This is what they think of you. You are living in a racist town. They don’t give a damn about you!” Everyone booed. He told them, “You’ll get only what you’re strong enough to take.” Lawson, too, criticized the Alley cartoon and the distorted media coverage, as did Wurf. Jones shouted out, “You see what promises are? They have lied to us again…. You can see the Councilmen are with the mayor…we are ready to go to their damn jail!”
A. W. Willis, Reverend Ralph Jackson, and other respected middle-class leaders of the NAACP were there. Turner again threatened to dump garbage at city hall, and Evers threatened to call in Black Power militants Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. “If they want trouble, we will give them trouble!” A Memphis police informant told the FBI that something at that moment crystallized in the psychology of the Movement: “Heretofore, there had been very little racial hatred injected in speeches to strikers, but that in his considered opinion the statements enumerated above tended to incite the workers and have tended to turn the strike into a racial situation.” The informant said Jones got up and shouted, “We’re going to march in the street this time. We tried to keep this a union issue, but it’s now a racial issue. I’m not responsible for what you do.”
Led by Jones, the crowd now poured from the auditorium onto the steps of city hall, prepared to march to Clayborn Temple, but police blocked the streets. Everyone milled around in front of city hall. A crew of policemen locked arms and told the crowd it lacked a permit to march. At another intersection, police “walked across the street to the curb and blocked us,” striker Ed Gillis recalled. “They said we was pushing. We wasn’t pushing. We was just standing there…and we was singing…wouldn’t nobody fight.” He found himself at the front of the group, singing, “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
Wurf watched with apprehension. Most of the crowd consisted of strikers—“tired, beaten men, making a struggle that before they died they would stand up and be men. They were not bomb throwers.” But, “scratching and clawing and humbling themselves” to make a living, they were “tired” of miserable conditions and disrespect. “They were really worked up. And when that kind of guy gets worked up, he’s [really] worked up. And I was scared.” He decided they should march not to Clayborn Temple but to Mason Temple—a much longer walk, of about three miles, which he hoped would burn off some of their anger.
WURF PLEADED WITH Assistant Police Chief U. T. Bartholomew, who said he had no authority to let them go. U.S. Civil Rights Commission staff member Bobby Doctor ran to tell Jacques Wilmore, the director of the commission’s southern field office, located in Memphis, “You’d better come down. I think the police are going to kill a lot of black people.” James Lawson reached Frank Holloman by phone and told him that to maintain a disciplined, nonviolent movement, the workers had to vent their anger and frustration in action. David Caywood, the white president of the West Tennessee American Civil Liberties Union, and Jerry Fanion both rushed to the office of Mayor Loeb, who broke the impasse with a call to Holloman, ordering the police to let the people march. Inspector Sam Evans and Assistant Police Chief Bartholomew agreed they could march four abreast on the west side of Main Street so as not to interfere with traffic.
Fifteen minutes before 4 PM, the march began. But “the march could scarcely have been called an orderly march,” the police reported. Indeed, few people even knew about the order to march four abreast, and fewer still understood its purpose. Whoever heard of a protest march with more than 600 people marching four abreast? A. W. Willis had told people in the auditorium that the civil rights movement in Nashville had been trying to stop the police from forcing marchers to stay three abreast in the streets, which infringed on the right to protest. In this case, if marchers stayed four abreast, the sheer mass of the crowd would force many to walk on the sidewalk and run into shoppers; if they walked only in half of the street, they could hardly avoid crossing the center line. And to vent the anger of the workers, it made more sense to take over the streets. Jones refused to cooperate and told Inspector Evans that the men would march eight abreast.
Once the march got underway, however, an almost festive mood ensued. Bill Ross picked the polio-challenged Wurf out of the march and drove him to Mason Temple. Civil Rights Commissioner Wilmore sighed with relief and headed back to his office. Lawson tried to create rapport with an officer, telling him that he too should join a union to improve his terrible wages and work conditions. Memphis State University’s white Presbyterian chaplain, Dick Moon, and Reverend Bell had an amiable conversation with another officer. “He was a friendly looking fellow,” Bell recalled.
Then, about halfway back from the front of the march, police cars suddenly appeared, each packed with five officers openly displaying rifles and billy clubs. They drove their cars into a closed formation, bumper to bumper, and began pushing up against Gillis and other marchers to force them toward the sidewalk and into one lane of the street. Police later complained that the marchers “harassed and cursed” them, had their arms locked, and would not budge. Reverend Lawson turned, stopped, and told the police, “Get that car back and away from us.” A veteran of violent police attacks on protesters in Birmingham, Lawson saw where this was going. He told the workers, “Let’s keep marching. They’re trying to provoke us. Keep going.” At that point, the police began what Lawson thought was a deliberate effort “to teach us a lesson.”
Gillis said police used their vehicles as weapons, one car in particular. The police “done run that car right up against me twice!” and “his front fender there was just rubbing my side…. I didn’t say nothing. And finally he rammed up and bumped against me and I still didn’t say nothing. And he looked around at me and rolled his eyes. I still didn’t say nothing. I just backed up some, away from the car.” Then, the vehicle ran over the foot of Gladys Carpenter, a veteran of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march and the 1966 March Against Fear, and a worker for Councilman J. O. Patterson, Jr. She exclaimed, “Oh! He runned over my foot!”
Police claimed that a striker in a green sweater (later identified as John Kearney) led “approximately fifteen unidentified male Negroes” toward the police car, filled with six officers, and that Jones stood in front of the car to stop it and then yelled, “Yeah, tip it over.” Wilmore, a sober and veteran observer of marches, saw workers rocking the vehicle but not trying to tip it over. They were trying, he thought, to get the car off Ms. Carpenter’s foot and to stop it from pushing against the crowd. This occurred at 3:56 PM, according to the police. At 3:57, a police radio ordered the officers to put on their gas masks, and Bartholomew ordered them to disperse the crowd.
“I was behind her,” Gillis said, and the next thing he knew, “The police was out there macing all of us.” In a manic fashion, police officers came charging out of cars yelling, “Mace, mace,” and holding up little squirt bottles full of what Police Chief J. C. MacDonald called “a new debilitating type chemical aimed to render defenseless those upon whom it is used.” It consisted of tear gas mixed with a chemical that broke down protective skin oils, causing skin to peel, damaging nerve endings, and causing excruciating pain. He observed that it “worked most satisfactorily” on this “recalcitrant and obstructive crowd which refused to move.” Police shot this burning, blinding, numbing, disorienting, and gooey gel directly into the eyes and noses of their victims, who typically fell to the ground, lost their vision and sense of direction, had difficulty breathing, and began crying copious tears. The military had developed mace for use in war, but police departments now stockpiled it to use against urban rioters. Lawson believed this was the first major use of the new chemical on a civilian population.
As the police charged, the elderly Gillis recoiled in shock: “There was about 15 or 20 police with that mace just gassing us, pushing us over to the wall…and there was nobody cussing, nobody fighting. Just walking down the street.” As “that gas was flying everywhere…I pulled my cap off and tried to keep it out of my eyes—put it over my eyes—and they come around and shoot it up in my nose…them polices [was] shooting that mace all in our eyes and faces.” Mace burned like fire, and it left skin red, disfigured, and peeling. “It like to put my eyes out,” he said; it left “a scab all the way around my head here, all through my hair.”
Gillis and others could not run away because the police “had kept us right up against the wall and just started shooting that mace on us.” One black officer pulled out a pump shotgun and elevated it so that it could be seen easily, as the police pushed the crowd south toward Beale Street. “They done us awful bad. And then they jabbed me three times in the side with a nightstick…. One old man there, 62 years old, they busted his head…. I didn’t see that, but…I seen his head the next day where they busted all his skin off.”
The police marked their targets well. Jones said he was near the front of the line of marchers and nowhere near the car-rocking incident, but police quickly located and maced him. The next thing he knew, a police officer had his gun pointed right at him. But this was not his day to die, said Gillis, because workers “snatched T. O. Jones out of the way.” According to the FBI, “T. O. Jones escaped.”
P. J. Ciampa was not as lucky. He had been marching only a vehicle away from Ms. Carpenter, and he made a perfect target. Ciampa had a bad knee and could not move quickly. He was talking to some of the marchers when three officers said, “That’s him.” Ciampa recalled, “I looked up at him, and said, ‘Just a minute, mister,’” but the officer responded, “Yeah, we’ll take care of you.” Ciampa described what happened next:
The mace hits me in the face, and I start heading for the curb and I stumble, and grovel, and then I feel awful. I feel this stuff all over me. You can’t breathe, you can’t see, you know…. I was completely disoriented…. I was just groveling for something to hold onto. And the earth was the best thing I could find. And some hands started grabbing me, and I thought, “My God! They’re going to—this is it! This must be the cops!”…I was totally helpless. I thought, “I’ve had it,” you know…. I thought they were going to tear me apart.
Black photographer Whittier Sengstacke, Jr., said Ciampa was “just in miserable shape. He was crying, he couldn’t walk.” Ciampa must have had flashbacks to the way thugs had so brutally beaten his father in the 1930s. But to Ciampa’s relief, the hands that grabbed him were not those of the police but rather of sanitation workers, “a few courageous souls that just moved in amongst the mace and everything else, and drug me out of there.” The men carried him away, got him to a restroom in a bank, and began washing out his eyes with water. Police had sprayed him repeatedly, he had bruises and abrasions, and the skin began to peel off under his left eye.
From Lawson’s perspective at the front of the march, “We are now in the retail business section and the office building section of Main Street when, suddenly, out of these side streets comes squad car after squad car.” Four or five officers poured out of each one. “They do not just emerge out of one street…it was a maneuver, not accidental.” When Lawson turned to a group of police officers and asked them to stop, an officer ran right up to him and sprayed the chemical in his face—not once but twice. His eyes partly protected by glasses, Lawson tried to recover his balance. In true nonviolent style, he turned to face the police a third time. They hit him full force with mace again, so that he could not function at all. Around him, all semblance of order collapsed as police attacked men in dungarees and clerical collars, women, and anyone else in their path. People ran in all directions, screaming and cursing and crying out. Even shoppers coming out of department stores got maced.
Presbyterian chaplain Dick Moon and Zeke Bell had been having what they thought was a friendly conversation with an officer when “he just wheeled and started putting mace all over me,” said Bell. The police pushed Moon up against a department-store window along with a crowd of many others, and he feared they would all crash through the plate glass. “There was an old man next to me and I saw a club come right down on him and it broke the skin and blood spurted every which way…. An old Negro woman was down on her knees,” trapped by the police and the crowds.
Civil Rights Commissioner Wilmore noticed several black officers in the police contingent; one sprayed mace aimlessly and with a look of shame on his face. Wilmore had not yet made it back to his office, and the march had not turned out to be as tranquil as he had expected. In front of Goldsmith’s Department Store, he saw police spraying their mace everywhere and watched as officers grabbed a thirty-eight-year-old sanitation striker named John Kearney by his green sweater. The man did not resist:
And at that point I pulled out my identification badge and I said, “Okay, now you got him in custody, you got him, you don’t need to hit him.” And at that point they cracked down on his head with a terrible crack. And at that moment I became aware of a policeman coming from the other angle out of the corner of my eye with a mace can. And I turned around towards him and I just did like this in his face [showed his badge] and he just reached…around my badge and gave me about two or three squirts squarely in the face…. The police officer just saw the color of my skin…he just operated automatically, that at that moment the enemy was anybody with a black face.
Black photographers Sengstacke and Edward Harris took photos for the Tri-State Defender as the police pushed people from the streets to the sidewalk and methodically maced official observers such as Baxton Bryant and Wilmore. Many officers took off their badges as they attacked and became especially incensed at the black reporters. “Don’t take a picture, give me that camera,” an officer commanded, as Harris snapped a photo of him with his nightstick raised to strike someone. Credentials “didn’t mean anything to policemen,” said Harris. “We were the only Negro newsmen on the scene and we were the only ones that I observed that were sprayed with mace.” Up until this point, the Tri-State Defender had given the sanitation workers very little coverage, but now Sengstacke and Harris took up a crusade to expose their plight and the police brutality against the black community.
It seemed inexplicable to Lawson that, after having averted a potential riot at city hall, the police would now move on the crowd in such a vicious manner. No doubt, some police had been dying to get at the marchers, and the car-rocking incident simply provided the excuse to do so. He recalled one officer who “in his facial expressions demonstrated just pathological hatred the entire distance” of the march. But Lawson concluded that the police attack was planned, not a spontaneous act—although he thought the decision to attack was made by the officers in the field rather than by Frank Holloman or the mayor. Police records reflected that the orders came from Bartholomew and MacDonald, on the street, when marchers would not stay four abreast.
The “police assault,” as Lawson called it, would profoundly influence the course of the strike. “A number of the police officers were very angry, and they took it out on the community wherever they could” from then on, said Lawson. “Police brutality increased in that period. I mean, here we are marching every day and walking every day and resisting every day, and they could not publicly put us in our place as they were used to doing in the police force in Memphis, Tennessee.” The police “were so hostile to us, they saw us as the enemy and not violence as the enemy. They could have easily kept public order if they wanted to,” as Police Commissioner Claude Armour had done during the early 1960s sit-in movement, said Lawson. “But the reality is that they didn’t want to.” This attack was only the first act of police retaliation against the Memphis movement.
“I BELIEVE IN dramatizing evil,” said Reverend Henry Starks. He had participated in marches as symbolic demonstrations in the past, and he had not been fearful going into the streets on this day, because he believed the older men in the union “don’t care for violence at all.” The city’s young Black Power supporters could cause trouble, but “most of them don’t march.” Starks walked right behind Ciampa, and he was horrified when the police dragged him away and turned their mace on him.
The events of that day gave him great emotional pain. Having grown up in segregated Memphis, he had experienced all of its humiliations. Police violence had always been pervasive, but the city had avoided the violent civil rights confrontations that had rocked Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Baton Rouge. He hoped for reconciliation between white and black, but now he felt sickened to see the angry expressions and violent actions of the police. He experienced the macing as a form of humiliation, and it frightened and immensely saddened him. He did not want to continue the march, but he put personal feelings of hurt and outrage aside and helped to reorganize the marchers. Said Starks:
The continuance was born of sheer desperation…. You couldn’t let the march fail for the symbolism involved. See, you had to continue…because otherwise it would have been disastrous to the cause…. I didn’t want to go myself but I had to do it…. I was really sick in away. I was disgusted and broken. Here I had on my clergy garb, too, and here I was hurting on the inside because of what I had seen them do to a lot of my people. And, of course, it was a painful ordeal for me all the way, but we had to do it.
Starks also recognized that repression spawned resistance, galvanizing both the black clergy and the black community as a whole: “I mean this was the cause of the unity that swelled up in the Negro community almost over night…when we had our night rally, we could hardly hold the people.” The organization of the black ministers “was born, see, born by this episode, this experience.”
One of the biggest mistakes the police made that day was to attack the Reverend Ralph Jackson. He came from an old school of southern preachers who had survived the Jim Crow South by working the system of paternalism and creating a niche for himself in the black church. He had participated in the Meredith March Against Fear, but he had largely stayed out of the way of confrontations with whites. Smoking nice cigars, wearing three-piece suits and silk ties, driving a Cadillac, with diamond rings and gold stickpins in his ties and slicked-back hair, Jackson hardly looked like an advocate for sanitation workers. Now he was mad as hell.
First of all, he was infuriated that “you had a bunch of councilmen who acted like cowards and children” and did not listen to the opinions of people like him on that fateful day. Then, he had been “laughing and talking more or less in a picnic fashion” with other marchers, and even exchanging pleasantries with the police, when, to his shock, “I was gassed and maced and that’s when I got mad.” He recalled:
I have always prided myself, coming from Birmingham, living in the midst of racism and all, the only encounter I have ever had with a policeman was a ticket…all of it lost, because I saw this for what it was. This was done to me for one reason and that’s because I was black, no other reason.
By their actions, police baptized him into the world of the working poor and told him just where he stood, in their eyes: at the bottom. Thus began a new relationship among black ministers, workers, and union organizers. With tears streaming from his eyes, as soon as Jackson could see, he left the march and got into his limousine. He found Ciampa stumbling down the street and picked him up. Ciampa recalled that Jackson “was almost speechless. He was so furious he could hardly talk. And I was so kind of whipped that I didn’t feel like talking. And I got into his car, and it’s spacious…. I looked at his spats. What kind of a…I begin thinking, ‘What is this preacher?’” When they came across the march’s stragglers, Ciampa got out of the car and joined them, while Jackson drove on.
Ciampa joined Gillis and others who went on foot down Main Street to Beale Street and east toward Mason Temple. The police attack had scattered the march, and, amid rumors of window breaking and looting, stores closed and shoppers fled. Only about seventy of the thousand or so who began the march remained together. When the bedraggled marchers finally reached Mason Temple, Tri-State Defender reporter Harris said, the police had also arrived, now holding four-foot-long billy clubs. They appeared ready to inflict even more mayhem. But instead of fear, their presence elicited outrage.
When Ciampa and others entered Mason Temple, Reverend Jackson was up at the podium, on fire with emotion that no one could ever put out. The FBI speculated that various leaders (all of them men) were now attempting to outdo each other with inflammatory rhetoric. T. O. Jones, almost apoplectic with anger, sputtered, “I feel like we have been assaulted by the police department.” O. Z. Evers shouted, “I’ve been pleading for the last ten days to keep this movement in labor [and] you see what we got. I’ve been pleading with the hot heads in this town to be cool, you see what we got. If this is what Memphis wants,” the Movement should bring in Black Power advocates Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown to “kick ’em in the teeth.”
Newsreel footage showed Wurf’s mostly deliberate, sober-speaking style giving way to a barely suppressed rage. He pointed out, “Yesterday, this group was behaved, it was peaceful, it sought nothing but the right to speak up, without a sign or semblance of violence.” But the City Council members “lied to me and they lied to you. I regret that I believed them.” He again referred to the “filthy, rotten” cartoon in the Commercial Appeal, accusing the newspaper of setting them up for this attack by its distorted reporting and inflammatory editorials. Tommy Powell was just as angry. After leaving the city hall confrontation, he told a reporter, “I don’t know what it’s gonna take…. The union has tried to keep it strictly a union matter, but no longer it’s a union matter, no longer.” The responsibility for whatever violence might ensue now rested on the city and the mayor, he said. FBI reports made it appear that he made this statement at Mason Temple as if to incite a riot.
Jones later summarized the altered situation: “A union has always tried to keep an issue as a union issue…but where there are as many blacks involved as was there…it finally becomes a racial issue, let’s face it…. For some reason the civil rights group is going to get in there. And you cannot tell them no. Especially when you’re reaching out for support.” Events propelled him toward a much more militant stance than he had wanted to take. He had defined the strike primarily as a labor issue, but now his rhetoric sharpened in mass meetings and he began to define it as a civil rights issue, too.
Wurf also concluded that the strike had now taken on added meaning. He had built AFSCME in the 1960s partly on energy created by the civil rights movement. James Farmer, who became the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), began as an organizer in Wurf’s union, as did others involved in the Freedom Rides into the segregated South. Wurf and his AFSCME colleagues had picketed employers in New York and elsewhere for discrimination. “So with that kind of a background, it wasn’t hard for me to sense that I was in the middle of a race conflict and a rights conflict, perhaps that was at least as important as the union conflict.”
AT MASON TEMPLE, strikers and their supporters vented intense anger at the police and the white establishment. Many times in the days ahead, protesters would repeat the threat made at this meeting to bring in the ironically misnamed “Black Power boys.” When people felt angry, they talked about bringing in Stokely Carmichael or H. Rap Brown, not the pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gillis said it was fortunate that at this moment black ministers began to play a determining role in the strike. “If the ministers hadn’t gotten into it, there would have been a lot of bloodshed…. They was just like Martin King. They didn’t want no violence.”
When Reverend Starks told the last holdouts from the march to go home and resist the temptation to retaliate with violence, they did as he said. The power of hundreds of workers picketing, marching, and meeting provided a discipline and momentum to the Movement that undercut calls for retaliatory violence.
Following their baptism by fire, sanitation workers hardened their decision to stop “taking it”—accepting demeaning treatment and overwork from the white man—and they encapsulated their determination in a slogan that would echo through the history of black labor and freedom struggles. After the macing, four simple words appeared everywhere on their placards: “I Am A Man.”