Sometimes I felt like we was going back to work shortly and then after a couple of weeks rolled around, sometimes I didn’t feel like we was going back to work at all. But we all started participating in the meetings and that gave me a little more courage then. I knowed if we would stick together we would win.
—Striker L. C. Reed
AS THE STRIKE’S THIRD WEEK BEGAN, THE CITY WAS OPERATING thirty-eight garbage trucks manned by 225 strikebreakers. Loeb and the newspapers used calls for law and order to strengthen the unity of the white community, insisting that outsiders from AFSCME had instigated the strike to take advantage of black racial grievances. The city had every reason to think it would win: macing, permanent replacement of strikers, and court injunctions could squash the workers’ movement even more effectively than the firings of workers who had threatened to strike in 1966.
The very health of the city was at stake, according to columnist Stanley Levey, in a Press-Scimitar article titled, “Behind Strike of Memphis Garbagemen.” He described the Memphis strike as part of a national pestilence of irresponsible unionism that had to be fought:
Public employees by the hundreds or thousands have been signing union cards, striking and picketing—activities not long ago considered illegal, unethical or unprofessional…. Firemen have abandoned fire trucks. Hospital workers have left their patients. Transit workers have left subways and buses. Policemen have reported “sick.” All or most have won higher pay and better working conditions, generally without punishment.
The “aggressive and articulate” Wurf had turned AFSCME into the country’s fastest-growing AFL-CIO union by taking advantage of rapid job growth in education, health care, and government and a “fever of union militancy” among public employees.* Levey thought taxpayers would end up paying dearly for this militancy unless the city of Memphis stopped it.
Racial polarization also could hardly be denied, but it was unclear whether it would aid the strike or kill it. In the black community, garbage piled up, and black ministers, students, and civil rights activists were infuriated by the police attack on Friday. In the white community, garbage collection went easily and most people united behind Loeb and defended police action as maintenance of law and order. Lawson and other black leaders first of all tried to build black unity, but they also sought white allies who could pressure the city government into a settlement.
Union members provided one possible bridge over the city’s racial and class divides. Prior to the strike, Dan Powell, the southeast regional representative of the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE), at a conference of unionists from six southern states held in Memphis on February 7, had brought into the open the idea of combining labor and civil rights agendas. Based in Memphis, Powell had joined the CIO when the American Newspaper Guild organized the city’s two newspapers in the 1930s. He and his union participated in purging the Left from the CIO, but Powell regretted the resultant loss of civil rights supporters from the southern labor movement. Hoping to reconnect labor and civil rights causes, Powell on February 7 brought in Bayard Rustin to give a keynote speech to the labor delegates. Rustin directed the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, which focused on addressing civil rights issues within organized labor. Rustin strongly advocated coalition politics.
Not “love or affection” but mutual interests dictated an alliance between blacks and the labor movement, Rustin told delegates. Reiterating themes raised in King’s 1961 AFL-CIO speech, he told them, “You can’t win without us [blacks], and we can’t get a damn thing without you.” Rustin promoted moving “from protest to politics,” based on an expanded black franchise in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, and he listed reforms that would benefit both blacks and labor, including a “freedom budget” funding full employment, improved education and wages, and other antipoverty measures. Rustin, like King, wanted to shift the freedom movement from “phase one” to “phase two.”
The problem—as black Memphians knew all too well—was that so many white working-class voters had already shifted their own allegiances to racist white politicians like Loeb and Wallace and to Republicans like Goldwater or Nixon, all of whom supported business over worker interests. Rustin and Alexander Barken, the white director of COPE for the AFL-CIO, both warned against right-wing extremists as well as Black Power “demagogues.” Neither Rustin nor Barken, however, offered an antidote to building trade unions that excluded blacks, to industrial unions and employers that kept them locked in the worst jobs, or to backlash by working-class white voters.
And few white workers in Memphis had ever heard much about the Negro-labor alliance from their own AFL-CIO leaders. Whether unionized white workers would fully support the strike remained a crucial unresolved issue. Bill Lucy said he received a lot of encouragement from white unionists at the start of the strike, but with a caveat: “We had people telling us that ‘I’ll help you all I can, but if the NAACP becomes involved, you can forget about me.’”
WHO WOULD BE willing to come to the immediate aid of the strikers? Who would be willing to confront the police? Who would be willing to go to jail? And who would maintain nonviolence and who would not? These questions preoccupied James Lawson and other strike supporters. If one wanted troops willing to go to jail, previous experiences pointed not to white unionists but to black youth, whose boisterous picketing had practically shut down businesses in Nashville and Memphis in 1960 and in Birmingham in 1963. Black youth, however, demanded disruptive, exciting action, and few of them believed in nonviolence as a principle.
When COME held its first strategy committee meeting on Monday morning, February 26, Lawson, Jackson, and other black ministers knew what needed to be done almost without discussing it. First on their agenda was to involve more black teenagers in the movement, and they selected twenty-six-year-old black postal clerk Harold Middlebrook to take charge of doing it. He had studied at Morehouse College, gone to jail with King to protest segregation at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta, and helped to organize the Selma and Meredith marches. He wanted to do in Memphis what SCLC had done in Birmingham: fill the jails. FBI agents and the police pegged Middlebrook as a “protégé” of Lawson and claimed that both of them incited racial hatred. An informant warned the FBI of their efforts to organize black youth, who “can be emotionally stimulated to commit acts or utter statements which could create chaos in the community.” Nearly 5,000 black schoolteachers would receive their paychecks on Thursday, and COME needed to activate black youth to convince the teachers to keep their money in their pockets rather than to shop downtown.
Workers held their noontime rally on Monday at the Local 186 union hall, and two separate groups marched downtown—one group leaving from Clayborn Temple around 11 AM and another in the afternoon.
Monday night, a defiant, charged-up crowd of more than a thousand people filled Clayborn Temple. Jerry Wurf defied the court injunction with a vigorous speech proclaiming, “With the solidarity of the men and the solidarity of the black community, we’ve got to win.” Reverend Jackson roared his support for the strike—waving his hands, pounding his fists, and sweating profusely as he excoriated the Loeb regime. He exhorted the crowd not to rest until “justice and jobs” prevailed for all African Americans. A genius at raising the emotional temperature of a mass meeting, Jackson also raised nearly $1,600 from those in attendance. Jackson also widened the movement’s agenda, saying that after the workers won their demands, the movement would campaign to end police brutality and improve housing, jobs, wages, and education across the city.
The movement might have faltered after the repression on Friday, but strike supporters considered Monday a great success. People had marched and picketed downtown without any violence, and there was much celebrating of the fact that the Memphis movement seemed to be on track despite—or perhaps because of—the police attack. But not everyone agreed with marching under strict police controls, as they had done that day. During the evening mass meeting, John Burl Smith indicated he wanted to speak, and Clayborn’s white pastor, Malcolm Blackburn, turned the podium over to him. Smith looked the part of a returning Vietnam War veteran. The FBI reported, as if it were ominous, that Smith “had two or three individuals with him who were obvious Black Power advocates” with “natural Afro hair-dos, dark glasses, and some wear amulets around their necks.” He also had the name “Invaders” emblazoned on the back of his jacket.
Smith made a fiery speech that poked fun at ministers like Starks and Jackson, saying, “All of their praying would not solve the strike or not get justice for the Negro.” He urged people to dump their garbage on the streets and challenged the ministers: “We’ve got to do some fighting. We must fight the power structure whether it is Henry Loeb or Richard Nixon…. You’d better get some guns…. You’re going to need them before this is over. You can’t pray your way out.” An FBI informant also quoted him as saying, “You preachers do the praying and we’ll do the other work.” Reverend Starks immediately told the audience that Smith’s ideas were not those of the strategy committee, but Reverend Blackburn countered that the feelings of young people needed to be heard if the movement wanted their support.
How to involve the Invaders, who did not adhere to nonviolence, without tainting the movement now became a problem for the ministers. Lawson and other ministers did not believe that “rhetorical radicalism” by black youth necessarily produced violence, but FBI agents and police took their words literally. The FBI reported to J. Edgar Hoover and a variety of police and military leaders unverified rumors of “two bearded, natural hair-do male Negroes” in town to meet with T. O. Jones in order “to assassinate Mayor Henry Loeb,” and of “various black powerites and participants in riots in other cities…coming to Memphis to exploit the strike.” Police also reported rumors that Loeb’s home and Lowenstein’s and Goldsmith’s Department Stores would be burned, that “the incipient SNCC-oriented Black Power movement” might burn the homes of scabs and take over the strike. Each alarmist report lengthened the list of potential conspirators and heightened police and FBI fears.
The open rift aired at the Monday-night mass meeting suggested not a Black Power conspiracy, however, but a generational and ideological divide. Lawson and the ministers, as well as AFSCME, continued to project mass marches and peaceful confrontations with city authorities as the only way to win. On Tuesday, February 27, some 300 people gathered at Clayborn Temple. Given that police had attacked them a mere four days earlier, they felt tense, but they mobilized their forces and marched to city hall. Others came by their own routes and overfilled the City Council chambers once again. The council attended to all sorts of mundane business, recalled Reverend Dick Moon, while protesters “waited and waited” for their issues to be addressed. Council Chairman Donelson proposed an affirmative-action program to open upper-level city jobs to blacks, but everyone already knew that the mayor was opposed to it, and the council did not adopt it.
The council put Wurf on its agenda to testify, but before he could do it, he received a summons from Chancellor Robert Hoffman, ordering Wurf and twenty-two others to chancery court for a hearing on charges that they had violated his antistrike injunction. The council told Wurf it would wait for his return, and meanwhile gave strike supporters thirty minutes to testify. Civil rights leaders, including Maxine Smith and Jesse Turner, many ministers, and James Shepard and a few other white unionists, all joined in. Reverend Kyles protested that police had lined up their vehicles outside and seemed prepared to gas them again. “Whose City Hall is this? We are being treated like criminals. They won’t even let us use the rest rooms.” Lawson protested the “two sticks” of brutality used against blacks—one wielded by government and the other by the police. He said, “It appears that we are surrounded by the Gestapo.” About fifty white businessmen watched, and Emmette Baker, president of the Memphis White Citizens’ Council, passed out flyers urging segregationists to defeat the strike.
Finally, Wurf returned from chancery court, hoping to persuade council members that they could end the strike painlessly: the mayor did not even have to sign a contract but could simply write a letter. The city did not have to deduct union dues from worker paychecks directly, only allow the supposedly independent credit union to do so. AFSCME would accept phased-in 5-and 10-cent raises, written assurances of future union representation and grievance procedures, and continuance of existing fringe benefits—conditions the mayor’s attorneys had already accepted. Wurf told the council that AFSCME would sign a no-strike clause as part of a new bargaining relationship. He said the mayor had adopted a no-compromise posture that had become more important to him than the substance of the issues, which Wurf said could be resolved easily.
Wurf thought his moderate proposals would produce a settlement. On Sunday night, Wurf and Lawson had met behind the scenes with Ned Cook—a close friend of the mayor’s and an international broker of millions of dollars in cotton, land, grain, and lumber—to compose various drafts of a compromise letter for Wurf and Loeb to sign. He thought this indication of business concern would sway the City Council. But when Wurf finished his testimony, the council ended its meeting without taking any action, leaving protesters sitting in the council chambers having achieved nothing. Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman ordered police not to arrest them or even to remove them if they held a sit-in. He did not want another dramatic confrontation, and with none at hand, the protesters left.
Council members met again later in a secret session, but they failed to come up with a consensus on any action. No one in the white power structure wanted to set the precedent of accepting AFSCME into bargaining. On that same day, the federally funded Memphis Housing Authority denied AFSCME’s request to represent 113 of their maintenance workers, even though President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988 in 1962 clearly allowed federally funded agencies to recognize public-employee unions. The temper of the whites on the council was hostile to AFSCME. “All of us had a built-in resentment to labor unions,” said council member Bob James, who particularly resented Lawson’s educated demeanor and moral stance, which did not rectify the “original sin”—an illegal strike. African Americans, James said, didn’t know how to “sell their ideas” and simply tried to browbeat the council into submission.
Meanwhile, when Wurf returned again to chancery court, Judge Hoffman said that he and twenty-two others had violated his 1966 injunction by speaking at mass meetings and other activities, and he bound them over for a trial. Attorney Anthony Sabella, pleading, “These men are not criminals,” won release on their own recognizance instead of the $500 bond requested by the city. He then began a fruitless series of appeals to overturn the injunction as a violation of constitutional rights to free speech. City leaders clearly planned to wear down the union through court actions.
That night, a relatively small crowd of 300 rallied at St. Paul Baptist Church. Black undercover patrolman Willie Richmond reported that Reverend Kyles said, “This was a labor issue in the beginning, but it is a race issue now, and we are at war.” Kyles pledged that if the courts put the AFSCME leaders in jail, preachers would take over leadership of the strike and go to jail too. Reverend Blackburn stressed, “We are not violent. We come in peace. We want justice.” He told the audience, “I know you are proud that you are black. I am proud that I am white. Everyone should be proud of what they are.”
The next day, Wednesday, February 28, about a hundred “primarily middle-aged and elderly Negro women,” according to the FBI, led the picketing of the downtown, joined by some 300 strikers. It was one of many instances in which black women played a leading role in strike support, raising money, walking picket lines, leading the singing in church and community meetings, taking over much of the work in the AFSCME office. The actions of black women were critical to the strike, but they did not get much press coverage. Black women seemed almost invisible in the media and the historical record.
That morning, the Commercial Appeal revealed that secret negotiations among Lawson, AFSCME, and business and civic leaders, had reached an agreement. A front-page headline, “Loeb May Offer Compromise Plan to Collect Dues,” destroyed it. The mayor immediately held a press conference to say that the “news of a compromise is news to me,” and that he would never accept a dues checkoff or sign a union contract. Councilwoman Awsumb observed, “We could have ended it that day if they had not used that word ‘compromise’ because this is a word that to our Mayor is as bad as ‘nigger’ to the Negro. It is like waving a red flag. And he backed off…and you could never get him back to that middle ground again.”
The mayor sent a letter to sanitation workers on Thursday, February 29, calling public-employee strikes illegal in this “nation governed by laws” and saying, “The strike must end,” before any agreements could be considered. He reiterated his previous offers of small wage increases and a continuance of vacations, insurance, and other benefit policies already in place. Workers had the right to belong to a union and to pay dues, but they had to do it without the city’s help. He assured them of “fair, dignified treatment,” that he was “sincerely interested in your welfare,” and that “you know that I keep my word.” There would be no reprisals, the mayor said, but he also warned: “I should remind you that some of the regular jobs have been filled and others are being filled daily.” The police reported that 317 workers now manned sanitation trucks, including sixty-two men who had first gone on strike but then had returned to work.
Also on Thursday, Harold Middlebrook’s efforts to mobilize youth started to pay off. Lawson met with thirty high school and college students at his church to plan mass picketing on Saturday in order to shame teachers and others away from downtown stores. Twenty-seven black and two white teenagers marched from Clayborn Temple in miserable, rainy weather to picket Goldsmith’s and Lowenstein’s Department Stores, singing, “Don’t buy from that store no more.” A mass meeting that night at Mt. Pisgah CME Church warmed up attendees with speeches, songs, and chants, while outside, officers ticketed dozens of cars and recorded license-plate numbers. When Jerry Fanion, community relations director for Shelby County, questioned the police about this, they promptly arrested him. Ed Harris, a young Tri-State Defender employee, took their picture, and they arrested him too, charging both of them with “jaywalking.” The arrests caused pandemonium inside the church, and even Fire and Police Director Holloman recognized this as a foolish provocation. He took the unusual step of going to court to get the charges dropped the next morning, Friday, March 1. But federal judge Robert McRae also denied jurisdiction to AFSCME’s appeal for free-speech rights and sent it back to Hoffman’s chancery court.
The most crucial event that morning, however, occurred not in the courts but at the noontime meeting at the United Rubber Workers union hall, where the strikers stood up in unison and thundered their rejection of Loeb’s letter demanding that they go back to work. They could potentially make a few modest gains and keep their jobs by going back to work, but they were willing to lose their jobs, if necessary, to get a union. “The basic issue is not pay, but recognition of the union,” explained Jesse Epps. “There has never been the unity in the Negro community of Memphis that there is now, and the reason is that recognition of the union involves recognition of the workers as men. The mayor wants to say, ‘Go on back to work and then we’ll do right about your complaints’…Just as if Memphis were a Delta plantation.”
Marches continued that day into downtown, and, for the first time, at Memphis State University, thirty-three black students and eleven white students marched together in support of the strike. Councilman Jerred Blanchard tried to get the City Council to initiate a pay raise and to negotiate a settlement behind the scenes, but both of his efforts failed. (Later Blanchard joined with conservative Councilman Tom Todd to propose a strike moratorium and a citywide referendum to be held in August to decide whether or not workers should have a dues checkoff, a proposal that would have killed the strike. Ciampa rejected it.)
Hopes for a compromise with the mayor among middle-class people still died hard. About seventy-five black ministers met with him at the AME Minimum Salary Building that afternoon, and he then invited a smaller group to his office; they met from 7 to 10 that night. Having been briefed by the police about the threats of armed force heard in Monday night’s mass meeting, Loeb thanked the ministers for “helping contain extremist elements within the Negro community.” He then talked about the city’s tight budget and inability to pay higher wages. Both of these comments made Reverend Jackson even angrier than he already had been. He did not want to contain militancy, and, “It was not the mayor’s prerogative to decide what the men wanted…. Listening to him made us realize that there was no position that we could take that would be compatible with his thinking.” Loeb reemphasized that fact by telling a reporter, “There is no change in my position. Be sure you put that in the story.”
Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance President Henry Starks concluded, “There was only one thing that the mayor wanted to do—continue to talk…. [W]e were as far apart at this particular meeting as we’d ever been.” Starks thought one good thing had happened: Black ministers lost their illusions about Loeb, and they concluded that the movement would have to escalate its pressure on city hall.
Yet for most white ministers, moderation remained the watchword. That Friday night, the AFL-CIO’s Bill Ross pleaded with the Catholic Human Relations Council to support the strike, but Monsignor Joseph Leppert, a white Mississippian with progressive views on race, objected that strike supporters at city hall on Tuesday had stirred up racial hatred and had even made obscene comments. Alberta Turner, wife of NAACP President Jesse Turner, couldn’t believe her ears. “Obscenities! I’ll tell you what obscenity is. It’s answering the phone at 2 o’clock in the morning and hearing someone say, ‘Your husband will be dead by tomorrow night.’ It’s having people write letters saying, ‘Get out of town, you goddamn niggers.’ It’s watching your children go off to school and not knowing if they’ll come home again because they’ve been threatened too. That’s obscenity!”
Later that night, someone smashed several of the windows at Loeb’s home.
THE POLICE CALLED Lawson and Middlebrook “incipient interlopers,” and their informants said they might wrest control from “middle of the road Negroes…extremely stable, cautious and law-abiding ministers,” such as Bishop Patterson and his son J. O., Jr. They put Reverend Jackson in this category, and they did not seem to understand that politics in the black community had shifted because of the police actions. Intelligence agents, however, held Lawson and others stirring up black youth as responsible for an apparent escalation of vandalism and youth actions over the weekend of March 2 and 3.
The FBI and the police intensified surveillance of the Invaders as well. They identified the leaders at this point as Charles Cabbage, John Burl Smith, Charles Ballard, Charles Harrison, Donney Delaney, Verdell Brooks, and Clinton Roy Jameson. Agents considered it ominous that Cabbage had talked with Lawson outside Tuesday’s City Council meeting. They said Cabbage and Coby Smith had gone to Atlanta to discuss strategy with other SNCC members, and they noted that John Burl Smith had once attended a New York meeting of the Socialist Workers Party, a group on the U.S. Attorney General’s list of “subversive” organizations. They were shocked that the black Ministerial Alliance had given John Smith $75 to pay his rent, and an FBI source quoted Coby Smith as saying that Memphis needed a “good race riot” to shake it up. Police reported trash fires and vandalism and said someone had found a cache of dynamite near one of the sanitation barns.
Youth involvement did accelerate over the weekend. On Saturday morning, some 175 people picketed downtown and handed out leaflets, led by Reverend Starks, and police identified 75 percent of them as being of high school or college age. Surprisingly, about 25 percent of them were white students from Southwestern College and Memphis State. In the afternoon, an even larger group of about 900—half of them women and youth, and including 300 sanitation workers—marched through downtown. This day was a powerful testament to increasing community and youth involvement in disciplined action, but many others chose spontaneous action. That night, someone tossed bricks through the windows of a Loeb’s Bar-B-Q and a Molotov cocktail through the window of a scabbing sanitation worker, and anonymous assailants physically attacked two scabs. Others dumped garbage in the street and set fires throughout South Memphis, Cabbage’s turf, forcing the fire department to make fifty-two emergency runs to put them out. Police attributed these actions to black youth stirred up by black clergy in COME.
Black ministers continued to preach and practice nonviolent discipline through mass meetings and marches, however. On Sunday afternoon, twenty-one different groups of religious singers, consisting mostly of black youth, held an eight-hour gospel-music sing-in at Mason Temple. O. W. Pickett and his Concerned Citizens Committee for Sanitation Workers and Family announced that $50,000 to $60,000 had been raised over the first three weeks of the strike to pay for food, clothing, and rent for strikers. People held smaller meetings at a church on the fringes of Shelby County and at Reverend Bell’s church, where black police plainclothesman Ed Redditt tried to explain their being there as part of an effort to improve “police–community relations.” Blacks told Redditt and his colleague, Willie Richmond, that they did not appreciate their presence. Rosetta Miller supposedly later told Richmond he would end up in the hospital if he didn’t stay away from movement activities.
Sunday morning’s Commercial Appeal, in a story titled “Marchers Draw Little Attention on Main Street,” downplayed the effects of the downtown economic boycott. “Shoppers either ignored the marchers or stopped to read the signs they carried,” the article read, and a salesman even reported that “three men who had picketed his store in the morning, came back after the march and bought shoes they had seen in the window.” The newspaper seemed to suggest the futility of sedate tactics such as picketing, thus strengthening the argument within the movement for more disruptive tactics. Reverend William Fields told the mass meeting Sunday afternoon that if “any of you are arrested the movement will get you out of jail,” and the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance met to discuss physically blocking garbage trucks. WHBQ-TV reporters asked Lawson on an afternoon news show if he would bring in what they called “the Black Power boys,” and Lawson said yes, he would bring in Stokely Carmichael or anyone else who could strengthen the city’s united front.
The movement had settled into a pattern of picketing, meetings, and mass demonstrations, but it proved impossible to form a coherent organization. Lawson ran daily COME strategy committee meetings at the AME Minimum Salary Building based on consensus, and meetings often took the form of a free-for-all. One participant exclaimed, only half in jest, “Who’s running this thing?” Reverend Starks called the movement a work in progress that was “open on both ends”—one could come into the movement or leave just as quickly. Starks tried to run his church, take care of his parishioners, give his sermons, and march in the street every day. By early March, he was physically spent and becoming ill. People felt exhilarated and then exhausted by the intensity of movement activities.
MAINTAINING UNITY REMAINED especially hard in Memphis, where a triangulated civil rights leadership consisted of the NAACP and the Shelby County Democratic Club on one hand, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance on the other, and the Unity League (headed by O. Z. Evers) as a distant third force. Beyond that lay the amorphous organization of the Invaders and an incipient Black Power movement among youth, as well as the possibility of a fledgling SCLC. In the swirling day-to-day events of the strike, leadership carried with it heavy sacrifices, personal losses, and danger, and Reverend Jackson complained that few black business or professional people or teachers took on these burdens. Jesse Epps noted that many black ministers only became involved later, when Martin Luther King came to town, in order to get up on the podium and be seen with him. The black middle class did not provide reliable supporters.
As a result, Lawson and the COME strategy committee suffered little restraining interference from more conservative black leaders. A few people taking on huge burdens made the difference between success and failure, and most people preferred to relinquish day-to-day leadership to Lawson. Yet some people resented Lawson for filling a key leadership role, and a degree of competition for leadership always existed. Lawson led in part by example and in part by default: he could survive on amazingly little sleep, getting up at six and going to bed at two or three in the morning. Despite all his activities, he and his wife, Dorothy, and their three sons met for dinner almost every night. Few others could keep up his pace. And no one else had his long experience in and theoretical knowledge of nonviolent direct action.
Strong union and worker action provided the glue that kept the movement solid. By contrast to the fluctuating ministerial and community support group, AFSCME had full-time national and regional leaders staffing the strike, including Bill Lucy, P. J. Ciampa, Jesse Epps, Joe Paisley, and President Jerry Wurf, plus T. O. Jones and rank-and-file activists Joe Warren, Robert Beasley, S. T. Thomas, J. L. McClain, Taylor Rogers, James Robinson, and Haley Williams. These men and others kept the rallies, picket lines, and marches going every day. The threat of fines and jail time for violating the court injunction put them all under tremendous pressure, as did police recording devices in hotel rooms and constant surveillance.
Given the failure of the 1966 strike, Wurf considered it a cardinal rule to largely ignore the injunction still in effect in Memphis. Without flaunting their activities, AFSCME leaders continued to speak at the Firestone hall, in churches, and before community and union gatherings, and to mobilize picket lines and marches. But they avoided arrests and confrontations with scabs. Wurf said, “This was not an ordinary strike. It was not handled in an ordinary way.” Jimmy Crunk, the scab worker who pulled a rifle on strikers during the first week of the strike, demonstrated the possibility that someone could get killed. Rabbi Wax had warned Wurf that armed racists might come into Memphis from the surrounding areas. If the union physically confronted scabs, Wurf feared, “All we would do is give the police excuses to break heads and throw teargas at us.” Instead, AFSCME leaders relied heavily on civil rights–style mass meetings, picket lines, and the economic boycott.
Their one concession to the injunction was that they ceded much of the strike’s public leadership to the black ministers. Wurf, Epps, and others attended strategy committee meetings, but AFSCME staff had their hands full primarily with keeping the workers unified and active and in providing for their families. AFSCME worked with Evers, Pickett, Crenshaw, and others in the community to direct food and funds to more than a thousand families, itself a huge logistical undertaking. All funds raised went through the ministers’ organization, COME, and how it got spent became a big issue later. Tri-State Bank (and NAACP) President Jesse Turner saved many a family from eviction by letting COME and the union write checks to them, even when it wasn’t clear whether there was enough money in the account to cover them. Strikers didn’t have much, but they feared losing what little they did have. Lucy remembered a man who owed more to a loan company on his 1953 Buick than the car had originally cost: “These companies had lent the people more than they could ever afford to pay back at phenomenal interest rates.”
Without a great deal of discussion taking place, the ministers and the AFSCME leadership neatly divided their responsibilities to create a labor–civil rights alignment unparalleled in southern movement history.
BUT MOST OF the “good people” in white Memphis still remained silent. The predominantly white Memphis Ministers Association had done nothing since the failure of negotiations in the strike’s second week. On Monday, March 4, the group finally resolved to set up a meeting of black and white religious leaders, but Rabbi Wax hesitated and the proposed meeting stalled. Timidity and compromise killed numerous white initiatives to do something to resolve the strike.
A handful of whites played a more forthright role. Father William Greenspun at St. Patrick’s Church attended strike-support meetings and gave more than $1,000 of diocesan funds to provide food and aid to families of the strikers. AFL-CIO leader Dan Powell raised several hundred dollars from a goodwill offering at the Unitarian Church. A number of clerics without congregations, such as MSU campus chaplain Dick Moon, sided with the strike, but none of them could leverage enough white community pressure to offset the mayor’s claim to speak for white Memphis.
When whites supported the strike, FBI agents became obsessed with discrediting them. FBI informants viewed Reverend Blackburn, the most consistent white strike supporter, as an “enigma.” They could not peg him as a leftist, but they claimed he had a violent temper and undefined subversive politics. The FBI also closely tracked white students who worked with Lawson against the war or who supported the strike. While searching for subversives among white youths and liberals, however, police agents ignored the strike’s most important group of potential white allies: unionized workers.
On Monday, March 4, some 300 sanitation workers marched from Clayborn Temple to city hall at 3:45, led by ministers Starks, Jackson, and Blackburn. The FBI estimated that at least 150 white union members joined them; people in the movement said 500. They carried placards that read, “Memphis AFL-CIO Labor Council Supports Sanitation Dept. Employees.” Memphis Labor Council President Tommy Powell, Vice President H. B. Griffin of the United Rubber Workers (URW), and COPE regional director Dan Powell led them in picketing downtown stores. George Clark, white president of United Rubber Workers Local 186, whose union hall AFSCME workers used every day, brought the largest contingent to the demonstration.
The Memphis Union News, edited by Bill Ross, defined the strike as a classic labor battle representing “the same type of revolt we had in the early period of the building trades, railroads, coal mines.” It ran a front-page editorial that denounced “ultra-conservative community leaders [and] the labor-hating press” that had been “spewing forth their biased and prejudiced views.” It accused the mayor of using tax money to pay for the police to bring in scabs from outlying counties and asked why the city allowed schoolteachers and bus drivers to deduct union dues from their paychecks but would not let sanitation workers do the same. “Organized labor in Memphis is growing weary of the shabby treatment that it is receiving and has received in the past from the ultra-conservative community leaders,” Ross wrote.
By placing the strike in a labor context and ignoring racial issues, Ross appealed successfully to a number of white union members. According to Beifuss, “During the first month of the strike, locals of textile workers; electrical, radio and machine workers; hotel and restaurant workers; typographers; maintenance of way workers; butchers; steelworkers; oil, chemical and atomic workers” all contributed money to the strike. The URW made the largest union donation to the strike when AFSCME workers collected $835 from rubber workers at the gate of the Firestone factory. Unionist Taylor Blair and former labor representative Frank Miles continued to mediate, as they had been doing from the beginning of the strike. Also on March 4, State Senator Frank White, an ally of organized labor, introduced a bill to create a mediation board that could force Mayor Loeb to accept binding arbitration by a third party. The Tennessee AFL-CIO kept pressuring legislators, successfully, to keep in committee anti-union bills spawned by the strike. “Even rural lawmakers aren’t anxious to have organized labor down on them” in an election year, wrote the Commercial Appeal on March 16.
Donations to the strike from national unions would accelerate throughout March, especially after King voiced his support for the strike. The Seafarers International Union presented AFSCME with $5,000 and pledged an additional $1,000 a week. The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), one of the few CIO unions to survive the CIO purge of Left-led unions, also gave financial and moral support. When fifty union officials from ten southern states met in Memphis for an AFL-CIO Social Security conference on March 15–16, they passed a resolution backing the strike and criticized the conduct of the city government as “a throw-back to the dark ages.”
At the local level, however, much division remained among white trade unionists. Taylor Blair had taken Wurf to the Memphis Building and Construction Trades Council meeting during the second week of the strike. Normally, local unionists would honor the visiting head of a national labor union, but the building tradesmen shunned him. Dependent on city government for construction jobs, in segregated unions, they barely acknowledged Wurf. Lucy said, “We got absolutely nothing from them, not even the time of day.” The American Newspaper Guild executive committee, including editors and reporters, did endorse the strike, but its predominantly clerical and advertising membership virtually censured the committee’s action.
Wurf said unions, like other American institutions, reflected the “good, bad, indifferent” character of human beings, and even if white union support for AFSCME was not unanimous, he considered it significant—especially when compared with the overwhelming hostility from most quarters of the white community. Most white AFL-CIO unionists recognized that if the Loeb administration destroyed Local 1733, it would destroy Memphis public-employee organizing and set back the labor movement for a long time to come.
Memphis represented the “convergence” of labor and civil rights that King sought, but it also represented the racism of the era. Epps and Lawson both observed that when white unionists rallied on March 4, they took a different route to the downtown, and most of them stayed to themselves when everyone gathered at their common destination. This could be explained by the fact that the Memphis Labor Council explicitly sought to highlight white support for the strike. Yet “convergence” undeniably remained stuck in a racial minefield. Dan Powell said that the strike had to be treated predominantly as a civil rights issue to attract black support, but AFSCME would lose the support of many white unionists as a result. School desegregation and racism, fear of increased taxes to pay for increased wages to sanitation workers, and political allegiances to Loeb all undercut white labor support for the strike.
George Clark and the URW’s Local 186 at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company came under sustained attack from some of its white members for supporting AFSCME—so much so that Clark issued a leaflet to his local, denouncing Loeb as well as some of his own white union members. “The right-wing people in our plant, that are supposed to be union members, will not prevent this union from supporting this, or any other group of workers, in their efforts to have a union.” Someone later bombed the concession stand outside the union hall in anger at AFSCME’s continual use of the Local 186 hall.
Many whites at the International Harvester plant’s UAW Local 988, the largest union local in Memphis next to Local 186, also resisted supporting the strike. Some of them had fought the desegregation policies of UAW President Walter Reuther, and black UAW leader George Holloway had battled for years with White Citizens’ Council and John Birch Society secessionists at his local. UAW regional representative Carl Moore prompted Local 988 to give a check for $600 to the strikers, but few of the UAW’s white rank-and-file members came out publicly to support the strike.
Despite these contradictions, AFSCME’s Epps saw the Memphis movement as a first step to revitalizing the southern labor movement. As he put it, “Either Memphis was the dam or it was the gate. And to lose it was not losing it for State-County but losing it for the whole AFL-CIO in the South.” But Lucy observed that many white unionists supported the strike as an economic issue only; as soon as it became a racial struggle, most of them jumped ship. After March 4, racial issues came increasingly to the forefront, and there would be no other major AFL-CIO demonstrations.
This white-worker ambivalence made Memphis AFL-CIO President Tommy Powell’s unrelenting support for the strike all the more remarkable. He demonstrated, picketed, spoke at mass meetings, played a key role in negotiations, and served as an unpaid adjunct to the whole AFSCME effort. T. O. Jones appreciated the role of Powell, Ross, the Shepards, and other whites who had helped him start Local 1733. After the macing incident on February 23, a number of black activists at Clayborn Temple had urged that Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown come to Memphis. With Wurf and Powell standing next to him, however, Jones emphasized that the movement did have white allies. “I want to criticize some folks for some of the things they have had to say up here. All white folks are not low down. No, sir, all white folks are not low down.”
THE “SPIRIT OF MEMPHIS,” as Lucy called it, encompassed a revitalized community mobilization on behalf of both labor and civil rights, even though it was filled with contradictions. Many white workers looked askance at the strike, but a greater number of indigenous southern whites involved themselves in the Memphis movement than in any previous southern civil rights or black labor struggle.
Privately, Jones wondered where many of the more conservative black leaders and even some civil rights activists had been for all those years prior to this strike, when the Memphis Labor Council and a few white union leaders had kept his local alive. He did not want labor issues to be overtaken by the politics of race, but events swiftly moved in that direction.