Our Henry, who art in City Hall,
Hard-headed be thy name.
Thy kingdom C.O.M.E.
Our will be done,
In Memphis, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our Dues Checkoff,
And forgive us our boycott,
As we forgive those who spray MACE against us.
And lead us not into shame,
But deliver us from LOEB!
For OURS is justice, jobs, and dignity,
Forever and ever. Amen. FREEDOM!
—“Sanitation Workers’ Prayer,” recited by Reverend Malcolm Blackburn
FOLLOWING THE TRADE-UNION DEMONSTRATIONS ON MARCH 4, some 300 souls met that night at Eastern Star Baptist Church, and Reverend Ralph Jackson denounced white ministers who would not join demonstrations as “unfit for the honor of minister.” Lawson called on this small audience to widen the Memphis battle over union rights into a struggle for human rights and to escalate it by courting mass arrests in the streets. When Reverend Bell said, “Memphis is going to be a better city to live in, or there won’t be no Memphis at all,” a youth shouted out, “We will burn it!” Reverend Henry Starks announced they would march at 1:30 the next day to the meeting of the City Council, which had “lied to us the same as the Mayor did…. They are not going to fool us out of there anymore. We are going to stay until they do something about our sanitation problem.” The consensus was that victory required escalation, not moderation.
The next afternoon, March 5, Bell and Moon led workers and sympathizers from Clayborn Temple to the City Council chambers, where they once again filled all 407 seats. Another seventy-five protesters, who could not get in, stood outside. Two hundred police also filled the room, and a hundred sheriff’s deputies surrounded the building. Police officers cautioned council members not to move through the crowd if they did not want to be caught in the middle of a mass arrest. Gwen Awsumb walked into city hall to find “the whole basement…teeming with police. I’ve never seen so many police in my life.”
Speakers addressed the council in tones of outrage. Lawson said the city could have already raised wages substantially with the money it had spent on extra police protection for scab workers, and he reminded the council that sanitation workers had been fighting for six years for union rights. Their pay had hardly moved up a notch during that time—in a job that had never paid enough to live on. He turned toward the audience and declared, “We will sit in this Council room until you get a settlement or until they put us out.” Reverend Moon read from the Book of Jeremiah about leaders who would not listen to the people, and Awsumb quietly gasped in dismay when he ended with a passage that read, “We will burn this city down,” clapped his Bible shut, and walked away from the microphone. A white man, his name lost to history, rose to beg the council to settle the strike, warning that his white neighbors were arming themselves to fight blacks.
Councilman Patterson hoped to pass his ordinance authorizing union dues checkoff, but he lacked the unanimous agreement needed even to put it on the agenda. When white council members refused to debate the substantive issues in the strike, saying that only the mayor could settle the strike, Reverend Bell rose to indict them for their seeming indifference. Later, he said the media quoted him out of context; that context was the pent-up frustration many African Americans felt not only about Memphis but the country as a whole:
We’re not going to leave this building until we get what we came for. We will be gassed or killed. We are going to stay until Shiloh comes. We didn’t come down here to reason with you gentlemen. If you were reasonable, it would have already been settled. The white preachers are too damn scared to tell you what you need to hear. I don’t like black rats or white rats, or rats. There are rats on the Council…. All these men are asking for is dignity and respect. You talk about whether it’s the Mayor’s or the Council’s responsibility. If these men were white, you would have already done something.
Bell purposely overstepped the bounds of racial etiquette and widened his attack to include national issues: “This is a racist town, this is a racist country. You call our sons off to be killed to protect your way of life. They come back here and don’t have a place to live. It takes about $350,000 to kill a Vietnam soldier. We ask for the right to have a dues checkoff and you say we have no right. The kind of garbage in the newspapers is not worth reading.” Bell shook his finger at council members: “I say you men don’t have any backbone and you are all going to hell.”
With a flushed face, Councilman Donelson jumped to his feet, “shaking with rage,” according to a reporter. “Mr. Bell, we have listened to you patiently. Either you speak to us in respect or I will move for adjournment.” Reverend Bell would not back down: “My mother didn’t raise any half-witted children. If I insult you by telling the truth, I’m going to keep on telling it.” Councilmen Donelson and James fought over the privilege of moving for adjournment, and only Patterson and Netters voted against it. White council members abruptly left, turning off the public-address system.
The City Council’s three black members—and, surprisingly, the conservative Republican Jerred Blanchard—stayed behind. Elected to the council as an at-large member, Blanchard believed he should represent the nearly 40 percent of the city’s population that was black as well as the 60 percent that was white. He felt disturbed by the massing of police and also thought the public-address system should have remained on, so that citizens could address their government. “I wanted to find out how the police handled them and how they [strike supporters] handled themselves,” he said. Blanchard had already begun to sense tragedy in the making.
The audience ignored police orders to move and began singing freedom songs, cheering, and yelling. Benjamin Hooks later said their zeal may have seemed disproportionate to the circumstances, but it came from the macing incident and the expectation that the police would assault them once again. Someone offered up a prayer “before they gas us down,” and Cornelia Crenshaw shouted out that she was “prepared to die.” She later recalled, “I meant that very strongly that day. I was so angry until I just [stood] there and with the force of my own voice without a microphone it could be heard all over the city council.” She felt fearful of the police but angry at council members who “would just sit there and insult your intelligence, as a person, just make a toy with you, you know, and make a fool of you.”
Lawson organized people for a mass arrest as they chanted, “We want jail, we want jail!” The powerfully built, tall assistant police chief, Henry Lux, locked the doors to the City Council chambers as police closed ranks. At the same time, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) President David Caywood, an attorney, rushed to the mayor’s office to plead with him to prevent another police attack. At 5:30 PM, Lux ambled to the front of the room, shaking hands with people he knew and joking with them. Lux surveyed some 400 people holding a sit-in and tried to break the tension by joking that he hoped they would not make him carry them out—“You don’t want me to have a hernia.” For the next forty-five minutes, he negotiated with Lawson about whether protesters would walk out or be carried out.
Outside, a group of marchers, comprised mostly of black students newly-arrived from Clayborn Temple, linked arms, and wouldn’t let anyone in or out. Malcolm Blackburn went outside and convinced them to let the police through, while inside Lawson told the crowd no one would be blamed if they didn’t want to be arrested, but also reminded them: “It is not dishonorable to go to jail for the right reason.” At 6:15, arrests began. Rather than going limp, protesters lined up two by two and walked under their own power to the city jail, escorted by police. Young people in the street formed a cordon around them, singing and chanting, “Down with Lux, down with Lux.” Some of them, said Moon, “were cheering and crying at the same time”—thrilled that adults had stood up to the white power structure. Those arrested marched as if through a battle line, singing:
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arm,
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arm.
Lux enforced restraint upon his angry white officers, some of whom could barely control themselves, but Moon said one officer kept commanding Reverend Starks, “‘Get along, boy. Go on, boy. Move it, boy.’ And I remember Rev. Starks saying, ‘I’m not a boy. I am the Rev. Mr. Henry Starks and if you call me ‘boy’ just one more time you are going to arrest me for assault.’” NAACP Director Maxine Smith had not planned to get arrested, but she joined hands with Bell as they sang their way to jail. She had never been arrested and was embarrassed about it. “I wanted my debut to be memorable,” she said, and would have preferred being dragged to jail, because “I wanted to be a little troublesome to the police department.”
Instead, a black officer arrested her in a gentlemanly fashion. At the jail, however, white officers she did not know kept referring to her as “Maxine” and refused to address her husband, Dr. Vasco Smith, by his title, even though they addressed white ministers Moon and Blackburn by their titles. As police photographed, fingerprinted, and booked her and other protesters, she said they treated them “like common criminals,” taking their wallets and rings and going through their pockets. Her organization had long chronicled the degradation African Americans felt at the hands of the police, and she now experienced it herself.
At one point an officer—probably unintentionally—shoved her into a room with a man using a urinal. She protested and was removed quickly, but she felt claustrophobic when police put her in a small cell. She waited five hours to be bailed out. At least five black women protesters were placed on the women’s floor of the jail, where one officer told her the police would never use titles of respect for black women. Smith later protested to Fire and Police Director Holloman about the generally “degrading, insulting, and humiliating” treatment, and she demanded he fire disrespectful police officers. Holloman said his policy was not to use titles for anyone, regardless of their social status, and he took no disciplinary action against the police. Much worse things happened as standard practice in Memphis jails.
Police had arrested 121 people at city hall, including one Firestone worker, eight ministers, and thirty-nine sanitation workers, charging them with disorderly conduct. Police also arrested two members of the Invaders, Charles Ballard and John Burl Smith, who had been downtown to support that day’s rally, and charged them with reckless driving. Reverend Blackburn listened in his jail cell as Smith argued with one of the ministers that getting arrested in a protest was a waste of time and would not do any good.
That night, “militant young Negroes,” according to the Commercial Appeal, held a boisterous rally at Clayborn Temple, where Reverend Ralph Jackson roused them with his fiery preaching and Lawson came fresh from jail to urge them to march on police headquarters the next day and get arrested. People passed around words to a new parody on “The Lord’s Prayer,” titled, “Henry, We’re Going to Tear Your Kingdom Down.”
Charles Cabbage and forty of his followers passed out a mimeographed, five-page manifesto titled, “Afro-American Brotherhood Speaks: Black Thesis, Black Power.” It demonstrated the gap between young black revolutionaries and black ministers. With the image of a raised black fist on the front page, the thesis attacked “Uncle Tom” black leaders who “skin and grin” for the white man, and it called Memphis a “massive plantation.” It attacked the military draft and “a war we have no stake in,” and defended imprisoned SNCC leader H. Rap Brown as a martyr. It called inner-city rebellions “the initial phase of a black revolution” and urged black students at Carver and Douglass High Schools to reject their black principals as surrogates for whites. It called on them also to reject white liberals, “who not only know very little about the need and wants of Black youth, but have no real genuine concern.” The thesis attacked black unity around the strike as a false unity—one that had put misleaders in charge. It condemned preachers “who inevitably quite [sic] the struggle too soon” (emphasis in the original), and indicted AFSCME for failing to physically stop strikebreakers. Cabbage and other Invaders, when they went to COME strategy committee meetings, criticized preachers who would not use “any means necessary” to stop scab workers. It concluded: “There must be some real fighting. We all know the preachers can’t fight or won’t fight.”
The “Black Thesis” included a letter from H. Rap Brown, written in New Orleans Parish Prison, that countered King’s classical defense of nonviolence in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” It began, “Manhood is the continuing battle of one’s life and one loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe. No slave should die a natural death. There is a point where caution ends and cowardice begins.” Brown urged people to move from “revolt to revolution,” to realize that for every freedom fighter murdered by the police, “there must be 10 dead racist cops. And for every Black Death there must be a Dien Bien Phu,” referring to the bloody battle in which Vietnamese armed forces defeated the French military. The thesis finished with a drawing showing exactly how to make a Molotov cocktail.
At the end of Tuesday night’s meeting, the FBI noted, young people chanted, “Black Power, Black Power.” The Memphis police and the FBI predicted violence would result as more and more young people got involved in the movement. But not all black youth ideologically opposed nonviolence or the ministers’ approach to the Memphis conflict. The Commercial Appeal quoted Central High School student Pat Mayweather, a young woman deemed “Chairman of the Negro Youth Movement,” saying, “We are not militant. We are not for Black Power. We just want equality. You might say we don’t know what we are doing here, but we know this is a cause and that it involves black people and we are black and we believe logically that we are involved.” Edward Carter, Jr., the only white youth in the group, urged more whites to support the strike. These March 5 actions, as intended, increased the sense of a movement in the process of escalation; Lawson further emphasized this by announcing that he had invited Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to Memphis.
The escalation in Memphis reverberated out into the surrounding Mississippi Delta. On the same day, Memphis police received a telegram from nearby Brownsville—a hotbed of racism where a lynching had occurred after World War II—signed by V. Doyle Ellington, grand dragon of the Tennessee branch of the United Klans of America. The group’s national leader, Robert Shelton, was complicit in the Klan bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four young girls and wounded twenty-two in 1963. Angry about the suspension of the three Memphis police officers who had arrested movement supporters for “jaywalking” the week before, Ellington’s telegram read:
MEMPHIS IS ON THE VERGE OF AN ALL OUT RACIAL WAR…. WE ARE SWORN CITIZENS OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE TO UPHOLD LAW AND ORDER AND I HEREBY COMMIT THIS OFFICE TO THIS DUTY. WE FURTHER COMMIT THAT WE WILL NOT STAND BY AND SEE ANY DULY AUTHORIZED OFFICER BE CUT DOWN WHILE ENFORCING THE LAW. WHATEVER IT TAKES TO STOP THIS WE STAND READY. YOURS FOR GOD AND COUNTRY.
The Commercial Appeal also published a letter that day from Mississippian Robert Patterson, secretary of the White Citizens’ Councils, who disputed the Kerner Commission and identified civil rights activism, not racism, as the root of the nation’s racial problems. Incited by King, he wrote, “The Negro has been told that he has the right to disobey laws that do not suit him and even has the right to riot.” A solution to the race problem would only come “when our nation’s press finally decides to tell the American public the truth, that the races are different.”
Bill Ross of the Memphis Labor Council had long kept track of white supremacists and right-wing hate groups, and he feared the strike would bring out violent people with guns, such as the white Memphian who shot down James Meredith in 1966. Epps, Lawson, other activists, and even white City Council members constantly received threatening hate calls and letters. The FBI tracked Lawson’s outgoing long-distance phone calls, but it ignored the many hate calls he received and provided neither Lawson nor anyone else in the movement with one iota of security.
ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, students began to play a significant role in escalating the Memphis movement. At Memphis State, a campus of 15,000 students, black and white youths were strangers to each other, but on this day, an interracial group of 150 students marched and held a sit-in and speak-out at the student-center patio. Other students incredulously “peeped from classroom windows” as a self-assured, neatly dressed black student named Eddie Jenkins stood on a table to address his classmates, and began to discuss not only the plight of the sanitation workers but also their own powerless condition. “Black and white students have established a common ground on which we may attack, not meet and merely discuss, but solve the problems or ameliorate the situations that threaten the common good of us all, black and white,” Jenkins told a student reporter.
White student Laura Ingram commented: “I could not believe that this was Memphis State. I was so encouraged by it…. I think the entire demonstration was a success in communication between black and white students.” Black and white students discussed the Black Power slogan without sharp disagreements, and both the campus newspaper and the assistant dean praised the event. In the days that followed, up to 300 black students began to congregate in the student center to discuss the strike and related racial issues. The alarmed head of campus security called this “veiled black militancy.” In 1968, as student movements swept campuses across the country, Memphis police and FBI agents suspected a radical conspiracy to overturn campus peace. They continued, however, to focus not on black students, the obvious leaders, but on white students who they thought had “the reputation of being agitators,” and had led the demonstration, “along with a large number of unknown Negro students.” The FBI now had George Leon, Susan MacDonald, Sidney Chilton III, and Laura Ingram under national surveillance because of their presumed ties to the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), the W. E. B. Du Bois clubs, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Police soon did focus on a few black students, particularly Edwina Harrell, whom they linked to Black Power advocates off campus. One informant said she had a “fine reputation” and had worked in a local law office, but “she is now wearing a natural Afro hairdo” and had been “indoctrinated” when she was a student at Spelman College by Cabbage, who was now priming her for “militant and if necessary violent action.” A leaflet Harrell wrote and distributed at the March 6 event suggested otherwise. It recounted the history of strikes in the United States and warned that when management failed to make concessions, “It is an historically proven fact that violence follows.” The flyer did not call for violence; rather, it called on students to take sanitation-worker grievances to all-white East Memphis by picketing shopping centers and to challenge the university’s hierarchical conservatism. “Now is the time to change Memphis and Memphis State University!! Now!” The FBI apparently could not distinguish analysis and demands for democratization from calls for revolution.
Downtown, 117 people (charges had been dropped against four others) came before Memphis Judge Ray Churchill for the city hall sit-in on March 5. He adopted a surprisingly conciliatory tone: Protesters did not have to put up bond and charges would be dropped against all of them if they did not get arrested again in the next sixty days. “I think perhaps it was bad judgment going there and saying you would not leave,” Churchill said, and the city had “come a long way in the last two weeks,” moving from the violent clashes on February 23 to these more civil arrests in March.
Judge Hoffman in chancery court proved far less conciliatory, convicting seven leaders of AFSCME for contempt of his court order prohibiting strike activities and sentencing them each to ten days in jail and a $50 fine. He set bail at $1,000 each for Wurf and Ciampa; $500 each for international organizers Lucy, Epps, and Paisley; and $250 for T. O. Jones and Nelson Jones, a union steward. Hoffman cited Wurf’s talk to the City Council as well as testimony from police agents and Press-Scimitar reporter Clark Porteous that Wurf was indeed leading the strike. Lyle Caldwell, who had first gone on strike but then returned to work, testified that T. O. Jones had threatened him on the phone shortly before someone threw a brick through the window of his home with a note tied around it, saying he should quit scabbing. Hoffman said AFSCME leaders could purge themselves of contempt at any time simply by calling off the strike.
Union leaders claimed they were “helpless” to stop the strike, had not encouraged it or even known about it, and merely had come to Memphis to settle it. Hoffman tried to get Wurf and Loeb (who came to press the city’s case) to settle the strike in his court—to no avail. Hoffman then dismissed charges against fifteen local union stewards after attorney Anthony Sabella said the men had simply quit work and technically speaking were not on strike. Hoffman told these local men they would not suffer penalties if they would just go back to work, but international union staff members who persisted in strike support would go to jail—an apparent ploy to divide the rank and file from staff members. Sabella appealed the judge’s ruling.
Out in the streets, Harold Middlebrook had succeeded in firing up high school student protests of these proceedings. He had set up youth action committees in a number of black schools that had called upon students to skip school to protest the arrests. A number of them did, rallying that morning at Clayborn Temple and marching that afternoon to city hall. Moon and Starks later led one group of marchers to the sixth floor of police headquarters and right into Judge Churchill’s court. Another “unruly” group of black and white youth, according to police, marched two abreast to the courthouse carrying placards reading, “Justice Is Dead in Memphis” and “Your Kingdom May Burn Down, King Henry.” Red squad leader Lieutenant Ely Arkin wrote: “As they progressed, the marchers became louder and more boisterous, shouting, yelling, and singing.” Six young black men carried a coffin to symbolize the burying of freedom, and, surrounded by 200 singing students (one of them white), placed it on top of the city hall stairs. Middlebrook read from the Bible and Blackburn conducted a mock burial of justice, saying, “In this casket is justice. In this casket is the freedom of not just the black people, but of all the people of Memphis.”
Marchers encircled city hall and sang, “We Shall Overcome,” ending with shouts of “Freedom!” Marchers hoped to produce a cascading series of arrests, but the police did nothing, only leaving Reverend Malcolm Blackburn to say that they would march again and again until justice was done. They marched back through the downtown, accompanied by sixty police officers, and when students turned off Main Street and onto Beale, several of them kicked overflowing garbage cans into the street. Still, police officers did nothing, knowing from past experience that arresting students would only produce sympathy in the black community and expand the movement.
Lawson and Middlebrook had seen the powerful effects of the black high school student movement that had saved the Birmingham movement from failure in 1963, and they knew that black youth required confrontation to get fired up. Quiet, disciplined marches were a little too predictable to energize youth shock troops, and organizers welcomed their creative actions. Sure enough, police began to have great difficulty in controlling hit-and-run actions by small groups in the streets. On the night of March 6, after the students “buried freedom,” seventeen young people picketed Loeb’s Laundry at Parkway and Lauderdale; later, someone broke one of its windows. Roving picketers moved on to the Harlem House restaurant and then Loeb’s Bar-B-Q at McLemore and Mississippi, joined by Reverend Blackburn. In the early morning hours of March 7, youths broke out windows of Loeb’s at Fourth and Vance and at grocery and department stores elsewhere and pulled false fire alarms throughout black Memphis. Someone threw a rock through the window of a Red Ball Freight Company truck, sending its black driver—who had nothing to do with the strike—to the John Gaston Hospital to have glass fragments removed from his head and face.
Most of these incidents, Lieutenant Arkin believed, stemmed from “vandalistic youths” not connected to the strike, but Police and Fire Director Holloman nonetheless publicly blamed their actions on the ministers. The newspapers quoted him the next day as saying, “They [the young people] go to meetings, are inflamed by fiery speeches, then disperse in small groups and are able to create havoc. How their [the ministers’] consciences can condone it is far beyond me.” Northside High School’s black principal immediately suspended two students for handing out Black Power flyers, and Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth Turner warned adults not to encourage youths to become truant from school on pain of fines and jail terms for parents. Black youth kept authorities unsettled and guessing about their next moves.
On Thursday, March 7, as the City Council finally considered Patterson’s dues-checkoff proposal and voted it down, Pat Mayweather and another group of nearly 100 black students met at the Minimum Salary Building to make placards. They marched through downtown, led by Harold Middlebrook, in what Arkin described as “a loud, boisterous and disorderly march,” shouting “Down with Loeb” and “Down with the mace-spraying cops.” Lawson led a second, more quiet and orderly, march—quite in contrast to that led by Middlebrook. Another group of twelve—mostly adults—also picketed and sat down in front of the entrance to the Democrat Road sanitation facility that morning, but no one was arrested.
Escalation was the order of the day. That night at St. John’s Baptist Church, Reverend Bell told some 200 people: “Memphis is sitting on a powder keg, and the only thing holding it together is the ministers.” Trash fires continued throughout South Memphis. Encouraged by Mayor Loeb, 3,000 members of the Tennessee Army National Guard began massive riot-control exercises in Memphis, as well as in other Tennessee cities. A U.S. judge refused to halt the exercises, despite a complaint filed by 500 African Americans in Nashville.
An FBI “Racial Matters” memo on Friday, March 8, warned (capitalized in original):
BITTER HATRED ON PART OF NEGRO LEADERS AND NEGRO YOUTH IS RAPIDLY DEVELOPING. THIS OVERALL HATRED AND CONTEMPT FOR AUTHORITY, COUPLED WITH YOUTHFUL EXUBERANCE, SOURCE FEELS, MAY TRIGGER A RASH OF PERIPATETIC AND SPORADIC UNORGANIZED INCIDENTS OF VANDALISM, BURNINGS, AND HIT AND RUN ASSAULTS ON POLICE OFFICERS.
That night, trash fires abounded throughout heavily black South Memphis, where Cabbage had his strongest base. A number of adults warned Lawson and other ministers that bringing militant black youths into strike support risked chaos, while various community sources told the FBI that Black Organizing Project leaders sought to provoke open warfare with the police.
But black youth more often than not took action on their own. On Saturday, March 9, about fifty black male teenagers, hanging out at a restaurant in South Memphis, threw rocks and bottles at both a squad car and then the wrecking truck that came to get it. More police vehicles arrived, and the incident almost turned into a brawl. The police feared such events could escalate until “some uniformed patrolman will catch some youth in the act and the youth will run, ignoring the officer’s order to halt and will be shot,” triggering an all-out riot. At the Democrat Road sanitation facility, black youths joined a crowd of fifty strike supporters who heckled scabs, while another group of seventy-five youngsters (including five whites) ignored heavy rains to march downtown chanting, “Freedom now.” Strikers also marched that afternoon, and that night Lawson and AFSCME leaders at Olivet Baptist Church outlined a schedule of continual marches, picket lines, and rallies.
A few of the city’s more privileged white college students began to get involved, including Bill Casey and the editors of the student newspaper at the private Southwestern College (originally a segregated Presbyterian school). Prompted in part by Coby Smith, one of the first black students to attend Southwestern, sixteen white students went to white churches in East Memphis on Sunday, handing out a flyer that said the strike was “no longer a simple labor dispute but a fervent protest against the outdated racial attitudes of this City that has united the entire Negro community.” According to Casey, “A few of the kids looked like beatniks and people were shocked and scared…. I had several sheets wadded up and thrown at me.” Otherwise, their actions elicited little response, while the FBI took special note of “ill groomed” white students supporting the strike.
On Monday, March 11, the Northside High School student-body president, Murray Austin Ervin, and another student named Alex Johnson passed out flyers at school, calling for a walkout. Despite a driving rainstorm, ninety-one students left the school at 12:30 and marched three wet miles to Clayborn Temple, upending garbage cans in what they called “turn over day.” After rallying, thirty of them linked arms six abreast and danced their way through the downtown shopping area, chanting, “Black Power” and “Down with Loeb.” They thoroughly “harassed the police,” according to a reporter.
Many people considered Northside the finest predominantly-black school in the city, with 1,100 students, 77 percent of them African Americans, nestled in a neighborhood close to the Firestone factory, where the parents of many of these students had repeatedly gone on strike. Northside’s principal called on students “to use common sense,” warning them of truancy charges and suspensions. But increasing numbers of them joined downtown marches and picket lines. They set off a chain reaction. At Humes Junior High, a smaller number walked out; at Carver High School in southwest Memphis, John Henry Ferguson, a twenty-year-old school dropout, and Willie Jenkins, who had been suspended from school in January, brazenly went through the cafeteria, calling on students to leave. They lay down on the floor when school officials brought in the police, who arrested them.
A number of black informants told the FBI they condemned the COME strategy of “injecting more youth,” whom they called excitable and “impulsive by nature.” By contrast, Reverends Bell and Jackson congratulated the Northside students for their actions. That afternoon, Reverend Jackson led another 175 marchers in an orderly procession from Clayborn Temple to the downtown. Twenty-five feet behind them, another, more rowdy group of 125 to 150 black youth shouted, “Down with Loeb” and “We hate hunkies” (white racists). The police tried to get them to march single file, but they marched four abreast, and the police could not get them to remain orderly. Disruption of the downtown, said Reverend Bell, “is going to continue. We’re not going to tell the police what we’re going to do because the police are cooperating with the mayor.”
Middlebrook enthused: “We had the kids totally involved.” Police became “very much uptight about the youth marches,” said Lawson. Middlebrook recalled a white woman who walked out of a department store; confronted by black youth dancing and singing, “Before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave,” she fainted. Such incidents increasingly drove white shoppers away from the downtown.
GOING INTO ITS fifth week, the movement remained strong, but doubts existed about whether strikers and their supporters could hang on long enough to reach a victory. Testimony in Judge Hoffman’s court revealed that only thirty workers had paid dues to the union before the strike, raising questions about how well organized AFSCME really was. The city on March 8 put sixty-five of its 180 garbage trucks onto the street and, the next day, increased that to seventy-five. Public Works Director Charles Blackburn said 90 percent of the people could now get their garbage picked up at the curb. Black community informants told the FBI that some NAACP leaders and ministers “are hopeful that the strike will soon end.” Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington sent his black administrative assistant, Hosea Lockard, to urge both black leaders and Mayor Loeb to make a compromise. Loeb said no; he had nothing but disdain for the Democratic governor.
Lieutenant Arkin felt confident that strikers would have to return to work out of economic necessity (although an FBI report indicated “no end in sight”). The city increased pressure on the workers after the Commercial Appeal published articles headlined, “County Taxpayers to Pay Half of Food Stamp Tab” and “Strikers Find Haven in Food Stamps,” causing scores of conservative whites to write to Loeb that he should cut off food stamps and life insurance for workers. Loeb kept the latter, but on March 29, he canceled the city’s contributions to the Shelby County Welfare Commission for food stamps for strikers, toward which the city and county paid a total of $15,000, in two increments. Workers paid 50 cents for $12 in food coupons, and more than 750 of them had signed up—at a total cost of some $300 to $400 a day.
It was unclear whether or not the mayor had the authority to cut off these funds, but the city’s share of food-stamp money stopped. Striker Matt Randle said food stamps made the difference between food and no food for one’s family. “We lived on food stamps.” After the food stamp cutoff, Cornelia Crenshaw broke down in tears at a workshop of the Council of Jewish Women, telling them that strikers’ families did not have enough to eat. “I told them at that time that I knew nothing about Castro, I had no communist’s learning…but I swore that I was going to write to Castro and ask him for some money to feed these men. I think we became so possessed with this thing until we would go to almost any end.” Crenshaw, O. W. Pickett, and AFSCME redoubled efforts to raise funds and food for the strikers.
Loeb had even less authority to stop the credit union from serving as a vehicle for union dues, since it was an independent agency with its own board, but, said Councilman Patterson, “That was one of the greatest ways to kill off a union, is to make sure that the union can’t get its dues.” Loeb had put workers—many of them losing cars, homes, and appliances—in a squeeze. “When you don’t have income, you get discouraged,” recalled striker Clinton Burrows. “Children would be crying at home, the next day they would talk about it” at the union meeting. Strikers “were getting weaker and weaker,” and by mid-March, he thought about half of them wanted to go back to work. Fortunately, some of the children marched with their fathers, and most of the wives stayed solidly behind the strike.
With movement escalation, racial polarization over the strike only intensified. A barrage of letters in the newspapers pressed for more draconian actions by the city. One claimed, “No business can be efficiently operated with union labor in this country” another called garbage collection itself “a socialistic venture” and warned that American freedoms “may soon be gobbled up by a godless, atheistic, materialistic socialism.” Clearly, black ministers now played the key role in keeping strike support alive. On Tuesday, March 12, the Commercial Appeal published an article headlined, “Negro Pastors Take Reins As Garbage Strike Leaders in Switch to Racial Pitch.” Writer Joe Sweat quoted Reverend Jackson as saying, “I have become a union leader.” But he and other ministers, Reverend Blackburn said, walked “on a tightrope,” trying to help a “pretty mild mannered group assert their right and on the other hand we are trying to hold down the young militants who want to tear the place up.”
Some eighteen demonstrators on that Tuesday morning, led by Reverend Starks, protested scabs entering at the Democrat Road sanitation facility. Harold Middlebrook led more than 200 black students to the weekly City Council meeting, pleading for action. Two of them were arrested in the city hall auditorium, lending a new air of intensity to the proceedings. Councilman Patterson put forward his resolution supporting payroll deductions through the credit union, and once again the council rejected his measure. For the first time, however, a white council member, Jerred Blanchard, voted with Patterson, Davis, and Netters. To many of the city’s whites, said Blanchard, “I became the fourth ‘nigger’ on the Council. That was the night the phone started ringing.” Now he, too, was barraged with anonymous death threats and derogatory comments.
Lawson bluntly told the City Council: “All right, if you want to leave it to Uncle Bubber [indicating Mayor Henry Loeb] and say that you don’t have any responsibility in this thing, go ahead. Then the black ministers will just go fishing and let what happens in this town happen.” But Lawson was not about to go fishing and let so-called Black Power militants take over. He and other ministers increasingly framed the strike as part of a larger struggle for black access to good jobs, better housing and schools, city leadership positions, and an end to police brutality—“only part of a broad spectrum of grievances in the Negro community,” according to reporter Joe Sweat. T. O. Jones privately chafed at this politicization, but there was nothing he could do about it.
After the council vote against dues checkoff, Patterson tried to propose another resolution, but the council did not let him bring it to a vote. Reverend Bell wanted to provoke another mass arrest, but instead Reverends Lawson and Kyles and Maxine Smith led a walkout of some 300 people from the meeting into a press conference. Kyles said, “There is no justice for blacks at City Hall,” while Lawson pledged to “escalate our fight” and have “a whole series of people coming in here from all over the Country to help you march and lead you on to victory.” Lawson wanted to raise the level of publicity and action in days to come, but Bell wanted to raise the level of disruption immediately. That night, at a rally at Lawson’s church, Bell said that if Memphis did not become a “city for all the people, there would be no city at all.” He urged students to skip school and picket Loeb’s planned speech at Central High School the next morning. Reverend Jackson also raised the level of his rhetoric, warning “police snitches” that he would not stop people from beating them up, and Dr. Vasco Smith and others urged people to unite and not be intimidated by police.
At one mass meeting, Reverend Jackson pulled a gold-plated lighter out of his pocket and said conditions now called for fire, not water. But militant rhetoric aside, black ministers feared the consequences if Loeb or the City Council did not make concessions soon. At various times, Martin Luther King, Jr., had pleaded with whites in power that “I need some victories” to keep the black masses from turning to violence, and Memphis’s black ministers felt the same way. The level of threats against scab workers, firebombings, and acts of vandalism escalated throughout the week, and Charles Cabbage spoke openly of armed self-defense should police or white vigilantes attack. Police claimed that T. O. Jones reportedly said he had seventy-five volunteers willing to burn the community—if that is what it took to bring about a settlement. Jones probably did not mean this literally, an FBI agent conceded, but such talk exemplified the frustration felt by many African Americans.
Combined actions by workers and students provided the key to keeping alive a direct-action movement in the streets. On Wednesday, March 13, late in the morning, 150 to 170 people, many of them teenagers, marched downtown and held a prayer-and songfest in front of city hall. A smaller group split off on the way back to Clayborn Temple and threatened shoppers and police, and another 125 to 200 adults marched later in the day. The movement’s hectic schedule now included up to three marches downtown, a union meeting at midday, and a mass meeting at night, as well as picket lines and boycott actions at sanitation depots and various stores. Workers could carry some of this burden, but student reinforcements had become crucial to the effort.
Authorities did what they could to discourage them. Police arrested nine black youths, ages eighteen to twenty-three, including nineteen-year-old Willie Henry, and charged them with disorderly conduct and “night riding.” In the words of the police, their crime was “shouting, acting boisterous and threatening people,” while refusing to march single file on downtown sidewalks. One seventy-year-old white man claimed that two marchers struck him and broke his false teeth, but he could not identify them. That night, at a mass meeting at St. Paul Baptist Church, ministers again appealed to the youths for their support. Elsewhere, at Cypress Junior High School, after a talent show attended by a thousand people, a group of youths went on a rampage and smashed rocks and bottles against police cars. Fifteen carloads of police at the scene dispersed them, with no arrests. Someone broke out another window at a Loeb’s Bar-B-Q, and seventy-five black students stayed away from Northside High School the next day. School boycotts and student marches had become a regular feature of the strike.
The confrontation in Memphis had reached an explosive stage, in part because the city proved increasingly successful in replacing strikers with scab workers. Reportedly, 120 strikers had now joined thirty-five other workers who had refused to strike in the first place—along with 156 other new recruits—so that more than 300 workers manned eighty trucks. At the cost of between $4,000 and $5,000 a day, all 800 Memphis Police Department officers worked seven days a week. The strike itself offset this huge financial drain by reducing the number of paid workers and garbage pickups. Bolstered by police escorts, increasing numbers of scabs went to work, despite heckling by strike supporters. Loeb’s strategy of gradually introducing strikebreakers seemed to be working.
Hence, a number of activists cried out for a more militant response to stop the strikebreaking. Reverend Malcolm Blackburn felt that the picketing and marches had become too predictable. The movement had failed to stop scabs, yet every time the topic of civil disobedience came up, the subject was dropped. On Thursday morning, March 14, he decided to block the sanitation trucks at the Democrat Road depot with his body. When he picked up Willie James Kemp and two others at his church, Kemp told him, “Well, we’re not gonna let you go to jail by yourself.” On the picket line, Blackburn refused to move out of the way of the trucks; next thing he knew, a phalanx of police threatened to beat up the picketers. Blackburn and Kemp were arrested, each of them for the second time, and so were four other strikers. Down at the police station, Blackburn recalled with amusement that a white officer called him “boy,” making him an honorary Negro, and charged the six of them with conspiracy to endanger public health and to obstruct trade and commerce.
Later that day, Reverend Middlebrook teamed up with Reverend Roosevelt Joyner, John Burl Smith, and Charles Ballard to lead a total of thirty people, including ten teenage girls, to sit down in the street at Third and Pontotoc in black Memphis; they were all arrested for blocking neighborhood garbage pickups. Several girls complained that police maced them; seventeen of those arrested were under eighteen years old.
Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth Turner struck back, directing police to arrest any school-age children under the age of sixteen they found on the street during school hours—“no matter what they’re doing.” Police promptly arrested a thirteen-year-old and a fourteen-year-old trying to make their way downtown to join demonstrations. Turner said he would charge such youths with truancy, and five truancies could result in expulsion from school. When hauled into court, a number of black students flaunted their disdain for the judicial system. As City Judge Bernie Weinman heard disorderly conduct charges against thirteen young adults (under sixteen) and seventeen youths (under eighteen), they laughed derisively and talked over the proceedings, until Weinman burst out, “This is no game—no picnic,” rebuking them as a classroom teacher might.
It seemed that repression only accelerated protest among black youths, and even some white ones. At Memphis State University that Thursday, whites in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and blacks in the Black Student Association (BSA) enlisted the student Liberal Club in picketing Mayor Loeb. MSU had called off morning classes so that all students could hear him, and Loeb spoke without incident, but as he began to drive off, about 150 students confronted him with a picket line on the sidewalk. True to form, Loeb popped out of his car and promptly began trying to convince them of his views and inviting them to his open house at city hall. The head of campus security had a fit: the television cameras recorded it all—which, police complained, only “built up the egos” of the demonstrators.
Authorities feared that the Invaders would get a foothold among rebellious youth—a fear that Cabbage cultivated. He told an informant that he purposely stayed in the background, but that the Black Power movement might challenge Lawson. John Burl Smith remarked that he would soon bring Stokely Carmichael to town, and that Carmichael had gone to Cuba to get weapons. Such comments were part of BOP’s calculated strategy of raising white fears of black rebellion in order to get more bargaining leverage. The FBI and the Memphis Police Department had them under constant and suffocating surveillance, following them day and night. When Cabbage complained of this to the FBI, an agent told him the police had the perfect right to follow them. Obviously, they weren’t about to stop.
IF INCREASING ARRESTS provided one form of escalation, increasing national publicity provided another. Up to this point, said Jerry Wurf, the Associated Press correspondent in Memphis had deliberately suppressed news of the strike, which had barely been covered by national media. Desperate to break the news blackout, movement supporters had threatened for weeks to bring in “Black Power boys,” such as Stokely Carmichael. But Lawson, Epps, and others who knew Martin Luther King sought to remedy the lack of media exposure by trying to pry him away from his impossible schedule (“King Implored by Ministers to Come Here,” read a page-one story in the Commercial Appeal on March 14). However, in a town dominated by the NAACP without a functioning SCLC chapter, bringing in King first could set off organizational rivalries and offend national NAACP leaders.
Jesse Turner, president of the Memphis NAACP and a member of the organization’s national executive board, believed the strike was faltering, so he called NAACP President Roy Wilkins. The national NAACP had already sent $1,000 to support the strike, but Wilkins had just finished serving as one of the Kerner commissioners and said he was too exhausted to come. Undeterred, Turner went to New York City on Sunday, March 10, for an NAACP executive board meeting, and he pleaded for three days that “this was a fight we could not [afford to] lose.” At the same time, unionists contacted Bayard Rustin of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Coincidentally, Turner brought Wilkins back with him, and Rustin flew in separately on Thursday, March 14; both men ended up speaking at Mason Temple that night. Both represented the more conservative end of civil rights leadership at this point—Wilkins typically favoring court challenges over demonstrations and Rustin calling for moderation and electoral alliances within the Democratic Party.
Turner believed that Wilkins could bring out the mass of Memphis NAACP members, and he was right: nearly 9,000 people showed up at Mason Temple, creating the largest event of the strike to this point. Middle-aged and older black women and men appeared in their Sunday clothes, as did many sanitation workers. The mass meeting demonstrated why the Memphis NAACP had earned top honors within the national organization for five of the previous six years, boasting the largest membership of any local branch in the South.
T. O. Jones helped to lead the meeting, and Jesse Epps told the crowd, “There will be little talk from this union from this day forward, for we are preparing for action.” Reverend Ralph Jackson, with his hair slicked back and wearing a shiny suit, pumped up the crowd’s emotions with raucous tones of outrage. People circulated huge garbage cans, labeled, “Dump Loeb Not Garbage,” and filled them with cash donations. Lawson called on people to stand in unity, saying, “There is no freedom without dignity,” and “no dignity without justice and manhood and power.” When Rustin took the stage, most young people knew about him only what they saw: a middle-aged black man in an unpretentious suit and tie, with large glasses and graying hair that seemed to stand straight up on his head. His conventional dress accentuated an earnest style of delivery. He looked and spoke like someone who had been struggling hard for most of his life, the veteran of an earlier generation of nonviolent radicals now at odds with the New Left and Black Nationalism.
Rustin’s position in the Movement at this point abounded with ironies. He had been among the first outsiders to help King in Montgomery create a thoroughly nonviolent movement and connect to labor and civil rights supporters across the country. He continued to advise King from the shadows, fearful that his homosexuality and past ties to the Young Communist League of the 1930s would be used to destroy King. Regarded by many as an organizing genius, Rustin had played a key role in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but lately he had urged the Movement to steer away from confrontations such as the Poor People’s Campaign. Instead, the nonviolent Rustin wanted to build electoral coalitions with AFL-CIO unions, most of which fully supported the U.S. war in Vietnam.
Lawson had a long relationship with Rustin, however, and was not disappointed by his performance in Memphis. Pointing his finger for emphasis, Rustin laid out the simple proposition that black people could not get justice in the larger sense if black workers did not win this fight. “How can you get rid of poverty if working men don’t get decent wages? If you can’t get a decent salary for men who are working, in the name of God, how the hell are you gonna get rid of poverty?” Until the federal government recognized the plight of poor people who worked in the inner cities, it never would end poverty, and justice for black workers would never happen in Memphis unless trade unions and black people “stand together, man to man.”
Rustin disparaged what he considered Black Power’s cultural distractions. In New York City, he said, “Nothing’s happening” because African Americans kept struggling over hairstyles or whether to use the name “Negro,” “Black,” or “colored”—or debating what is or is not soul food. By contrast, “In Memphis there is a real fight going on. Here people have a fight on your hands and don’t have time for this foolishness.” He drew his heaviest applause when he likened the Memphis fight to the Montgomery movement and called the Memphis strike “one of the great struggles for the emancipation of the black man today.” “This becomes the symbol of the movement to get rid of poverty…[and] this fight is going to be won because the black people in this community and the trade unions stand together.”
Rustin told his audience that the power to bring change was in their own hands, supported by the national Movement. “I am sure your papers do not report and debate the truth of what’s happening here,” but “people who believe in justice and democracy are behind you and have not forgotten the struggle that is going on here nor its profound importance.” Rustin’s audience followed his every move and applauded his articulate and frank statements. As sweat streamed from his face, Rustin then led the crowd—including well-dressed elderly women, students in cardigan sweaters, and church elders in suits and ties—in singing. He was a grand singer, one of those in the Movement who had helped to transform spirituals into labor and civil rights anthems:
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round,
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, gonna keep on a-walkin’,
Keep on a-talkin’, marchin’ to the Freedom Land.
Rustin was not a well-known figure, but he provided a good warm-up for Wilkins, who was, and an aroused audience gave a long, loud, standing ovation when Wilkins stepped to the podium. He, too, had chided Black Power advocates, and he had also criticized King for opposing the Vietnam War. Like Rustin, he wore a conventional suit and tie, not a dashiki or army jacket, yet people knew that Wilkins had devoted himself for decades to the NAACP, to which many in the room belonged. They expected Wilkins to take a middle path in his discourse, and that is just what he did—yet he also delivered his message with acute rhetoric and strong feeling.
He expressed shock that men could work forty hours a week and still qualify for welfare and food stamps. “When you have a situation like that you ought to stay here and fight until hell freezes over…. I say the city of Memphis, Tennessee, ought to be ashamed of itself. If I were the mayor, I would be ashamed. I wouldn’t want these men to not be able to feed their families on the lousy pittance they are paid.” Wilkins criticized police brutality, saying, “Mace is to curb a riot, people running wild. Mace is not made to be used on orderly people marching down the street in orderly fashion.” To rising applause, he told the crowd, “You have given enough in forbearance” and should fight hard for change. “I don’t mean go out and tear up the town. This is your town just like it’s a lot of other people’s town and you’ve got to live in it. Don’t foul your nest but don’t give an inch…. I didn’t come here to make threats, but anyone who picks on peaceful people is building for trouble…. I don’t mean riots,” he said, but Memphis “has got to make a clean break with the past.”
Wilkins spoke sympathetically of the difficulty of changing an entire culture built on segregation, saying, “It’s hard for old Negroes to change their minds…and you know it’s hard for whites to change their minds, even the good ones.” To laughter and applause, he added, “And the bad ones just get worse.”
Wilkins knew Memphis. He had first come through town in 1929 with Walter White and George Schuyler to investigate secretly the conditions of black levee workers in Mississippi, who then made a mere 10 cents an hour. He later told interviewers that “Negro peasants,” as he called them, had escaped from Mississippi to Memphis “with a plantation economy in their bones.” Unionization gave them their only means to move from a dismal past to a better life, but to do it they had to fight bias against unions as well as the old plantation mentality. The struggle in Memphis thus represented “the overflowing of the final developments of the black worker in the South.”
Wilkins had seen this transition in his own lifetime, and, true to his own optimistic brand of politics, he offered a vision of incremental but significant change: “There must be new pay scales, new security, new life for the people—a new deal all the way around.” A change in the status of black workers, along with the black vote, could transform the city, he said, adding, “Look at the unity that has been forged here. The Negro population is like a unit on this. It can be done, with that kind of unity.” He urged his audience “to get people who are blocking the way out of the way,” and concluded, “Pray God that you may spread it [the Movement] to the rest of Memphis.”
AFTER THURSDAY NIGHT’S mass meeting, a more widespread sense of unity gripped the black community, along with the demand for action that gripped many black youth. Friday, March 15, marked five consecutive days of youth marches, and police arrested five black males (ages thirteen to fifteen) from Humes Junior High School for carrying placards and blocking traffic at Hernando and Union. None of their parents even knew they had skipped school. On the same day, a Shelby County grand jury indicted eight strike supporters arrested on February 23—including seventy-two-year-old O. B. Hicks. For supposedly rocking a police car, the grand jury charged them on two counts: for “prowling” and “traveling for the purpose of intimidating citizens.” Judge Weinman’s court held in abeyance the cases of the thirty people arrested for blocking trucks the previous day, and Judge Churchill released Charles Ballard and John Burl Smith on probation. Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman complained that the courts were being too lenient.
The police reported increasing verbal threats aimed at sanitation workers, Molotov cocktails used to start garbage fires, some seventy false fire alarms, and an attack of beer bottles against police cars by some fifty youths on Danny Thomas Boulevard. Authorities confiscated weapons at Porter Junior High and Booker T. Washington High School. Police said a hundred teenagers marched up and down Main Street, some of them shouting, “Burn, Memphis, Burn,” on their way back to Clayborn Temple.
Holloman said, “I deplore the use of our youths in such a manner,” and he advised parents that “it would be wise to know where their children are at all times.” On Saturday, March 16, black youths picketed downtown and Eastgate, Southgate, and Poplar Plaza Shopping Centers in white Memphis, led by Reverend Middlebrook. That night, police arrested four youths between fifteen and seventeen years of age for throwing a Molotov cocktail against a grocery-store wall. City Councilman Netters warned, “Black Power people in Chicago are thinking about coming down here.” Holloman warned that teenagers found downtown during school hours “will be arrested no matter what they are doing and charged with truancy.”
THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL condemned youthful demonstrators and the adults who supported them, but also admitted to a “stalemate.” In a Saturday editorial, “Time for Council to Move,” the editors suggested the mayor’s hard line had opened a racial chasm, and now called on the City Council to intervene in order to resolve the strike.
On Sunday, March 17, oratory supporting the strike rang out in black churches, and the movement used the churches as a mass outlet for its own four-page newspaper which mocked the despised Commercial Appeal with its own title, the COME Appeal. Police intelligence agents reported pickets in front of the public library, verbal threats, and vandalism around the city. With alarm, they also noted another sign of Movement escalation: an article in the Sunday Commercial Appeal titled, “King to Lend Vocal Support at Rally.” Lawson’s ally would arrive in Memphis the next day.