It had never snowed that late in March. Never. And some of us felt that just really something was just in the air and that it was going to be something dreadful going to happen.
—Lanetha Jewel Branch, teacher and strike supporter
MOVEMENT CRITICS OF KING OFTEN CLAIMED THAT HIS sudden appearances in support of local movements diverted attention from organizing, did little to advance the struggle, and merely inflated his ego. King’s strength, said Bayard Rustin, was not in organizing a campaign from the bottom up but rather in mobilizing people to support one already in motion. At this, King was superb. His March 18 speech mobilized black Memphis more than anything that had yet happened. Strikers felt King’s words gave deeper spiritual and political meaning to their struggle, and he strengthened their belief in ultimate victory, while others who had stayed on the sidelines began to recognize that the outcome of this struggle might determine the fate of Memphians for generations.
Loeb thought that the power to determine events remained in his hands. As the strike continued into its fifth week, it had failed to truly inconvenience the city’s white citizens. Even with its reduced workforce, the sanitation division managed to dispose of most of the white community’s trash, and cold winter weather kept garbage from rotting very quickly during a reduced pickup schedule. The day before King’s speech, eighty-four of the city’s 180 trucks picked up garbage—ninety-two went out the day after, an indication that more blacks were doing scab labor.
Many young people, unionists, and ministers, however, believed they had reached a new and more powerful stage of struggle. The COME Appeal asserted, “Never before in the history of Memphis has the Negro community been more united.” Strike supporters widely distributed a leaflet titled, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Community on the Move for Equality Invite You to March for Justice and Jobs.” They urged ministers to turn out their congregations for “a momentous event for Memphis and this country,” and told public-school teachers: “His march will be the most important event in this country since August 28, 1963, in Washington.” In another leaflet, COME linked labor and civil rights explicitly and urged people to “March for Justice and Jobs” in order to make Memphis “a city for all people. A man is a man. God requires that a man be treated like a man.” It urged participants to “walk gently” in “a march of dignity. The only force we will use is soul-force which is peaceful, loving, courageous, yet militant.”
In another widely circulated leaflet, black ministers urged whites to “be united in harmony and cooperation, not separated by hate and discord,” to see the strike in the broad context of brotherhood that King had always emphasized. “To the white people of this community, we say: Let the settlement of this sanitation men’s strike constitute a new beginning for Memphis—a drive for jobs, housing and education for blacks and whites alike. Let us strive for equality and friendship. Let us build a better city on a foundation of mutual respect and progress towards the American ideal of liberty and justice for all.”
Lawson and his colleagues in the clergy aimed to create a nonviolent coalition that the civil rights movement had never seen before—bringing together unions with civil rights groups, black workers with black preachers, alienated students and young black men disconnected from work with the black middle class, and black and white religious followers of the Social Gospel with each other. In the aftermath of King’s visit, however, Memphis was anything but peaceful.
KING’S CALL FOR a boycott of work and school and a mass march had set the movement abuzz, yet some felt mass marches were outmoded, and they criticized Lawson for not being militant enough in his tactics. But what did “militant” mean? “Whites interpreted militant as meaning force and violence; blacks interpreted it as meaning unrelenting direct nonviolent action,” according to one study. Lawson and the ministers clearly adhered to the latter meaning, but others in the Movement believed in using the rhetoric of armed self-defense to put pressure on the white establishment. Reverend Bell and others kept raising the specter of bringing in Stokely Carmichael as one way of exerting that pressure. Lawson too said he would invite Carmichael if it would unify the black community, yet his presence seemed more likely to splinter than unify the emerging Memphis coalition. Bell ultimately dropped his proposal, but rumors of Carmichael’s imminent arrival persisted.
On a more substantive level, black youth increasingly criticized Lawson and other ministers for not stopping the garbage trucks through civil disobedience, nonviolent or otherwise. Lawson did not shy away from civil disobedience—in fact, he had been urging it—and at the March 18 mass meeting, Ralph Abernathy also urged people to place their bodies in front of garbage trucks. But, except for the March 5 mass arrest and the more recent arrest of thirty picketers for blocking garbage trucks in the street, it hadn’t happened. In truth, most ministers preferred marches, speeches, and mass meetings. Bell, Lawson, Middlebrook, and other COME strategists hoped to remedy this by recruiting hundreds to get arrested on Friday morning before King’s projected mass march. The plan also included a mass boycott of schools. “We are expecting to have 10,000 in the march—school children included. We’ll fight the truancy verdict in the courts if need be,” Lawson told the media.
COME’s youth group fanned out all over town on Tuesday night, spreading leaflets urging blacks to march on Friday, while COME sent a letter from twenty-two ministers and other identifiable black leaders to black teachers and businesspeople. Calling the Memphis movement the most significant since Montgomery, they urged people to put aside their fears. Internal-security police reported that “Black Power Advocates” used more coercive tactics to get people to the march: people calling themselves “Invaders” supposedly had told teachers leaving King’s speech that they would burn their cars if they opposed the Friday school walkout. Police reported threats to burn down two white schools and said the Invaders were agitating at schools in South Memphis for classes to be canceled. John Burl Smith went directly to the principal of Douglass High School, demanding to address the students, but he was told to leave, and he did. Police also reported threats to strip cars and damage buildings at four other schools if teachers and principals did not support the walkouts.
Police agents were alarmed to learn that King had left behind James Bevel, perhaps his most incendiary SCLC organizer. With a receding hair-line, a full beard, manic energy, and a prophetic, egalitarian vision of social change, Bevel had saved the movement in Birmingham from failure by unleashing the “children’s crusade,” in which thousands of students walked out of school, faced Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses, and packed the jails when the adult movement was flagging. In Memphis, he planned to concentrate on gaining more black youth support, which had clearly become crucial to the future of the Memphis strike.
Bevel began holding meetings and, true to his ultra-egalitarian Christianity, did not stick to one issue. He said blacks had to overcome a great range of ills engendered by racism, including the war and capitalism itself. Bevel spoke at Warren Temple and Lane Avenue Baptist Church, saying that if the city didn’t settle the strike by Friday, schoolchildren should boycott classes for the entire following week. He gathered students at LeMoyne College on March 20 to give what one FBI agent called “a virulent black power talk” and an MPD agent called “an incendiary anti-war speech.” He urged students to read Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks newspaper, saying they should accept support from white liberals and clergy but not trust them. He also said he planned to form a new Black Power organization linking black nationalists across the country. Intelligence agents saw Bevel as a kind of ideological wild man—visionary, spontaneous, rhetorically unpredictable, and focused on the idea that black people themselves had to run their own communities and stop relying on others. “Bevel is organizing for the future,” said a black community informant. Bevel asked students to prepare themselves to lead revolutionary change, but he apparently said little or nothing about the Poor People’s Campaign or the strike.
As with King, Bevel’s specialty was not methodical organizing but powerful rhetoric that aroused people to action. A number of black activists in Memphis likewise tried to effect change simply by escalating their rhetoric. Reverend Bell made a comment—seemingly designed to provoke the authorities—that he had resumed smoking just so he’d have an excuse to carry matches around the city in case he needed to burn it down. Cornelia Crenshaw supposedly threatened the Memphis Housing Authority with destruction if it did not close down during King’s proposed march. Reports circulated that black workers at Baptist Hospital would walk out, and an active rumor mill in black Memphis kept the police off guard and apprehensive about what would happen next.
But AFSCME staff members, as well as James Lawson, questioned whether such agitation really produced constructive action. Jerry Wurf said that a lot of what passed for “militancy” in Memphis consisted of loose talk and bravado, especially among young people. Willie Jenkins, John Henry Ferguson, and a group of about twelve unemployed “young militants” hung out at the AFSCME headquarters, sporadically following the leadership of COME’s Reverend Middlebrook, but AFSCME gave neither this group nor the Invaders any formal support because Wurf said they could not be controlled. Even as young blacks complained that the ministers had failed to stop strikebreakers and trucks from leaving the city garbage depots, Wurf said AFSCME had already decided, “We couldn’t win the strike on the picket line…. We in effect let the city hire scabs.” Wurf avoided such confrontations in part because he worried at the phenomenal number of guns floating around Memphis in the hands of both whites and blacks—including “these goddamn crazy kids with their five dollar pistols coming into the situation, invited by T. O. Jones,” who used some of them as bodyguards and let them hang out in the AFSCME office. Ciampa called them Jones’s “palace guard.”
Wurf, like Lawson, shunned rhetorical radicalism but thought it infected King’s staff. He described Bevel, Hosea Williams, and other SCLC staff members who came to Memphis as “a nice bunch of people but…arrogant beyond belief.” He said, “King was a reasonable man to deal with. The staff…was totally impossible. He seemed to assemble every egocentric character in America.” Wurf tried to warn them about Memphis—that “they were not in control, that the people weren’t prepared”—but they ignored him. Wurf said, “I spent half my time to keep that city from burning down while the goddamned mayor was pouring gasoline on the situation and I ran around pulling matches out of people’s hands.” King’s visit had the ironic effect of bringing new recruits to Cabbage’s young group—including James Elmore Phillips, Clinton Roy Jameson, Charles Harrington, Charles Ballard, Hurley Gibson, and Don Neely—and a Memphis movement insider told the FBI that Wurf was “doing his best to talk the younger element of the Negroes in Memphis out of committing violence and burning.”
Sanitation workers, by contrast, could be relied upon to adhere to non-violent discipline. They attended mass meetings in churches and at the United Rubber Workers union hall, marched in a line under the control of AFSCME marshals, and led picket lines and other forms of protest. But workers sometimes decided to take stronger measures, and police reported increasing incidents of vandalism and threats directed at strikebreakers and white businesses after King’s visit. Historically, strikers have often used sabotage when overt picket-line confrontation proved too dangerous; Lawson knew this, and he thought the city’s intransigence might justify putting sugar in the gas tanks of sanitation trucks. He distinguished sabotage against property from violence against people—a distinction that white “law and order” advocates did not make. And in truth, distinctions between violence directed at persons and destruction of property were easily blurred. The day after King’s visit, according to police, fifty-eight-year-old John Hart, a sanitation worker who refused to strike, had a brick thrown through his car window; another barely missed the window of his house and hit his roof. Bricks also shattered three windows at the home of strikebreaker Richard Givens, who fired his shotgun out of the window in response. Someone threw a kerosene-laden beer bottle with an ignited rag against the home of sanitation supervisor Leonard Ward, but it failed to ignite. Someone even fired a shot through the glass of a scab’s front door. Such anonymous attacks made it increasingly risky to scab.
Sporadic property destruction against white businesses also escalated. Someone shot a hole in the window of a Loeb’s Laundry, and someone else broke a window at a Loeb’s Bar-B-Q; people frequently pulled fire alarms in the middle of the night or started trash fires. In one bizarre incident, a striker named Leslie Robinson, forty-one, kicked a woman’s garbage cans into the street, spilling their contents, because she would not stop putting them on the curb for pickup. Robinson cursed her and threatened to burn down her house, until she pulled out a pistol and fired it twice into the air. He left. It appears that she and he were both African American; police later arrested Robinson for assault and her for firing a gun inside city limits.
Actions by young people increasingly unsettled the schools. The city courts indicted two young African Americans who had disrupted Carver High School, Willie Jenkins and John Henry Ferguson, under an 1858 law charging them with “unlawfully disturbing and disquieting a school assemblage.” Police singled out Ferguson for arrest numerous times and in one incident stomped on his sandal-clad feet, temporarily crippling him, on President’s Island, where police had threatened to kill black labor organizer Thomas Watkins in the 1930s. They told Ferguson that the next time they arrested him, he might end up in the Mississippi River, along with “that nigger-lovin’ preacher,” Malcolm Blackburn. The police also charged twenty-two-year-old sanitation worker Willie Kemp, another of their favorite targets, with assault and battery on a police officer, in retaliation for roughing up black police plainclothesman Ed Redditt outside the Firestone hall several weeks earlier.
Loeb still insisted that racial violence could never happen in Memphis, but FBI agents and the police warned that events were moving fast in that direction. “Loeb is deeply hated by many of the Negroes,” said an informant. “People will be swayed by Black Power groups, mainly composed of young Negroes of Memphis who will not sit still for the same treatment that ‘old time’ Negroes in Memphis have gone along with.” Something much more dangerous was also going on as well: WHBQ-TV reporter Don Stevens reported to the police on March 21 that someone had called the station to say King would be shot if he returned to Memphis. (Police traced the call to a telephone booth.) King’s talk on March 18 hardened the attitudes of some whites, and the buildup toward the March 22 mass demonstration increased racial tensions.
Right-wing activists put flyers and newsletters targeting King, Lawson, Bayard Rustin, and others as secret Communists on car windshields and in homeowners’ doors. One flyer, “The ‘Real’ Martin Luther King, Jr.,” put out by a Memphis group calling itself “Enlightened People on Communism,” repeated Hoover’s allegation that King was “the most notorious liar in the country” and quoted testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), linking King to supposed subversives Anne and Carl Braden, Bayard Rustin, Jack O’Dell, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Stokely Carmichael—and linking all of them to a Communist conspiracy to “create a Soviet America.” Small cells of white hate groups—some of them based in the John Birch Society, the KKK, and the White Citizens’ Council—bombarded people connected to the strike with frightening phone calls and letters. “Rev. Dick Moon’s wife Glenda got phone calls describing in vivid terms her intercourse with black men and the parts of her anatomy that must be black,” wrote strike historian Joan Beifuss. In an era before personal answering machines, Maxine Smith recalled, if you did not pick up the phone, it rang all night long. But if you picked it up, the caller might say, as one did to T. O. Jones, “You black son of a bitch, we’re gonna get you.” Wrote Beifuss: “It was as if a whole host of people with twisted minds were thrown to the surface by the tension boiling in the city.”
But violent views did not come just from the margins of society. Congressman Dan Kuykendall, speaking to students at Southwestern College on March 22, described demonstrators as people who would “pillage, burn, loot and destroy.” He attacked flag burning as treason, social programs as the work of the Democratic “pick pocket party,” and dissent as “subversion and infiltration.” He said the internal revolt of citizens in the United States, like that of the Vietnamese, represented the spreading effects of “communism everywhere.” Kuykendall’s cold war view of the world as polarized into good and evil suffused the news media and much of the culture in white Memphis, leaving little room for critical assessment of social problems or their origins.
With no framework for analysis upon which whites and blacks could agree, anger and resentment spread in every direction. Someone dumped garbage on the lawn of white Councilman Downing Pryor for merely considering compromise; black children teased the children of black Councilman James Netters for not marching on behalf of strikers; when black youths picketed white Councilman Billy Hyman’s lumber store, someone shouted out, “Kill whitey.” Loeb received anonymous death threats and traveled with personal guards, and he kept a shotgun readily available under his desk.
Police agents themselves held a paranoid view of the strike—even more so after King entered the picture. The Memphis FBI dredged up an old and uncorroborated memo that “a Communist Party functionary described Martin Luther King, Jr., as a confirmed Marxist in February 1962,” while police agents profiled Lawson, too, as a Communist-oriented subversive. The FBI and local police said black ministers and unionists had purposely allowed black radicals to get out of hand and to unleash violent elements among black youth. The police constantly cited what they considered aggressive behavior by black youths—from harmless acts like singing, shouting, and dancing in the streets to taunting and making obscene gestures at people shopping downtown. White agents saw the strike itself as an affront to supposed racial peace, as did whites generally. One letter to the editor alleged that black downtown boycotters harassed a white woman and engaged in “shouting and gesturing obscenities” at another white shopper. In a previous era, the mere allegation of such acts could have led to lynching.
ALL OF THIS should have alerted the city’s white leaders to an escalating situation and the need to dampen the crisis with a few swift decisions, but this they would not do. Lawson said a “moral blindness” existed in leading circles in Memphis, and the Commercial Appeal demonstrated it in a blunt front-page editorial: “To Dr. King and His Marchers.” Placing the blame on King and the Movement for the city’s tensions, it read, “If you don’t watch out, Dr. King, you, and some of your fellow ministers here in Memphis just might undo what has already been accomplished” in improving race relations.
A handful of whites had begun to struggle to get through to Mayor Loeb the importance of settling the strike, but it was rough going. Dick and Glenda Moon and others started a group called “Save Our City.” The group began sending out mailings the first week of March and put an ad in the paper urging people to get involved in settling the strike. A number of middle-class white and black churchwomen and civic activists had been holding interracial social meetings, and they began workshops on racial issues just before King’s visit. Joan Beifuss, Carol Lynn Yellin, Glenda Moon, and several others from this group met with Loeb on March 14, telling him they were more interested in obtaining racial peace than saving the city’s budget. Loeb stopped them, pointing his finger at women who did not have southern accents and asking them, one by one, “Where were you born, honey?” He told a woman with a master’s degree from Oxford University in England, “Well, you’re sweet and you’re a pretty little thing, but you just don’t know what you’re talking about.” He told them, “I wouldn’t do a single thing differently.” Groups of white middle-class women who came in to support Loeb got a much warmer reception.
After their disconcerting encounter with Loeb, Mary Doughty and some of her friends who wanted a strike settlement went to a meeting of Local 1733. “Upon entering the Union Hall we were given a standing ovation by the approximately 700 men present,” who praised them for meeting with the mayor on their behalf. In the white community, however, such women were called Communists and worse. Trying to get the mayor or the white community to change was difficult indeed.
The City Council still provided the one hope for a pragmatic response before the mass march scheduled for March 22. On Tuesday, March 19, the day after King’s speech, some 200 strike supporters attended the council meeting, again supporting Councilman Patterson’s resolution that had been tabled on March 12—to let the credit union take money directly out of worker paychecks and deposit dues in the union’s account, something already allowed to charitable organizations. Council members discussed Patterson’s proposal until 8 PM, holding two recesses behind closed doors, as strikers and their supporters sang hymns in the City Council chambers. Seemingly on the verge once again of settling the strike, the council took no action. Chairman Pryor recessed the council until 4:30 on Thursday, March 21, the evening before King’s return. The Press-Scimitar called it a “Hurry Up Try for Ending Strike” and said the council was considering three different ordinances.
A potentially encouraging sign occurred on the night after Tuesday’s council meeting, when AFSCME at last found a white audience willing to consider its case. The Tennessee Council on Human Relations sponsored a meeting at St. Louis Catholic Church in a well-to-do white East Memphis suburban area, where Bill Lucy “deftly fielded questions about the strike and received applause several times although the audience apparently was predominantly opposed to the union’s position,” according to the Commercial Appeal. Whites apparently preferred a well-spoken African American to the more blustery P. J. Ciampa, and a white constituent named Louise McComb wrote to Councilman Donelson that they gave Lucy “a standing round of applause at the conclusion of the two and a half hour meeting which included many questions asked and fully answered.” As a surprised Lucy later said, “I think people found out that the union fellows didn’t carry machine guns…and that there were legitimate problems that had to be solved.”
Mayor Loeb spoke at the church the next night, and McComb wrote that he “was definitely on the defensive,” subjected to sharp questioning, and “often his answers were not to the point.” Loeb said union officials could be present and collect union dues from individuals when workers got their checks, but he would not allow the credit union to deduct dues automatically. Why? Because unions were not always “in the best interests of all the residents of the city.” Loeb still substituted his own judgment for that of the workers. Only if the voters themselves, in a citywide referendum, approved a dues checkoff would he go along with it.
Labor negotiator Frank Miles belonged to St. Louis Church and attended this meeting. Afterward he approached the mayor with one of Loeb’s close friends, who said, “Frank and I were just saying how absolutely silly this whole darn thing is and how dangerous it is.” In Loeb’s expression, Miles said he thought he saw that the mayor had finally glimpsed dangers ahead: there had been a long period of failed negotiations, “and now here comes Dr. King.” Loeb invited the men to his house for a sandwich and then agreed to resume nonbinding discussions between the city and the union. He accepted Miles’s conditions for doing so: The city would raise no legal questions (despite the injunction) over the union’s right to negotiate; meetings would be held without the media and the parties would make no statements to the press; the City Council, not the mayor, would invite Miles to mediate, so that he did not appear to be Loeb’s pawn. Any form of mediation could buy time until things cooled down and eventually produced some form of recognition, Miles thought.
Meanwhile, the movement tried to place maximum pressure on the city. An insider predicted to the police that 10,000 to 20,000 marchers would turn out on Friday, and he reported that mass leafleting was going on among black high school and junior high students, as well as university and college students. At least a thousand black workers—including members of the United Rubber Workers, the Teamsters, and a few members of the UAW local at International Harvester—planned to participate. The UAW’s Fair Practice Council that week warned the mayor that he should not use penal-farm workers to pick up garbage, as rumors had suggested he would. Black businesses such as Union Protective Life, North Carolina Mutual, and Atlanta Life Insurance, and even Universal Life, which had broken a strike by its own employees a few years earlier, gave their workers the day off to support King’s march.
The MPD’s Lieutenant Ely Arkin said pressures had built up to the point that the city had no alternative but to allow King’s mass march, which could dwarf anything that had ever happened in Memphis. Even the mass media took notice: WMC-TV news director Norm Brewer on the preceding Friday night had editorialized for resumption of talks. The Press-Scimitar ran a letter from Memphis State academics David and Carol Lynn Yellin, calling for mediation leading to a settlement, along with a story and editorial in a similar vein. For the first time, the newspaper explained that the city already bargained with hundreds of craft-union members, that the Memphis Transit Authority allowed bus drivers to have dues checkoff and binding arbitration, and that the Memphis Board of Education did the same with teachers who belonged to the Memphis Education Association. The city already guaranteed a variety of relationships with union members through contracts and would not fall apart if black workers also got a union contract. Unionists had known these facts for years, but most Memphians had not. “The printing of that information and the shift in editorial emphasis presaged a change in the handling of strike news by the two daily papers,” wrote Beifuss. But Reverend Benjamin Hooks said the shift in media coverage came too late: the pendulum of opinion had swung so far against the strike in most of the white community that it became “almost impossible to change it.”
On Thursday, March 21, at 6:30 PM—the last possible moment before King’s march—the City Council passed Chairman Pryor’s resolution asking Frank Miles to mediate the strike. They knew Loeb had already agreed to do it, and since mediation was not binding, he could easily reject its results. Patterson, saying this was toothless, cast the only dissenting vote. Had the council instead passed his alternative proposal, allowing dues checkoff, it might have settled the strike right then and there. But Loeb privately had already convinced a majority of council members to support a proposal forbidding dues checkoff. The council would not take a forthright stand against him.
A white woman named Carroll Richards that week wrote a letter to the Commercial Appeal, urging Loeb to rethink his position: “If one is to gamble so much, namely the city of Memphis, on principles, his principles should be worth it.” She asked Loeb to reconsider the possible disastrous consequences of his uncompromising position. “It is in your power to mold Memphis into a genuine city, or to reduce it to a pile of stinking rubble. May history praise you as a man of wisdom—not condemn you as a fool.”
WHILE THE MEMPHIS movement prepared for King’s return, he traveled the Deep South to drum up support for the Poor People’s Campaign. On March 19, he had left Memphis to speak in small towns across the Delta, including Batesville, Marks, Clarksdale, Greenwood, Grenada, Laurel, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In each place, hundreds of people came out to hear him. He drove to the state capital of Jackson, arriving at 4 AM, after a twenty-one-hour day, and for the next several days he continued on through the Black Belt of Alabama and Georgia. In one week’s time—from Los Angeles to Memphis to Mississippi and Alabama—he delivered thirty-five speeches.
Mississippi had always put a special chill in his heart. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1966, he had been directly confronted by one of the sheriffs who murdered civil rights workers there during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Now, speaking in the Delta, the bitterness that African Americans felt about the lack of progress welled up in King, too. In Grenada, where whites had responded brutally to SCLC’s voting rights and school desegregation efforts, King attacked racism as stridently as any black nationalist. “We are tired of our men not being able to be men, because they can’t find work,” he said. “Negroes are poor in Mississippi for one basic reason, and that is that white people have exploited us, they have trampled over us with their iron feet of oppression, and they have denied us opportunity.” He told a rally in Laurel, “The thing wrong with America is white racism. White folks are not right…. It’s time for America to have an intensified study of what’s wrong with white folk. Anybody that will go around bombing houses and churches, there’s something wrong with him.”
As he attacked racism, King also offered a class analysis: black exploitation went back to the taproot of slavery and segregation, he said in Clarksdale, and he called for compensation for this history: “We want some land,” the proverbial “forty acres and a mule.” Widespread white poverty should demonstrate to Mississippi whites that “you can’t keep me down unless you stay down yourself. Now, by trying to keep black people down, white folk have kept themselves down. So they’re poverty stricken too. They are half educated too.” One white man in Mississippi, acting nervous and conflicted, gave King a hundred-dollar bill to support his campaign, but otherwise he met hardly any whites. King still preached hope, saying, “When you can finally convert a white southerner, you have one of the most genuine, committed human beings that you’ll ever find.”
King despaired at Mississippi’s poverty, but also at his own failure to raise funds and volunteers there for the Poor People’s Campaign. He met hundreds of people, but few joined up. When he asked who from Clarksdale could go to Washington, only two people raised their hands. King and his entourage, although hopping across the region by prop plane part of the time, fell behind schedule, and the energy imparted to him by the Memphis movement began to dissipate. On March 21, he canceled his last speeches in southern Alabama due to bad weather, leaving hundreds waiting for him. Hard pressed, he still hoped to reach Memphis for the next day’s march and then leave to campaign in Georgia later on the same day.
Instead, at midnight King found himself stranded at the Birmingham airport, impossibly waiting to get to Atlanta for a SCLC strategy meeting on his way to Memphis. Foul weather shut down most flights in the Mid-South. He spent much of the night just getting from Birmingham to the Atlanta airport, and there he stood at 8:15 the next morning, after another night destroyed in what Andrew Young called King’s “war on sleep.” He waited, but no flights took off for Memphis.
In a bizarre twist, in the middle of what had seemed like an early and warm spring, more than sixteen inches of snow fell on Memphis, the second-largest snowstorm in its history. From the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, temperatures dropped more than fifty degrees in less than twenty-four hours. Snow clogged the already-budding magnolia trees and azaleas, and at least nine people died in Tennessee and Kentucky. “Snow Blanket Bundles Dixie,” proclaimed a news headline. No one went to work, and no one went to school. The Memphis Public Works Department sent out three trucks, but they all became stuck in the snow. Trees and power lines came down, cars and buses couldn’t move, telephones went out. Nature had gone on strike.
James Lawson awoke very early that morning, anticipating the largest mass march since Selma, but then he had to postpone it. Talking by phone to King, he jested, “We’ve got a perfect work stoppage, though!” Twenty hardy souls showed up at Clayborn Temple to march, including striker L. C. Reed and his son, who came to Memphis for the march on his way from negotiating a pro football contract with the Minnesota Vikings. Ministers told them all to go home. Only Thomas Moore, a white worker from a UAW local in Detroit, marched through the snow that day, holding a handmade picket sign reading, “Do Right Mr.? Mayor.” Loeb, who showed up for work at city hall despite the snow, asked him in for a cup of coffee.
Lawson that day spoke to a hardy band of teachers at Mt. Olive CME Church, and nearly a hundred strike supporters turned out for a strategy session at Clayborn Temple. Someone shot into a strikebreaker’s home that night, and several acts of vandalism occurred, but not much else happened. Samuel Kyles joked that an act of God had closed down the entire city—the perfect general strike.
After the snow melted, King continued to Waycross, Albany, Macon, and Augusta, Georgia, on Saturday, with his children Marty and Dexter in tow. For once, he was able to campaign with his children, but it was not a happy time. The seemingly solid unity of Memphis had lifted his spirits, but his own tensions and fears had only multiplied since he left the city. Typical of the discouraging news he received from his field organizers, SCLC’s representative reported that not one of 120 invited black ministers had come to an organizational meeting for the Poor People’s Campaign in Virginia. The campaign was in deep trouble, and so was King. When a reporter in Albany asked him why he did not have any bodyguards, a discouraged King told him, “There’s no way in the world you can keep somebody from killing you if they really want to kill you.” It was much on his mind.
On Sunday, after less than twelve hours at home in Atlanta, King flew out again to New York. That night, in a Harlem church, King’s nerves seemed to reach a breaking point, as he invoked God’s promise made to him during his time of terror in Montgomery in 1956, “never to leave me, never to leave me alone, no, never alone, no, never alone.” King had used this same refrain at Ebenezer Baptist Church on March 3 when he spoke of the “unfulfilled dreams” of people who tried to change history. “It gets very discouraging sometimes. Some of us are trying to build a temple of peace. We speak out against war, we protest, but it seems that your head is going against a concrete wall. It seems to mean nothing.” In the shelter of the black Baptist church, King revealed the huge strain he felt. He told his congregation, “Life is a continual story of shattered dreams…. So often as you set out to build the temple of peace you are left lonesome; you are left discouraged; you are left bewildered.”
THE SNOWSTORM SEEMED providential in some ways, but in truth it provided a huge setback to the Memphis movement. The community had mobilized and reached a moment of maximum unity, but now it would take at least another week before King could return, and efforts to prepare the groundwork for King’s general strike began to lag in the meantime. In industry as well as household and service employment, few black workers could afford to lose their jobs, and now they had extra time to think about what would happen if they boycotted work for a day. Nervous whites half expected it to happen, but neither the civil rights movement nor the unions were prepared for it, and few white unionists would have supported it. The movement carried on as usual, Taylor Rogers recalled, but “we never did follow up on the work stoppage. Not too much was done about it.”
In truth, the movement in Memphis, like the Poor People’s Campaign, was not as well organized as many people believed, said Maxine Smith. The sheer numbers of the sanitation workers always made the movement appear to have more widespread support than it actually had. She thought that workers made up at least 100 out of the 121 arrested on March 5, for example, while only eight out of some 500 ministers in town submitted to arrest. Demonstrations downtown typically included 300 to 500 people, but again, most of them were workers. Out of a black population of 200,000 African Americans, how many were ready to sacrifice for the strike? Longstanding black disunity around political and organizational turf remained a fact of life.
Loeb knew all this, and when union representatives renewed talks with the mayor’s men over the weekend, they quickly sensed that these negotiations were a public relations gimmick to make Loeb appear reasonable. Miles convened the first nonbinding mediation session on Sunday afternoon, March 24, with Jones, Ciampa, and Lucy representing the union and H. Ralph Jackson representing COME, while attorneys Myron Halle and Tom Prewitt, Director of Finance Harry Woodbury, and Tom Todd of the City Council represented the city. But Halle dropped a bombshell, saying he did not think the city could meet legally with people who had been convicted of violating the court injunction—namely, Jones, Lucy, Wurf, Ciampa, and other AFSCME leaders. “We were amazed and surprised at the city’s position,” said Lucy, and Miles, too, was flabbergasted as the meeting suddenly dissolved. The next day, the city’s representatives went before Chancellor Robert Hoffman, who told them they certainly could meet with union representatives.
On Monday afternoon, March 25, city and union representatives again met behind closed doors for more than four hours, but the mayor would not participate because the media were banned. AFSCME thought he had agreed not to make public statements during negotiations, but on Tuesday, he announced that strikers would no longer receive food stamps; on Wednesday, he told the Lions Club that he would never sign a union contract or allow dues checkoff. He reiterated, “The strike is illegal—and you can’t deal with illegality.” Loeb had already violated all the rules Miles had established for resumed negotiations, and his men undermined the talks further, saying they were not official representatives of the city, had come only to talk, and that only the mayor, who would not attend, could make binding decisions.
On Wednesday, Reverend Jackson burst in on the COME strategy committee meeting to inform them that the talks with the city had once again turned into a farce. The union could not even get city representatives to use the word recognition. Some AFSCME negotiators seemed willing to dispense with that word, but Reverend Jackson insisted that no agreement could be made without it: “‘Recognition’ meant the rights of black men to be treated as people with rights, able to speak for themselves. And the City has the obligation to recognize that they have this right…. This is what these men were saying, ‘I Am A Man, we don’t need any Great White Father. I Am A Man, this is what I’ve decided I want for my family, and as a man I have the right to make that decision,’” said Jackson. This was non-negotiable, and he made sure that union negotiators understood that, too. From now on, they insisted that the word recognize or recognition had to be in any agreement to settle the strike.
At the end of the day, Jackson and the AFSCME negotiators all walked out, telling the press, “After three days of meetings the city’s representatives have failed to observe and acknowledge the union as a designated representative of the workers.”
As mediation once again collapsed, COME announced that King would lead a mass march and one-day work stoppage and school boycott on Thursday, March 28. On Friday night, Reverend C. L. Franklin, formerly of Memphis and now of Detroit, would lead a rally at Mason Temple with his famous daughter, Aretha Franklin—a phenomenon then blasting the American airwaves with her powerful, church-based rhythm and blues. Another giant march with King, the Franklins, and others would then take place on Saturday. The AFL-CIO Labor Council ran full-page ads supporting the march in both newspapers, and handbills appeared everywhere, including among black workers at the Methodist Hospital. Universal Life and Union Protective Life Insurance Company black executives once again pledged to close their doors, as did the black managers of the Harlem House chain of restaurants. Two daily marches into the downtown had already resumed, after the break caused by the Friday snowstorm.
Police expressed increasing concern, particularly because strike supporters had begun to communicate with each other through walkie-talkies and to use citizens band radios to monitor the radios used by police mobile units. The Invaders also allegedly began telling picketers to put down their signs and burn the stores. Black detective Willie Richmond reported, “They were shouting as they walked the streets, ‘To Hell with all this picketing and prayer. We are not getting nowhere with all that kind of stuff. Let’s fight.’” The climate became so tense that presidential candidate George Wallace indefinitely canceled his plan to speak in Memphis on Wednesday, March 27.
At the same time, a police informant said, nerves were frayed and a great deal of anguish was expressed at COME strategy committee meetings. At one of them, “Those present agreed that the strike cannot last much longer, with Epps stating that the union had already spent over $15,000 and the union has to do something, that it just cannot go on day by day marching downtown.” Everyone was exhausted. Reverend Starks may have broken his health, and many others could not attend to their ministerial duties. Fear constrained many blacks—especially black teachers, who could be easily fired by the city. Lanetha Jewel Branch, who had taught in black schools for years, tried to collect a dollar a head to support the strikers; out of forty teachers at her school, only seven would donate. Speaking of King, she later said, “You have to recognize that during that time there were many African Americans who did not participate, and did not believe in what he was doing. Because some African Americans also thought that he was a trouble maker.”
Knowing these constraints, COME decided to limit mass meetings to three times a week, instead of holding them every night, and to rely on “big name” speakers such as King and the two Franklins, who could ramp up mass meetings through infusions of soul power. At the other end of the spectrum, Cabbage argued forcefully with the strategy committee that not enough had been done to stop the sanitation trucks from going out or to bring the city to a halt. He felt that tactics should include not only blocking garbage trucks but also various types of sabotage and intimidation against strikebreakers.
Cabbage also opposed bringing in King—first from a turf-conscious viewpoint and then for tactical and political reasons. “We had worked organizing people for two and a half years, while the ministers had done nothing,” in his view. The Invaders had in a few cases taken over the pulpits of churches to speak about the strike, and they felt growing support among young blacks. But once King came back, Cabbage thought the movement would adhere more tightly than ever to ineffective picketing and marches. Cabbage felt that people at some point had to be prepared for armed struggle, but the ministers refused even to hold it out as a threat to the city’s white leaders—who in the end responded only to pressure and fear. Ministers couldn’t be faulted for following their ideology of nonviolence, said Cabbage, for they were sincerely exercising their Christian beliefs, yet he thought this was a losing strategy.
Cabbage and his group believed that young black people were riled up and already had the power to disrupt the city—if only the movement cared to use it. The movement did not need King to use this power. Harold Middlebrook, from a nonviolent perspective, agreed that nonviolent direct action had not been fully tried at the local level: “Dr. King never really needed to come to Memphis. Because we had not done what we could have done.”
Yet most of the ministers in COME were not impressed with Cabbage’s argument. They didn’t see many troops behind him, and it was largely ministers and students, not members of the Invaders, who had brought young people into the streets. Reverend Starks called the Invaders “sideliners in the movement” who talked militancy but actually did little in terms of leafleting, marching, organizing, or any of the other things that built a movement. He thought the Invaders posed no real alternative to bringing in King, in terms of mobilizing a mass movement that could force the city to deal with the strike.
Growing personal strains also separated Cabbage and his group from the ministers. Individual Invaders, often motivated by a desire for personal gain, sometimes took actions that discredited the group. One Invader pilfered the checkbooks for COME and put them into the trunk of Cabbage’s car; when police stopped Cabbage on the street, they found the checks and an illegal concealed weapon, which they happily displayed to the media after arresting him. Another Invader in the downtown group named Roy Turks denounced Reverend Jackson in a meeting, calling him an obstacle to the movement. He later mailed or took the minister a bullet, with a note saying that this bullet had his name on it if he did not start going along with the Invaders. Such intemperate attacks, reminiscent of street gangs, divided Cabbage and his group from the mainstream Memphis movement. In his Leninist view of organizing, Cabbage had planned to “direct traffic” behind the scenes, but instead he was exposed by the actions of others as personally untrustworthy and politically unreliable.
Cabbage felt some of this resulted from the work of police agents who had infiltrated his group, yet he did not know who they were, and he had no way to expose them. Nor did he have a way to impose discipline among his members. As the day of King’s march approached, tensions skyrocketed between the police and people identified as “black militants.” Police detectives felt threatened. Redditt reported that reputed Black Nationalist karate experts and sharpshooters wearing what appeared to be hats identifying themselves as Muslims had arrived from the Watts area of Los Angeles. His partner, Richmond, claimed that John Henry Ferguson and several other Invaders had surrounded him and Redditt at a mass meeting as T. O. Jones declared, “If you are a policeman, I am not going to be responsible for what my boys do to you.”
Among Cabbage’s group, antagonism toward police agents grew stronger, as police continued to keep Black Power leaders (as well as AFSCME staff) under intensive surveillance, illegally searching hotel rooms, bugging phones, and following people everywhere. Cabbage complained to the FBI about police behavior, in hopes that federal agents might intervene, but the FBI merely said that the police “have a right to surveil anyone on the streets of Memphis.” To his chagrin, because he had approached the FBI, some people labeled Cabbage himself as an FBI informant. Anyone who protested anything seemed to end up immediately in an FBI or police file, and it was absurd, Cabbage decided, to think that the FBI would protect the rights of anyone in the movement. And equally absurd to say, as the FBI did, that surveillance had no intimidating effect.
One place FBI surveillance could have a very chilling effect was among students at Memphis State, where some were considering whether to make a major plunge into the strike but also were concerned about jeopardizing their possible careers after graduation, or even their ability to stay in school if cooperative university officials went after them due to FBI inquiries. Ron Ivy, a charismatic student who had experienced the February 23 macing, so distrusted the police that he carried a .22-caliber pistol. He and others in the emerging Black Student Association (BSA) continued to hold forums on black identity, to define what they called black “strength in union.” An FBI informant said that at one meeting, “All present agreed that the NAACP was outmoded; that it was too legalistic, too mild, too respectable; and that a militant aggressive black movement was needed,” but he also commented that “the group lacks unity and strength.”
The BSA discussed the role of black athletes in the upcoming Olympic Games, celebrated the theme, “Black is beautiful,” pledged to better the condition of blacks at MSU, and welcomed white participation. The FBI surveillance revealed that black students chafed at the way racism intruded into their lives, but what most of them wanted was democracy and economic advancement, not armed revolution. BSA members produced a document that said black students should help to raise the “bottom class” that “exists in the misery and pessimism of our city,” including the sanitation workers, rather than merely try to advance themselves into the black middle class.
CHARLES CABBAGE FELT pained by the contradictions of Memphis. He admired King’s personal courage and dedication and did not want to confront him over tactics and strategy, as Carmichael had done in Mississippi in 1966. But if King insisted on coming back, Cabbage felt, history had put the Invaders in a position from which they could not shy away. “By being at the right place and the right time you can bring about big changes,” he believed. It was time to end the reign of preachers who still clung to moderation and refused to go all the way toward revolution. A rebuke to King’s nonviolent philosophy on the streets of Memphis would have the same kind of effect that Carmichael’s cry of “Black Power” did in Meredith’s March Against Fear: it would hit front pages all across the country. Black Power revolutionaries in Memphis could demonstrate that King’s nonviolent methods and ideology no longer worked. “In our meetings, we had decided that nonviolence had to be challenged, and we decided to disrupt the march. I saw it as an opportunity to stop King,” if it became necessary.
He hoped, however, that King would not come back to Memphis, for he did not relish any confrontation with him. He thought that, even in King’s terms, the mass march was unwise: people were angry and stirred up, but not well organized, and few of them accepted the nonviolent discipline needed to make a mass march successful. Cabbage considered his alternatives. One would be to circulate through his network and put out the word to stay away from the march. That’s what he told some people to do, and he decided to do that himself. Alternatively, he could actively urge his people to disrupt King’s march. He concluded that he did not actually have to do that. In fact, he did not have to take any action to challenge King. For neither he nor anyone else one could really control the decentralized movement of young people—most of them unemployed, bored, annoyed, angry, looking for something, anything that might change their conditions.
All Charles Cabbage had to do was sit back and wait.