The crime of racism and segregation and prejudice…was already in our society…but it was invisible until there was a catalyst for making it physical…. It wasn’t our violence. It was the violence of the system that came to the surface.
—James Lawson
KING ALWAYS SAID VIOLENCE DETERRED A MASS MOVEMENT because it distracted people from the real issues at hand. This is exactly what happened in Memphis. Despite King’s efforts to put the Thursday, March 28, events in context, the media focused on the actions of looters and on whether King as a leader could be trusted, blotting out the sanitation workers’ strike and the Poor People’s Campaign. Meanwhile, the city of Memphis went into a state of siege.
State AFL-CIO leaders continued to block efforts in the Tennessee legislature to suppress the strike, but no one could stop legislation deemed necessary to curb riots. Only hours after the disruption in the streets of Memphis began, the House suspended its rules and voted 70 to 0 to give the state’s mayors power to proclaim civil emergencies—for the first time since the 1866 white race riot. Loeb could now impose a curfew for up to fifteen days; ban sales of weapons, gasoline, and liquor; close stores; and prohibit people from being on the street without a permit. That same afternoon, Governor Buford Ellington signed that law, as well as one making it a felony to enter into a conspiracy to incite, organize, promote, encourage, or participate in a riot or to interfere with police or firemen during a riot. Under this elastic language, similar to anti-riot laws already in use against H. Rap Brown, the state could indict almost anyone who played a leadership role in a demonstration or rally that was followed by what might be defined as a riot. A previously passed Tennessee law provided up to fifteen years’ imprisonment for looting.
These powers allowed Mayor Loeb to place the city under martial law. He issued an official statement that the march had “degenerated into a riot, abandoned by its leaders,” forcing the police “to restore law and order and to protect the lives and property of the citizens of Memphis.” “What needs to be done will be done,” said Loeb, as police fanned out across the city. Anyone found on the streets without a police pass between 7 PM and 5 AM would be arrested. Loeb’s curfew lasted for the next five nights.
By 6 PM on March 28, some 4,000 National Guardsmen, in patrols of twenty men each, had arrived from small towns and rural areas across West Tennessee—all carrying rifles with live ammunition and fixed bayonets. Around 7 PM, a five-mile-long convoy of troops poured into the city. Armored personnel carriers, normally used to transport troops under fire, drove on cleats that tore up the city’s pavement. Troops also arrived at the Memphis airport in a U.S. Air Force prop plane. Its front end opened up like a huge mouth, disgorging scores of men in green battle fatigues and helmets and carrying duffel bags and rifles. They dragged ammunition boxes behind them and carried tear-gas canisters around their waists, ready for war.
Nearly all of the guardsmen were young whites from rural areas with no real military experience. One of the very few African Americans, a sergeant, admitted that the National Guard in the South had “traditionally been a white outfit, and Negroes have been reluctant to join it.” They were under the direction of the Memphis Police Department’s tactical squads, sheriff’s deputies, and the Tennessee Highway Patrol, also almost entirely white. During a comparable military occupation of Detroit, scores of African Americans had been shot. With only rudimentary training, and frightened by fires and masses of blacks in the streets, white guardsmen tended to shoot first and ask questions later. Some of them in Memphis had infrared telescopes on their rifles through which they could see the color of a man’s shirt 200 yards away in the dark.
One commanding officer told his troops at the National Guard Armory: “How you conduct yourselves downtown will decide whether you’re dead or you stay alive.” With this alarming send-off, 4,000 National Guardsmen joined 300 policemen, 50 sheriff’s deputies, and 250 state troopers careening around Memphis in speeding Jeeps, police cars, and fire trucks. As they drove down narrow roads in neighborhoods filled with “shotgun shacks,” showers of bottles and rocks from black residents sometimes greeted them, and the potential for hair-trigger reactions was very high. Anyone walking the street remained subject to arrest, and virtually any black male out in public for the next four nights could expect to be frisked, hands above his head and legs spread on the sidewalk, or to be thrown on the hood of a car.
Authorities sealed off Beale Street and much of black Memphis from the rest of the city. The number of calls for police and fire assistance leapt to 1,115 on Thursday, then declined to 984 on Friday, to 862 on Saturday, and 672 on Sunday. The city answered 517 fire calls over four nights—three times the normal number—and television news showed flames consuming a housing complex. Arkansas also mobilized National Guard troops to patrol the bridge from Memphis into West Memphis, Arkansas, thereby stopping blacks from leaving Memphis and keeping its own black community under tight control.
Scenes of downtown Memphis on the television looked bleak. Signs saying, “I Am A Man” and “Memphis AFL-CIO Labor Council Supports Sanitation Dept. Employees” lay in the streets next to broken windows. A movie theater showing The Graduate stood empty. Police held shotguns ready and leaned on billy clubs nearly half the size of their bodies. Helmeted National Guardsmen marched through the streets in formation with bayonets drawn. One or two black traffic cops appeared over the weekend, but otherwise Beale Street seemed to be occupied by an army of white males. Department stores, such as Goldsmith’s on Main Street, stood empty—their huge, unsmashed plate-glass windows a testament to the city’s resolve. In black neighborhoods, however, a kind of war had begun with the police that would not abate for years to come.
NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS proved to be much more cautious than the police. A few photos showed young black children talking with guardsmen and even curiously touching their weapons, but the children developed no such rapport with white police officers. The New York Times, explaining violent police reactions to both African American and student protesters at Columbia University in the spring of 1968, quoted a criminal justice professor: “At some point when police are faced by a mob or crowd, fear erupts and the individual patrolman no longer seems to be able to discriminate and he strikes out at anyone near him.” Blacks understood, however, that racism as well as fear motivated the police. Angered by young African Americans insolently dancing, shouting, picketing, and being “boisterous” for the previous three weeks, the police used the March 28 riot as an excuse to strike back.
For five nights, police stopped and searched black people all over the city, often roughing them up and treating them rudely. They ordered people sitting on their porches to go inside, sometimes invaded their homes, and cursed and threatened them. Sanitation worker L. C. Reed and his wife had rushed home before curfew on Thursday night and barely made it; police caught a friend of theirs on his way home and beat him up. A news story told how police jerked a cab-driving minister from his vehicle and cursed and beat him simply for being out on the street; many others experienced similar mistreatment. According to the NAACP, police behavior included frequently using the word nigger, crashing down doors, entering without search warrants, confiscating people’s personal property, damaging their homes, and cursing, intimidating, and humiliating people of all ages.
Loeb’s curfew affected blacks much differently than it did whites. The first night, businesses shut down, but after that, white East Memphis and its environs carried on almost as normal. The central city and the predominantly black areas, however, continued under strict curfew, with restricted bus services, and businesses and government offices closed early. Whites traveled the streets freely while law enforcers stopped and roughly searched any African Americans who dared to venture out.
The difference between the ways blacks and whites experienced the city’s state of siege became especially obvious in the schools. On Friday morning, March 29, someone fired several shots at a police car, and isolated incidents of fires and vandalism occurred, but otherwise things remained quiet. Only the Catholic schools closed. Yet Frank Holloman’s language of war caused black parents great worry, and many of them kept their children home. Blacks comprised almost all of the 45,000 of the city’s 125,000 students who stayed home from school. In white Memphis, few people absented themselves from school, business, or other normal activities.
The militarization of the city affected African Americans in drastic ways, with lives lost or damaged, homes attacked, work and school days lost, and time spent in jail or prison. The Associated Press described Beale Street as a boarded-up “plywood wasteland for ten blocks,” where “soldiers and steel-tracked armored vehicles took the place of Saturday shoppers.”
For whites, the cost was different: the riot disrupted their sense of innocence, civic pride, and good race relations, and many blamed blacks for it. Thomas Faires, president of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, told the New York Times, “It’s going to take maybe forty years before we can make any real progress. You can’t take these Negro people and make the kind of citizens out of them you’d like.”
Some whites paid a more tangible price in the form of property damage. The Insurance Council of Memphis estimated that rioters smashed 200 storefronts, 155 of them on Beale Street. The council estimated that only about 30 percent of windows and only 5 percent of stores were looted, but business leaders estimated some $400,000 in initial damages, and some people speculated that fire costs would increase that figure to nearly a million dollars. It cost the state legislature $1.5 million to pay for troops and state police.
Yet black Memphians did not respond to police provocations with a general campaign of arson and looting—as had occurred in Watts, Detroit, and Newark—nor did they attack whites. By Saturday, National Guardsmen had the downtown area almost to themselves, and they looked more bored than anything else. Except for a few policemen injured on Thursday, no white citizens in Memphis experienced personal violence. Police arrested no one for sniping, and blacks committed no homicides. Most fire alarms turned out to be false, just one more method used by black youth for harassing the city. When Assistant Chief Henry Lux assessed the situation, he concluded that none of the fires had been extensive or threatened any lives.
The Commercial Appeal called this lack of violence to persons the result of the “overall good performance” of the police. James Lawson, however, credited the existence of a powerful nonviolent movement. “The fact that these thousands of people in a disciplined fashion moved on back to the church in a peaceful way, that’s been lost in the whole story.” In one sense, the events in Memphis proved King’s belief that nonviolent mass action remained viable. He believed it kept the black community in Memphis from really blowing up after the police attack.
On the other hand, the NAACP said that black Memphians “deluged” it with complaints of police brutality; victims included “bank officials, postal employees, unemployed, people with police records, people without police records, housewives.” One seventeen-year-old said, “They caught my uncle on the streets and they beat him half to death.” Maxine Smith developed a file of fifty-eight sworn affidavits of police brutality and sent many of them to U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and to Shelby County Attorney General Phil Canale.
Heightened police violence continued for months to come. On April 23, police shot the husband of Elizabeth Stevenson in the face and chest, claiming he had run from them, and they subsequently beat a man so severely they paralyzed him. In May, the Tennessee Civil Rights Commission held hearings that documented numerous charges of police brutality; its chairman concluded that if “only a small part of the accusations were true, a serious situation exists in Memphis.”
Frank Holloman, a white Mississippian, had always insisted that blacks had equal rights before the Memphis Police Department, but almost no one believed him, and he cast doubt on his own statements after March 28. “Hollow-man,” as the Tri-State Defender called him, came out as a hard-line, law-and-order conservative, railing against “long-haired, foul-smelling hippies” and “hostile forces” in black Memphis that threatened to dissolve society from within. A year after the strike, speaking to a white Memphis sorority, he continued to denounce “permissiveness and appeasement” of the city’s black movement leaders and warned, “The very future of civilization hangs precariously in the balance” in the police struggle to defeat crime and disorder.
Holloman cited his former boss at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who attributed police-brutality charges to calculated efforts by subversives to undermine law enforcement. (In July, the Press-Scimitar headlined Hoover’s statements, “Brutality Claims Linked to Communist Plot.”) Holloman continued to harp on law-and-order themes. Police were the “thin blue line” protecting society from “the murderers, rapists, robbers, looters, burglars, assassins, arsonists, thieves, bigots and anarchists who threaten our American way of life,” he told the Memphis Rotary Club in 1969. “We have stood against anarchy and chaos” and “the revolutionists who would have anarchy in Memphis,” Holloman told the City Council in 1970.
Young African American men bore the full brunt of the police crackdown after March 28. Law-enforcement officials arrested 226 people during the day on Thursday, a total of about 300 by Thursday night, another 53 on Friday, and 71 on Saturday. Black teenagers or men in their early twenties made up 80 percent of those arrested; many of them were between the ages of eight and twelve, according to Assistant Chief Lux. Floods of young black men, and at least twenty-seven black women, passed through jails and the courts, some of them held without bail. A reporter described the scene as police booked them at the jail: “Blood streamed down the side of one youth’s head. Another was swathed in bandages. A third was pushed to the desk in a wheelchair. About one in eight seemed to be hurt.” One woman cried at her inability to get her teenage son out of jail, as young men came into the courts wrapped in bloody bandages. Police shot one black man, age thirty, coming out of a grocery store, and two other men, both twenty-one, in separate incidents—for trying to run. A white store owner wounded a black youth of seventeen with a 12-gauge shotgun.
By April 3, nearly 200 African Americans faced charges of looting, disorderly conduct, or “prowling to intimidate.” Some of those arrested after the legislature passed its anti-riot law on March 28 faced even more serious state felony riot charges. Despite the gravity of the situation, some black youths laughed and joked and remained defiant in court.
ACTIVISTS IN MEMPHIS reassessed the situation after March 28, and the possibility of more violence remained heavy on everyone’s mind. Reverend Dick Moon said, “We expected Memphis to respond like all of the other cities. We saw Thursday as the first day of rioting, Friday about twice as bad, and by Saturday all hell would break loose.” Lawson called for the movement to carry on in a disciplined and peaceful fashion and to take more blows if necessary, while the Invaders saw Thursday’s disruption and counterviolence as a kind of victory for black people. Lives hung in the balance over these competing views within the Memphis movement.
Baxton Bryant, who represented the Tennessee Council on Human Relations throughout the strike, told an NBC reporter on Friday, March 29, that the split between youthful militants and the “militant ministers” had been worsening for weeks. Some ministers had walked out of COME meetings when members of the Invaders insulted or criticized them, yet they had been “keeping the militant youth within their own circle, up until yesterday.” Bryant doubted whether the ministers could control events any longer: “When you’ve got two protests with different philosophies going on at the same time it can make it very difficult for all of us.”
No one understood the consequences of a breakdown in nonviolent discipline better than the workers themselves. On Friday at noon, when they met at the union hall, AFSCME’s staff members hesitated to start marches again, until an older sanitation worker stood up from the back of the room and said, “Ain’t we gonna march today?” That settled the issue. Within twenty-four hours of the police attack, 200 to 300 workers would retrace their steps of the previous day. Some of the most famous photos of the strike show these men walking in single file, their signs underscored to read, “I Am A Man,” while police and National Guardsmen watched with drawn bayonets.
Whether the Memphis movement would carry on hinged in large measure on the actions of these men: if they folded under pressure, that would end it. Instead, film footage showed them on Friday afternoon moving out again from Clayborn Temple without hesitation, in plain working clothes, walking erect, with a wary but dignified demeanor. As the marchers left in single file, Reverend Starks shook the hand of each man, graciously and with a smile, lending his courage to theirs. Black ministers made sure that strikers marched with signs only: light sticks on picket signs could not break a window, but they might give the police a rationale for attacking marchers. In subsequent days, sanitation workers remained at the core of every march, and they inspired others to keep going.
Lawson and the ministers gathered pictures taken by black photographers of rioters the day before and concluded that few if any of them were marchers or members of the Invaders. Lawson and David Caywood of the American Civil Liberties Union now screened out all teenagers and also used the photos to screen out street people and potential troublemakers, making sure that only workers and adults participated in marches for the next few days. The MPD’s Henry Lux, armed with a walkie-talkie, led the marchers in single file, and their ranks stretched out for nearly a mile.
“They marched with these cannons and what not pointed at them…so therefore you couldn’t say that the men were frightened off,” observed T. O. Jones. They detoured past Beale Street, which was blocked off. One of the world’s “most famous streets, memorialized in song and verse, was a scene of boarded-up windows, broken glass, scattered merchandise, and armed guards,” a reporter wrote. “The rubber-cleated tracks of armored personnel carriers left slashes [that] looked like gigantic zippers.” Store owners, angry and silent, stood outside their businesses. When the marchers got to Main Street, they were confronted by four armored personnel carriers with mounted machine guns, two truckloads of guardsmen with fixed bayonets on their rifles, a raft of police in squad cars and motorcycles, and, at one store, four clerks holding shotguns. They continued on, carrying placards reading, “I Am A Man” and “Mace Won’t Stop Truth.”
Cornelia Crenshaw, white and black college students, black female domestic workers, and a few middle-class white women joined them in another march on Saturday. “Keep Your Money in Your Pockets,” read their picket signs. For the duration of the battle in Memphis, black workers and their allies continued to exercise a quiet leadership role on boycott and picket lines, in marches, and in mass meetings, ignoring intimidation and continuing their schedule of daily union meetings and street marches. “Their willingness to go out there day after day in the face of all those white cops is simply amazing. I’ve never seen a black community so united,” said AFSCME’s P. J. Ciampa.
Surprisingly, the weekend passed with no major outbreaks of violence or looting. The workers maintained nonviolent discipline, while the Invaders maintained a studied silence. James Lawson believed that the men and their supporters would ride out this crisis and win. AFSCME leaders, however, had reached a real state of panic, because the expenses for the sanitation workers had now reached $50,000 a week. Ciampa reflected, “The mistake we made is that instead of giving a stipend, we started out by saying, ‘We will take care of your needs. We’ll see that none of your family is hungry. We’ll see that you have a roof over your head, that nobody suffers from lack of prescription money or medicine.’” The union ultimately switched to a simple stipend of $40 a week, but the strike still cost AFSCME a total of $300,000 in benefits for the men and their families, not to mention staff costs. Members of Jerry Wurf’s staff told him, “We’re dead,” but Wurf felt, “We had to go on; there was no way back.” As Jesse Epps said, Memphis had become “the dam or the gate”: a loss here would damage AFSCME’s credibility all over the country and perhaps destroy union organizing across the South, while a win could increase the momentum of public-employee unionism.
Wurf, AFSCME’s Young Turk of labor, had been in Washington, DC, on March 28 to get more “outsider” support, and he had spent part of his day talking to AFL-CIO President George Meany, the quintessential leader of labor’s old guard. Meany boasted that he’d never been on strike in his life, supported the Vietnam War and CIA intervention against labor and peasant movements in Latin America and Africa, and had denounced A. Philip Randolph for demanding the expulsion of unions that excluded blacks. Now Meany opened AFL-CIO coffers to give Wurf $20,000 for the strike and, more important, he sent out a letter to unions across the country asking them also to donate. Based on Meany’s letter, Wurf announced a plan to raise $200,000 to support the strikers and their families—enough to keep the strike alive.
Financial support, channeled through the local ministers’ group, meant everything; without it, strikers would have been forced back to work. Some of them did better on strike benefits than when they were working, although more than one man had to excuse himself from union meetings to work some other job in order to pay his rent.
The historic march by workers into downtown on Friday, March 29, signaled a quick recovery from the Thursday riot, yet many worried that the law-and-order rhetoric—coming from President Johnson on down—would completely frighten away white supporters. Reverend Dick Wells and a handful of other whites who had participated in Thursday’s march had pledged to go down to the Firestone union-hall meeting on the next day, and they kept their promise. As the ministers walked into the hall, the workers, one by one, began to stand. Recalled Wells, “By the time we got to the platform everyone was standing in silence. We had come back in the midst of their defeat, our defeat.”
The police attack—far from frightening away sympathetic whites—had galvanized them. On that Friday afternoon, forty white ministers met at Reverend Dick Moon’s Westminster House on the Memphis State campus, and a few staff people came into town from the National Council of Churches in New York to help. A handful of religious whites—including Methodist, Catholic, and Episcopal bishops—got together and wrote a manifesto that called for settling the labor issues so that needed racial reconciliation and reform could begin—although the media misinterpreted their statement to say they wanted black ministers to stop their marches. Two Memphis seminary professors also wrote up a support statement signed by a number of theologians. The Memphis Ministers Association over the weekend began talk about a summit meeting of religious, business, and civic leaders.
Dean William Dimmick at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral had witnessed the racial polarization in Birmingham in 1963 and was anxious to avoid it in Memphis. On Passion Sunday, March 31, he issued a powerful appeal, calling on Memphians to transcend the black-white divide. A number of other white ministers and rabbis from their pulpits affirmed the Memphis Ministers Association’s “Appeal to Conscience,” which had been issued on Race Relations Sunday, February 11, the day before the strike began. It simply asked people to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Martin Luther King had always hoped that whites in the South would respond to moral issues raised by the freedom struggle in this way, but it might have been a case of too little, too late. A bruised and battered black community now demanded much more than moral statements from whites. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the strike “has expanded into a broad human rights confrontation in which almost every aspect of Negro life in Memphis is now at issue.” Blacks “are beginning to see the basic immutability of their lives, unless they act. They have extrapolated the city’s attitude in the garbage strike to everything else—housing, welfare, jobs, education, police.” Too few white Memphians understood this change in black consciousness—and least of all those on the City Council.
Councilman Lewis Donelson from the beginning had sharply opposed union recognition and dues checkoff, and in a letter to one of his constituents, he denounced “the Negro racist groups [that] converted the whole matter into a racial question with ugly threats of violence.” He blamed “various Negro groups vying for power and in the process trying to outbid each other in violent talk and ridiculous demands.” His white constituents in turn called for a hard line: If you “give in to criminals and law violators I hate to think what is going to happen to our good city,” wrote one; if you “cower before the union, and intimidation, a wave of strikes can be expected,” wrote another. But now the Republican businessman had lost patience with Loeb, and divisions in the white community began to take political shape.
On Friday, Donelson pressed a resolution before the City Council, committing it in vague language to take “affirmative action” to recognize the union and open the way to a settlement. He had earlier proposed to create more training and jobs for blacks, much to the chagrin of many of his white constituents. All day, behind closed doors, council members wrangled over Donelson’s proposal. Unionist Taylor Blair had convinced Council Chairman Downing Pryor that, even if the executive had the power to negotiate contracts, council members had legislative authority to set policy regarding recognition and dues. When a few of them went to Loeb for advice, he simply told them that the workers were wrong and they were wrong. His arrogance incensed Donelson, who pressed on until three black council members—plus Donelson, Pryor, and Jerred Blanchard—voted for a plan to take “affirmative action” to end the strike. Others voted against, creating a 6–6 tie. (It is not clear which council member did not vote.)
The possibility of the City Council settling the strike stalled out once again. As the sixth week of the strike drew to a close, Loeb put eighty-nine garbage trucks on the street, the county court allocated $46,000 to the sheriff to buy more riot-control equipment, and Memphis Police Department officers bolstered their seven-day-a-week, twelve-hour-a-day shifts, all of these measures fixed upon a strategy of breaking the strike.
There were no marches or rallies on Sunday, March 31, but the next day, some 450 people marched again in single file from Clayborn Temple to the downtown and back at 2:30 in the afternoon. Strikers made up the vast majority of the marchers, with COME making no effort yet to bring volatile high school students back into the mix. That day and the next, thousands of strikers and their supporters filed by Larry Payne’s body, displayed in an open casket at Clayborn Temple. Payne had been popular among young people in the housing projects where his mother lived, as well as in his father’s more middle-class environs of Mitchell Road in southern Shelby County. Fearing the showing of his body would set off an explosion of anti-police sentiments in the streets, police pressured Payne’s family to hold the funeral at Payne’s home church. At the behest of ministers in COME, his family held the funeral at Clayborn Temple.
During the funeral, the pastor said the sixteen-year-old Payne had been cut down long before his time, and some 500 mourners expressed profound grief and anger at his wanton killing by the police. “They shot you down like a dog,” his mother cried out, and teenage girls fainted when they went by the casket. A community source told the FBI, “There will probably not be a Negro in Memphis who is not convinced that he was unarmed when he was shot.” Despite seething anger in the black community, sanitation workers marched peacefully to the downtown following the funeral, further demonstrating their ability to maintain nonviolent discipline. The curfew ended, and on Tuesday, April 2, the last of the National Guard pulled out of town.
Meanwhile, King’s staff pulled into Memphis. R. B. Cottonreader, James Orange, Jesse Jackson, James Bevel, Hosea Williams, and Poor People’s Campaign Mississippi organizer J. T. Johnson all checked into the Lorraine Motel on Sunday and Monday. So did Charles Ballard, John Burl Smith, and Charles Cabbage of the Invaders—on SCLC’s bill. Hard feelings persisted between the Invaders and the Memphis ministers, and part of SCLC’s job was to smooth over this rift. Ralph Jackson had initially told Cabbage that COME would provide some funds to his Black Organizing Project if he would help keep youths nonviolent, but Jackson thought that instead, the Invaders had instigated trouble at Hamilton High School and downtown, and they virtually had taken over the chapel during the police siege of Clayborn Temple. (Sweet Willie Wine later said some of the Invaders had even stashed weapons in the belfry.) On March 29, the same morning King had interviewed Cabbage, a “fed up” and “disgusted” Jackson had refused to see Cabbage, an FBI source said.
Whatever they might have done to verbally provoke young people on the morning of the march, however, James Lawson saw only one black youth associated with the Invaders—a teenager he knew well—take action, by throwing a brick into a window. Pictures taken by black photographers of Thursday’s fracas confirmed their absence from the riot. Reverend Starks cited the main culprits as opportunistic “elements on the sidewalk who were never march participants, and who took advantage of the march to create confusion.” Even the FBI agreed that the Invaders were not responsible for the riot. Charles Ballard was the only BOP organizer who showed up on a list of 342 people arrested. But Cabbage and his friends continued purposely to confuse the issue: as leverage to get financial support for their cause, they wanted to maintain the impression that they might have done it and still had the power to stop or start another riot. Yet a black source in the movement told the FBI, “There are only about 12 to 15 hard-core BOP people in Memphis,” and the rest “are merely followers or people who tend to imitate them.”
These youths nonetheless remained a volatile force. Robert Analavage, a reporter for the New York radical journal the Guardian, interviewed Cabbage and his comrades, and an FBI observer said they gave the impression they “all want to destroy the King image.” One COME activist called their demands for funds—in return for “keeping the lid on” black youth—a form of “verbal blackmail.” Yet the Invaders continued to complain that “the preachers aren’t going to do anything” to disrupt the city’s garbage collection, and they asked COME to replace James Lawson as its chair. Reportedly, one COME strategy committee member agreed, and some SCLC staff members remained angry at Lawson for the March 28 fiasco, but neither group wanted to lose Lawson’s leadership skills, and the answer was no.
At a press conference on Monday, April 1, activists attempted to create at least the image of a black united front. Cabbage and someone named Donnie Delaney represented the Invaders; T. O. Jones, P.J. Ciampa, Joe Paisley, and Bill Lucy represented AFSCME; and Lawson and other local ministers of COME attended, as did SCLC staff members. All called jointly for an end to “plantation rule” in Memphis. Orange said he would hold workshops throughout the week on nonviolence, and Hosea Williams said he would escalate strike actions. Jesse Jackson announced a plan to “redistribute the pain” through a national boycott of goods produced in Memphis as well as against national companies with distribution plants in Memphis, such as Coca-Cola Bottling, Hart’s Bread, Wonder Bread, and Sealtest Dairy: “White businesses in the Negro community are going to be told to shape up or ship out,” he said. James Bevel announced, “We’re here as political psychiatrists. We see the mayor and his group as patients who are mentally sick.” He also said, “We unequivocally believe in and advocate Black Power” and “consider ourselves part of the black power movement. We believe in black power and are working toward that aim.”
King’s SCLC staff highlighted Black Power rhetoric as a way to bring the “militant” and nonviolent wings of the Movement together, but in truth, it was Black Power merged with the Negro-labor alliance. AFSCME and SCLC decided to make the mass march a national event like the march from Selma to Montgomery, the last one that had brought together a powerful national coalition of labor, religious, and civil rights supporters. In New York City, Bayard Rustin and Victor Gotbaum, director of AFSCME’s powerful District Council 37, began to mobilize 6,000 people from all over the United States. They chartered a jet for 300 unionists, expecting King to lead a march of as many as 30,000 people. Jesse Epps began to contact as many white unionists as possible, and the COME strategy committee quickly shifted the date of the proposed Memphis march from Friday, April 5, to Monday, April 8, to accommodate this national mobilization.
The situation presented great tactical difficulties. An alliance with King’s powerful national allies in the unions surely must have sounded too much like the kind of top-down national march in a local setting that SNCC disdained, and it highlighted the interracial mobilizing that many Black Power advocates rejected. Alternatively, the Black United Front approach presented at the press conference might unify SCLC and COME with the Invaders, but it nearly left out the local unions and whites. Yet King’s overriding aim, as always, was to create the largest, most inclusive coalition possible.
The police, meanwhile, increased their pressure on the Invaders. On Tuesday morning, April 2, seven police officers with guns drawn surrounded BOP activist Charles Ballard. The incident could have led to his death, but instead of shooting him, they arrested him for disorderly conduct. This and other threatening incidents by police, who continued to follow the Invaders everywhere they went, made it clear the city planned to crush this group of young black activists.
In his haste to leave Memphis the previous Friday, King had not gotten back to Cabbage as he had said he would. But on Tuesday, James Orange and several other SCLC staff members held long meetings with Cabbage, John Burl Smith, Edwina Harrell (the only woman leader in BOP, and Cabbage’s girlfriend), and other Invaders at the Lorraine Motel. The COME strategy committee met on the same day, and Bishop J. O. Patterson of the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ and Bishop Julian Smith of the CME church, who had been in the front row of marchers with King on March 28, insisted that none of the funds raised for strikers should go to The Invaders. (COME, however, ultimately paid out about $3,000 in legal fees to defend them in court for arrests incurred during and after the strike.)
The Invaders now turned to SCLC, asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a cooperative to sell literature and teach black history. Cabbage later said he had the illusion that King had vast financial resources. Something more sinister developed, the FBI believed, when Black Nationalist minister Reverend Charles Koen (misidentified by the FBI as Reverend Carnes) arrived from Cairo, Illinois, and joined the discussions. The MPD’s undercover Invader, Marrell (“Max”) McCullough, reported that Koen said his black liberation group in Cairo could provide funds to BOP after April 15 if it could “keep the pressure on the white man”—which meant, “You have to burn his store and virtually have to burn him before you can bring him around.” He said the National Council of Churches had raised $2 million to dispense to five cities in danger of racial trouble, and one of the five was Memphis. This rhetoric of burning did not faze Orange, who heard it often from street gangs. Regardless of what anyone said, his job was to turn the Invaders into marshals for the upcoming march. He simply told the BOP that SCLC itself might provide some aid, but no financial decisions could be made without King’s approval—and meanwhile, if they wanted funds, they needed to support the nonviolent movement.
Police reports of these discussions went right to the mayor’s office, and they must have made city officials extremely uneasy. In addition, economic pressures on the city were becoming unbearable. A couple of small downtown business owners attended the City Council meeting on Tuesday to complain that the economic boycott was hurting them. When Councilman Wyeth Chandler objected that the city had to draw a line somewhere against unions, one of the men responded, “Mr. Chandler, we have just about reached the line…. We are not big businessmen like Mr. Pryor or Mr. James. I had salesmen who had to go home the other night without paychecks. If I could find a way to sell my business and leave Memphis, I would do it.” It looked like owners of small businesses might now turn against Loeb.
But bigger businesses also worried that riots in Memphis would turn away investors and tourists; auto salesman John T. Fisher thought that the city’s business climate might soon fall apart. Adding to businessmen’s concerns was the news that AFSCME had begun organizing among kitchen, laundry, and maintenance workers, as well as nurses, at city hospitals. Grain merchant Ned Cook, one of the city’s most prominent businessmen, desperate to end the strike, met with Downing Pryor to try to find some solution. Downtown business had fallen by 25 percent even before Thursday’s altercations, and sales dropped off much farther after that—and the big sales weekend of Easter was only two weeks away. Blacks also threatened to disrupt the May Memphis Cotton Carnival, the city’s biggest tourist attraction.
When Loeb had been the mayor in the early 1960s, business pressures had forced him to pull down the “whites only” and “colored” signs, but this time he showed no sign of bending. On Tuesday, as National Guard troops pulled out of Memphis, Loeb, Holloman, Lux, and city attorneys planned to go to court to place strike leaders under peace and financial responsibility bonds, making them responsible for any further riots and their costs, and to seek a federal injunction to stop King from leading a mass march.
IN ONE SMALL but promising sign of independence from Loeb, the City Council on April 2 asked labor mediator Frank Miles to bring together the city and union negotiators on the council’s behalf. Miles immediately tried to restart negotiations, but Jerry Wurf and the city’s attorneys could not arrange to meet until April 5. Meanwhile, Tommy Powell invited thirty business and civic leaders to meet with unionists on Thursday, April 4, and John Spence of the Civil Rights Commission planned small discussions with businesspeople on April 5 and 6. They hoped somehow to resolve the strike before King’s national march, planned for Monday, April 8.
AFSCME also asked influential Memphis attorney Marx Borod to intervene; he very reluctantly went to the city’s attorneys to broach the idea. Ominously, they told him, “We’ve won the strike. Nothing more needs to be done.” A short while later, Loeb called Borod on the phone to reiterate that he had no intention of backing down. The next day, King would return to Memphis.