FRENCH HISTORIAN MARC BLOCH, AN ANTIFASCIST RESISTER murdered by the Nazis during World War II, wrote that historians adhere to standards of truth, but cannot avoid taking sides. “The solidarity of the ages is so effective that the lines of connection work both ways,” between the past and one’s present.
I have my own personal solidarity with the history told in this book. As a high school student in Michigan, the heart of organized labor in the 1960s, I supported the rising civil rights movement. As a college student, I witnessed the racial polarization following the bloody Detroit riot in 1967 and worked in the “Vietnam Summer” campaign that Martin Luther King, Jr., helped to initiate. Until the nation stopped spending its fortune on wars abroad, he said, we would never solve the problems of poverty and racism at home. As King encouraged young men to do, I resisted the Vietnam War by filing with my draft board as a conscientious objector to war.
Like many other New Leftists, by 1968 I thought perhaps King was not “radical” enough. Then he began his Poor People’s Campaign, a “last ditch” effort to convince the government to shift priorities from military spending to ending poverty. King hoped to build a movement of the poor, beginning in the Mississippi Delta heartland of cotton, segregation, and poverty. He also went to its commercial capital of Memphis, Tennessee, to aid 1,300 black sanitation workers on strike for union rights. When an assassin murdered King there on April 4, 1968, we lost the one person in the Movement (as we called it) who could unite a broad range of Americans in favor of racial and economic justice and peace. Another assassin killed Robert F. Kennedy in June after he won the California Democratic primary as an antiwar candidate pledged to end poverty.
It seemed that the world split apart in 1968. In Prague, Mexico City, Paris, Chicago, Memphis, and many other places, people revolted against the old ways, while government repression intensified. Largely disconnected from unions and the Marxist “Old Left,” I followed King’s legacy as best I could by joining the Poor People’s Campaign march that June in Washington. I worked full-time to end the war in Vietnam and then moved south to work for the Southern Conference Educational Fund in the peace and freedom movement. I sat in a dreadful Kentucky county jail for three weeks for protesting false charges against black activists in Louisville who had been arrested for organizing a community protest of King’s assassination.
Then one day in August 1970, Martha Allen and I moved to Memphis as southern civil liberties workers. A dreadful pall still hung over the city in the aftermath of King’s death. White police officers had declared war against black youths. State law allowed them to use “all necessary means” to arrest fleeing felons. They killed a black teenager for stealing soft drinks from a truck and shot another in the back when he tried to climb a fence after a petty burglary. In 1971, twenty-three police officers chased down sixteen-year-old Elton Hayes and beat him to death for trying to outrun them in a high-speed car chase—setting off riots in the black community. Police jailed and harassed our friends in the Black Panther Party after they sat in at the Memphis Housing Authority to demand affordable housing for the poor. As economic conditions worsened in the 1970s, workers continued to organize and strike.
One day, responding to an emergency call from the Panthers, I sat on their porch as an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “observer” to discourage white police officers—who were circling the block with their rifles visible and loaded—from initiating a shoot-out. They left. On another day, we followed Reverend Ezekial Bell in an entourage of cars across a bridge over the Mississippi River to help black civil rights activists in the plantation district of Earle, Arkansas. We turned a corner in the cotton fields to see police and other white men brandishing shotguns, leaning against cars and pickup trucks. As we drove into Earle for a rally, they closed the road behind us. We were lucky to be able to leave Earle intact later that day.
One could see the “white backlash” in full swing in 1972, as President Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, proclaimed in Little Rock that Republicans would take the country “so far to the right you won’t recognize it.” In one macabre scene, white Memphians buried a bus in a trench and stomped its roof in to protest two-way busing to integrate the schools. (Black students had previously been bused to avoid integration.) As blacks gained more political power, many whites left the city. White workers at area factories called us Communists for handing out leaflets supporting Democrat George McGovern for president. We organized a rally at Reverend James Lawson’s Centenary United Methodist Church to protest false charges against black activist and California professor Angela Davis, a Communist Party member, and we became targets of the local “Red squad.” When we made plans on the phone to meet at a factory gate to hand out leaflets, the police were already waiting for us. They tapped our phones and followed us around, as the FBI accumulated a file of 2,400 pages regarding my various Movement activities dating back to my sophomore year in college.
We were part of a small handful of younger activists who joined with the embattled veterans of the Movement. As such, I was fortunate to meet many of the characters in this book. These included the voluble Reverend Ralph Jackson, the inspiring civil rights leader Maxine Smith, the astute attorney Russell Sugarmon, the prophetic Reverend James Lawson, the athletic but gentle Reverend Henry Starks (who called everyone “brother” or “sister”), the acerbic Bill Ross, and the analytical Dan Powell (the latter two, white labor leaders), the feisty community activist Cornelia Crenshaw, the saintly priest Monsignor Joseph Leppert, and the energetic union organizers Leroy and Alzada Clark. These and many others tested in the strike of 1968 organized Memphis for many years after King’s death.
We also witnessed devastating poverty in our fast-deteriorating neighborhood in North Memphis. Unions in my home state of Michigan had enhanced the lives of many of my relatives; I asked what had happened to labor in the South? In my organizing, I met some of those in the previous generations who had built southern labor and civil rights movements since the 1930s—people such as Myles Horton, Claude Williams, Anne and Carl Braden, Modjeska Simkins, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jack O’Dell. But most leftist labor organizers in Memphis had been run out during the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s, and I knew little about what had happened there. I kept asking myself, How did it get to be this way?
My organizing experience sensitized me to a host of issues and people in the South, and it still provides a vantage point for studying history. But after six years in Memphis, I still did not have answers to my questions. So I went off to graduate school at Howard University in Washington, DC, and then to Northern Illinois University outside Chicago, where learned professors introduced me to the study of African American, southern, and labor history. In my research, I learned about the long history of black resistance to racial oppression and found out that labor organizing persisted during eras of slavery and segregation. In Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993) and Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (1999), I traced the way black and white workers had created a better world. They generously opened their lives to me and helped me to form a bottom-up view of history that I could never have obtained from other sources.
I had arrived in Memphis only two years after King’s death, but until I began researching this book, I still only vaguely understood what had happened there during the great upheavals of 1968 and 1969, when the Memphis sanitation strike became a turning point for the Movement comparable to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. The Memphis story provides a window through which we can understand the struggles of the 1960s as well as the deep obstacles to King’s dream of a united, peaceful, integrated, democratic America. Yet it is a story that has been almost lost to history. Although many people know King died in Memphis, many don’t know what he was doing there; they don’t know that he died in a struggle for the right of workers to have a union.
Going Down Jericho Road follows King’s Poor People’s Campaign and the plight of black workers struggling for union rights in the Mississippi Delta region—until their paths crossed in Memphis in 1968. Organizing in Memphis—the Bluff City—proceeded under its own steam and with its own leaders, but eventually the local movement and King’s fate became inextricably intertwined. I have traced the history and highlighted the issues that emerged as part of a national debate about the connection between racism and economics. It is a story about King, and it is also a story about the plight of the unemployed and poor people in America who worked “full-time jobs at part-time wages.”
In Memphis, King joined forces with black workers, ministers, young people, women, and a broad range of activists who turned the town upside down for sixty-five days in the winter of 1968 under the banner, “I Am A Man.” It was the simplest of demands: the right to human dignity, which translated to union power on the job. Union organizer William (Bill) Lucy called this mass community mobilization “the spirit of Memphis.” King defined that spirit as one in which the better-off help the poor to change their lives.
King asked people to follow the example of the Good Samaritan, a traveler of a despised race who stopped to help a battered stranger lying by the side of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, after better-off religious leaders had passed by and done nothing. “Ultimately, you cannot save yourself without saving others. Other-preservation is the first law of life,” King said. On April 3, the night before his death, King urged strike supporters in Memphis to follow the Jericho Road as the Good Samaritan had done—by serving the poor despite personal dangers. In his view, serving others was life’s highest calling and also of benefit to ourselves, for, “Either we go up together or we go down together.”
LIKE ALL HISTORIES, this one remains incomplete. I ask the reader’s understanding for the book’s shortcomings, and I thank all of those who helped me in trying to tell the story (see Acknowledgments). I have incorporated many voices and perspectives, but especially those of people in the Movement. This story is only part of a much longer and continuing odyssey of the world’s working poor—taking us not to the reassuring civil rights legislative victories of 1964 and 1965 but to the hard, unresolved issues of racism and poverty that continue to haunt us in the present.