Tragedy and Hope: Memphis 1968

The news came over the radio, the words like so many bullets
exploding: Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot. Dr. King was
dead.

Agony erupted on Chicago's west side. More people were
killed, beaten, arrested. Long smoldering anger and frustration
burst into flames, in Chicago and in a dozen or so other cities.

April 4th, 1968. Three days later we were on our way to
Memphis, while national guardsmen patrolled through the
smoking rubble in the ghetto Mayor Richard J. Daley had
denied existed.

Dr. King had been in Memphis to lead a march of striking
sanitation workers when he was assassinated. The workers
were members of AFSCME (the American Federation of
State, County, and Municipal Employees) but their all Black
local 1733 was not recognized by the City of Memphis. They
averaged about $1.70 per hour with no benefits for gathering
the city's garbage, were given the oldest, most dilapidated
trucks to drive, worked under unsafe conditions- two men
had been killed because of faulty equipment in their truck-
and when the men were sent home because of inclement
weather, the white workers had been paid for a full day's
work, the Blacks for only a couple of hours.

The Mayor and City Council had shown some willingness to
negotiate a small pay raise, but Mayor Henry Loeb refused the
demand most important to the workers: recognition of the local
with dues check-off. Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King,
along with other SCLC leaders would be in Memphis on April
8th to carry on Dr. King's attempts to break the stalemate.

Our friend Bill, an organizer for AFSCME in Chicago, was
being sent by his union to the Memphis march. He invited Gil
and I and some others along, six of us in Bill's small station
wagon, taking the long, monotonous road the length of Illinois,
past silos and wheat fields and more of the same. We cut
through the corner of Mississippi where we found, after a
long stretch of countryside, a cafe in a little town with the
odd name of Festus, where we were served sandwiches
and canned soup.

It was late evening when we reached Memphis, unable to go
into the city because there was a curfew, the city cordoned
and patrolled by the National Guard. AfSCME was paying
for one motel room. We took the mattresses off the beds,
some of us slept on the box springs, others on the mattresses
on the floor.

The next morning we entered a grim, silent city, the streets
deserted, the shops shuttered, windows boarded over.
Violence had disrupted the first march, windows were broken,
those who advocated nonviolence dispersed. Dr. King had
returned to Memphis determined to lead the strikers in a
peaceful march which had been planned for the day after he
was assassinated. With fires still smoldering in a number of
cities, Memphis leaders apparently feared the worst. The
downtown area was closed down tight.

The only place we found for breakfast was near the bus
station which was still open and functioning. Bill studied
the menu and decided to order the grits. He said he'd
learned to eat grits when he'd been on assignment in the
South, but he could only eat them with sugar.

"If you put sugar on your grits," I told him, "They'll know
right away you're a yankee."

Bill was laughing when the waitress came for our orders.
"Is it true," he asked her, "that you can tell the yankees by
watching to see who puts sugar on the grits?"

"I don't know about that," the waitress said, her face hard,
"But they serve grits every day at the jail. Folks in there get
plenty of grits to eat."

We ate without talking much after that, no lingering over
coffee. The only parking place we could find near where
people were beginning to assemble was behind a Black-
owned funeral home. Some Black people parked near us
and were getting out of their car. An elderly woman
walked over to us.

"I thank y'all for coming," she said.

The gray stillness, with rain forecast, was broken by the
muffled sound of car doors closing as more arrived.

Bill took her hand. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm so sorry we had
to."

We walked down the crumbling sidewalk to the church where
the march was to start. This was the "Black Section" of town,
the houses small and crowded together.

Some of the men wore or carried signs that stated simply: "I
Am a Man".Although it was Monday, many were dressed as
if for church. Thousands were not going to work that day. A
small percentage was white, most of us from outside Memphis:
union leaders and organizers, civil rights workers and
clergymen, and some local white clergymen.

People filed into place quietly, speaking in subdued voices,
calm in spite of the threats: "The guard has been ordered to
shoot anyone who looks suspicious..." said the voice over a
portable radio.

A young Black woman next to me said nervously, "How do
you keep from looking suspicious? What if I grin..." She
spread her mouth, but her soft eyes were not smiling, "If I go
around grinning all the time, I'll sure enough look suspicious."

Some parade marshals came by with paper bags and asked
that anything resembling a weapon be turned over, "fingernail
files, umbrellas..." We could not give "them" any excuse to
bring charges against us was the message.

"Oh Lord," the young woman said, "I've got a pair of scissors
in my purse. They cost five dollars and I have to keep them."
She was taking a course in Home Economics at the college
and carried the scissors in her purse so she could use them at
home too. She hugged the purse against her breast.

As we waited for the march to begin, she told about the
insults of the white guardsmen when she and a girl friend
had been caught out minutes after the seven p.m. curfew.

A guardsman, rifle held upright, ordered them to halt.
"Where the hell do you gals think you're going?"

They were visiting a friend a block away. The guardsman
called them whores, said he could shoot them or screw them,
whichever he preferred, and ordered them home. They ran,
their hearts pounding, locked and bolted their door and leaned
against it for what seemed a long, long time before they dared
move away from it.

At last we began to move, eight abreast. People who had
been talking quietly hushed, and so we walked in silent
tribute to Dr. King and all he stood for, no sound but the sound
of marching feet. Through the downtown streets, dead and
quiet, the cross streets barred by double rows of national
guardsmen, rifles held out before them, bayonets pointing toward
us. All their faces were white. Young men who looked as if they
should be home tending the fields or punching a timeclock.

Only the sound of thousands of feet against the pavement.
Dr. King- and Medgar Evers, Chaney, Schwartz, Goodman,
Emmet Till, - and thousands of others before him, and after him
how many more? We marched through the area where the riot
was supposed to have occurred after he was gunned down-
half a dozen broken or boarded up windows, the rest blending
into the destruction from urban renewal. Some of the decrepit
houses were coming down- riot or urban renewal?

I have seen photographs of the King Memorial March showing
Coretta Scott King with her three oldest children, the
Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, Andrew
Young, and Rabi Abraham Heschel on the first row, the
required eight abreast, leading the march. I was so far behind
them that some of the speakers had finished speaking when I
and those around me reached the Plaza. Rosa Parks, Dr.
Spock, Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte, and a few others
addressed the rally. I have forgotten their exact words.

But I shall never forget when Coretta Scott King stood before
us, Her beautiful calm face, her soft voice as she spoke about
how her husband had often sent her to speak in his place when
he had appointments he could not keep.

"And now," she said, I have once again come in his place..."

The next day she would be following her husband's casket as
it was drawn through the streets of Atlanta by mules hitched to
a farm wagon.

Eight days after the march the strike was settled. The
Memphis City Council voted to approve the contract.
It included union recognition and dues check-off, a two-step
15 cents per hour raise, and provision for a grievance committee.