At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

Lawson met Wurf at the first public forum, on Thursday, February 22. Prodded by intermediaries from all sides, City Council members sought a face-saving compromise between Loeb’s demand for surrender and the union’s package of reforms, but their hearing stalled over recognition to speak. One by one, striking workers deferred to union officials, each of whom was gaveled to silence. “We insist on hearing from the men themselves!” said the chairman, and the standoff grew raucous until the union side pretended to capitulate. From their daily rally at the United Rubber Workers Hall, more than seven hundred strikers soon entered the ornate council chamber of rosewood panel and scarlet carpet. They shouted assent when leaders asked if they wanted the union. From the floor, Lawson and other local preachers sparred with council members about whether they could hear the men now. “I have to walk both sides of the street,” declared the exasperated committee chairman, Fred Davis, one of three black members on the City Council of thirteen, hinting plaintively that he must lean far toward Mayor Loeb’s requirements to get votes for any resolution. Davis tried vainly to thin the crowd by half to meet fire codes, then to adjourn the deadlocked hearing, but the strikers broke defiantly into the movement song: “We shall not be moved!” They sang “God Bless America,” and preachers interspersed prayers with impromptu sermons all afternoon in what became a mass meeting of occupation. A white man from the Tennessee Council on Human Relations sent out for a hundred loaves of bread and thirty pounds of bologna. Rev. Ezekiel Bell, the only black pastor in the Memphis Presbytery, called his church kitchen for mustard and utensils. Eight women used the city attorney’s table to make sandwiches they wrapped ceremoniously in paper napkins for dispersal by hand. “We cast our bread upon the water!” called out William Lucy, a black deputy to Wurf.

  Some 150 officers surrounded the muffled noise of City Hall in police cruisers, waiting for orders as messengers shuttled between caucuses and the Davis committee, which remained besieged on the council platform. Ten days into the strike, only twenty of two hundred sanitation trucks were in service. Replacement workers were proving difficult to find or keep, despite the city’s influx of sharecroppers displaced by the nearly total mechanization of cotton farms. Boy Scout troops spearheaded civic drives of curbside cooperation to help the overmatched replacement crews, but they stopped short of removing trash themselves. With backlogged piles in front of some downtown businesses, voices at the Memphis Country Club were muttering that public unions were a minor cost of business, and the embattled Public Works Committee resolved to propose its bare-bones settlement without a hearing. Chairman Davis completed less than two sentences of the announcement at 5:38 P.M.

  “The men were on their feet cheering,” wrote Memphis historian Joan Beifuss. “Jubilantly they thronged the aisles.” Leaders handed out chunks of leftover food as mementos, and cleanup crews busily swept up crumbs behind a happy departure. On Friday, overflow crowds forced a shift into Ellis Auditorium for a vote by the full City Council, and more than a thousand sanitation workers arrived in their best clothes—suits and baseball hats, starched shirts and fedoras, Sunday shoes and tan raincoats. Dignitaries and curious newcomers came, too, but the prospects for a settlement had chilled overnight. The front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal emblazoned incendiary headlines: “Committee Surrenders but Loeb Holds Firm/ Strike Boosters Hold Picnic in Chambers of City Council.” Stories described the event “as if it were a raid by barbaric Visigoths,” a critic would write. The editorial cartoon presented a fat Sambo caricature of T. O. Jones perched on a garbage can labeled “City Hall Sit-In,” with fumes curling upward to spell a message: “Threat of Anarchy.”

  Council members entered long enough to pass a resolution delegating “sole authority” in sanitation matters to Mayor Loeb, then filed out by a rear exit under police escort. They left a stunned silence behind, followed by puzzled questions and scattered boos. Wurf came forward with groping explanations that the promised settlement vote must have been aborted, but the public address system went dead before he or local leaders could respond. In confusion, James Lawson noticed white councilman Jerred Blanchard peek back into the auditorium. “Jerry,” he pleaded, “could you give us a microphone?” Blanchard had voted for the substitute resolution, angry over yesterday’s abuse of Fred Davis, but he regretted skulking out the back door. From a law student’s memory of one courtroom argument in the 1940s by the legendary NAACP attorney Charles Houston, Blanchard retained a stab of conscience about the attitudes toward nearly half the city population. Now he rushed off to say the public address system should be restored, if only to prevent pandemonium. (For such gestures, Blanchard said, he became known as the council’s “fourth nigger.”) Loeb refused on the ground that the sanitation workers should leave, not talk. A white lawyer bolted in to warn that it was going too far for police units to attack the workers in retreat. When Loeb denied any such plan, the lawyer cited his own eyes—“Well, the police have their gas masks on”—and the mayor confirmed quickly by radio that masked units indeed had formed several rows deep across Main Street, linked arm-in-arm. Lawson and Jerry Wurf were imploring the police commanders to let the angry, devastated men walk together to a church.

  New police instructions allowed the marchers to move out four abreast in the right lane. Cruisers rolled slowly beside the front ranks to make sure no strays crossed the center line, while foot patrols stretched parallel to the marchers behind. The police formation, which magnified the tension, conflicted with the stated goal to keep northbound Main Street open for traffic. Toward Gayoso Avenue, two blocks before a turn into Beale Street’s famous blues corridor, cruisers angled rightward to pinch marchers toward the curb, and a piercing shriek emitted from Gladys Carpenter, a City Council employee known for her journeys to march in Selma and Mississippi. When sanitation workers jumped to lift a car tire off her foot, officers jumped from the rocking cruiser to spray incapacitating Mace. Within seconds, radio reports triggered general mayhem from an order to disperse the procession. Seventy-two-year-old O. B. Hicks crumpled to the sidewalk from a “blinding chemical.” Jacques Wilmore, who begged an officer to stop hitting the bloodied Hicks, flashed credentials as regional director for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, only to be Maced himself, and Hicks would be hospitalized under arrest for night-riding. Hundreds of strikers fled in panic, but some were dragged toward jail on their bellies. James Lawson looked back in time to see a solid line of officers charging behind truncheons and spray cans of Mace, then choked from several doses at close range. He recovered enough to lead a remnant of the marchers nearly three miles to safety in the [Bishop Charles] Mason Temple, the mother congregation for the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ.

  P. J. Ciampa came there late. After stragglers pulled him semiconscious from the sidewalk gutter, they found water to rinse Mace from his eyes, then flagged down a passing sedan. Hustled into the back seat, Ciampa blinked at the strange sight of polished spats on an imposing black preacher who moaned in the throes of conversion. For Rev. H. Ralph Jackson, it became his mantra that a lifetime of dutiful trust “went down the drain” the instant police officers gassed him like others in clerical garb. He had avoided “race trouble” always to climb the hierarchy of the AME church. No fewer than nine AME bishops had just witnessed Mayor Henry Loeb dedicate the grand new headquarters building for the AME Minimum Salary Division to support needy ministers, with effusive praise for its national director, and Jackson burst into Mason Temple to say Memphis police never would attack white preachers like that, without even speaking. “This happened to me because I was black,” he proclaimed. Astonished wags quipped that the foremost Uncle Tom of Memphis was reborn a lion of protest. He joined leaders Ezekiel Bell and James Lawson to tell counterparts in the white clergy that the labor struggle was now a test of civil rights. A lone white minister was whisked forward to read scripture when he ventured by surprise into the next mass meeting. Inspired by the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rev. Bill Aldridge tried to articulate why
Christian obligation must override passions of race or class, but exposure first made him shiver in every culture. (“Goodness knows why I was there,” he recalled.) Distressed members of his prestigious Presbyterian congregation circulated letters stipulating that their assistant pastor’s sojourn among the garbage workers “does not represent the majority of people at Idlewild Church.”

  IN MIAMI, a Ford Foundation observer reported confidentially to McGeorge Bundy that SCLC’s conference on urban ministry subsided from chaos into lessons led by the spirit. He said young James Bevel, “who breathes fire and smoke,” preached early in the week on the structure of slums “like a man unprepared to accept any shred of the present American system,” and Daniel Moynihan had the misfortune to follow “in an atmosphere of almost total hostility” toward his famous report on pathology in Negro families. Moynihan became “unusually timid,” added the observer, taking refuge in abstractions that worsened his reception, “but he did make a speech before a group of black ministers and got out alive.”* Subsequent presentations—notably by Alvin Pitcher of Chicago and Virgil Wood of Boston—challenged the preachers with rare models of church-based mobilization for education and employment. Rev. C. T. Vivian quoted one voice from a survey of attitudes toward the evangelical slum church: “I have shouted until my garter-holders have come loose…but it didn’t change the conditions under which I live, so I don’t shout no more.” On Friday, February 23, King reprised his determination late in 1964 to leave the Nobel Prize mountaintop for the valley of Selma. “And the valley calls us,” he said. “We will be returning to valleys filled with men and women who know the ache and anguish of poverty…filled with thousands and thousands of young people who’ve lost faith in America.” He preached again on Lazarus and Dives. (“Hell is the pain you inflict upon yourself for refusing God’s grace.”) “I want you to go back and tell our brothers and sisters to wait until the next morning—don’t give up too early,” he said. “Tell the black nationalists, who want to give up on nonviolence, don’t give up yet.” He exhorted the preachers “as we leave Miami to go out and prophesy,” then ducked away to New York for an evening speech.

  Managers at the Four Ambassadors advanced numerous polite reasons to head off a songfest of farewell hymns by their SCLC guests, but skeptics sensed corporate nerves badly frayed by the thought of black preachers massed in the new cathedral lobby. During delicate negotiations, a check-in telephone call brought emergency news of the Mace riot on Main Street—“Oh Lord, all hell’s broke out here”—which caused ministers Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Benjamin Hooks of Memphis to cancel family trips and book the next flight home. They had time to join about fifty remaining colleagues around the Sheraton’s piano for movement songs and spirituals in harmony, closing with “We Shall Overcome,” and tension dissipated to the point that one hotel patron inquired about hiring the ensemble to sing on the beach.

  King reached Carnegie Hall to address a hundredth-birthday celebration for the late scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. Ossie Davis presided. Pete Seeger sang in appreciation, and King sketched a life that had spanned nearly a century of upheaval, starting in 1868 just as Congress impeached Abraham Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. Among luminous books by DuBois, King cited Black Reconstruction in America for puncturing the hoary myth that “civilization virtually collapsed” while ex-slaves could vote and hold office, by chronicling the introduction of public schools among many institutions sturdy enough to survive white supremacy’s restoration by force. DuBois proved, he said, “that far from being the tragic era white historians described, it was the only period in which democracy existed in the South.” King’s tribute covered DuBois the NAACP founder and early crusader against segregation, down to the defiant expatriate whose death was announced during the 1963 March on Washington. “We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life,” said King. “Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years.”

  Stanley Levison candidly bemoaned King’s Carnegie Hall performance. “I’ve never heard Martin read anything as badly,” he told friends over his wiretapped phone. He said King had used a prepared text, strayed from proven oratorical themes, and matched rather than elevated the tone of “the deadest meeting I’ve ever seen.” For Levison, the DuBois event was emblematic of despair in progressive circles. “The people are depressed,” he said. “They feel that nobody has answers to riots in the streets. They feel frustrated about Vietnam.” Levison thought the depression was unwarranted but real, like the paradox of DuBois, who could be recognized either for a long arc of achievement or his bitter, halfhearted flight into Communist ideology.

  Levison groped for bearings when radicals and rulers alike boiled over in every direction about race, violence, and democracy. In Oakland, California, Stokely Carmichael, after a sensational “Free Huey” speech on the birthday of Huey Newton, had just been named “Prime Minister of the Black Nation” in a fantasy merger between remnants of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. Carmichael had turned hard against his own years of creative privation in the voting rights movement. “The vote in this country is, has been, and always will be irrelevant to the lives of black people!” he told the Oakland rally for Newton. He posed for photographs with sunglasses and a rifle, calling for solidarity with Cuba and North Vietnam, but he turned also against any “white” Marxist anchor for political thought, in part because Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh had rejected his request for separate black leadership. “Communism is not an ideology suited for black people, period, period, period,” Carmichael declared. “Socialism is not an ideology fitted for black people.” He embraced color—“Black nationalism must be our ideology”—with little but militant rhetoric to govern internecine competition. His SNCC rival James Forman became “Foreign Minister” by vowing personal retribution against whites on an enormous scale—“The sky is the limit if you kill Huey Newton!”—but soon wound up menaced himself by Black Panthers with pistols. From jail, after a gun battle with police, Newton wanted Carmichael to wear Panther leather instead of African robes, and Eldridge Cleaver sneered at Carmichael as a pretender with a “suitcase full of African souvenirs.” Willie Ricks sighed: “SNCC people were the bad niggers in town, and then the Panthers jumped up and started saying, ‘We are badding you out.’”

  In Washington, the nation’s leaders fragmented over real violence. On Tuesday, February 27, they gathered secretly in shock over a cable from Vietnam requesting 205,179 more U.S. soldiers above the current ceiling of 535,000. “This is unbelievable and futile,” numbly observed White House counselor Harry McPherson, who rarely spoke in military meetings. New Defense Secretary Clifford feared popular revolt against pouring troops down a rat hole. That same evening, CBS News televised the respected anchor Walter Cronkite from the rubble of the formerly serene Vietnamese imperial capital of Hue, which Tet attackers had held for twenty-six days under massive U.S. bombardment. “What about those fourteen Vietcong we found in the courtyard behind the post office?” Cronkite asked his viewers, doubting that civilian or military casualties could ever be tabulated. “They certainly hadn’t been buried,” he said. Cronkite glumly announced a “speculative, personal, subjective” judgment from his inspection tour of the war zone: “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion.”

  President Johnson returned from his Texas ranch after midnight, doubly shaken. Cronkite’s broadcast assured a drop in war support among moderate Americans, and the giant troop request risked defection even by war hawks in Congress. Early Wednesday morning, General Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs rushed straight from his transpacific flight to the White House, where he told Johnson’s war cabinet that the battle initiative was conceded to the enemy in the Vietnamese countryside, and that Westmoreland lacked the reserves to hold cities unless he abandoned several provinces. Wheeler’s manner was graver still than the cable he had sent ahead from Vietnam, which drove the President to exaggerated c
aution. “Buzz, we are very thankful that you are back,” he said gently. Johnson commanded strict secrecy while he thrashed for options, but the search for new solutions collided with war weariness. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, irascibly said the administration should authorize nuclear weapons or withdraw. Among key senators, Henry “Scoop” Jackson warned that he would balk at any troop shipment big enough to require new taxes or a call-up of the Reserves, and the President stooped to subtle provocation with his powerful friend Richard Russell of Georgia—saying war critic William Fulbright now put Russell among his converted Vietnam doves.

  “Well, did he call my name?” asked the prickly Russell, who denounced the war in private but scarcely spoke to Fulbright, whom he regarded as a prima donna.

  “It was just enough, like an old cow if you ever milked in the country days,” Johnson coyly replied. “Just as you get the bucket full, she dragged her tail through the top of it and leaves a little streak. That is the way he dragged your name through it.”

  Hard upon Cronkite and the Wheeler crisis came the report of the Kerner Commission on riots, which paralyzed even Johnson’s guile. He seethed first that news outlets jumped the release date with feverish headlines on March 1: “Panel on Civil Disorders Calls for Drastic Action to Avoid 2-Society Nation/ Whites Criticized/ Vast Aid to Negroes Urged, with New Taxes if Needed.” The President steadfastly ignored an avalanche of publicity about the Kerner Commission, which found no political conspiracy behind the urban riots of 1967, and traced them primarily to racial deprivation. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” declared the report. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it…. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” Aides bravely warned the President that refusal to acknowledge his own commission was a publicity blunder, especially since the Kerner recommendations so closely paralleled his “racial redress” speech at Howard University in 1965. But it was too painful for Johnson to rationalize or deny that his domestic agenda was lost to a Vietnam budget more than three times what his commission urged for investment in cities. Instead, he escaped Washington with a stealthy new travel regimen to avoid hordes of antiwar protesters—no advance schedule for reporters, short notice to intended hosts—and turned away from questions about the riots.