News of the plane crash that killed Otis Redding spread like wildfire through the R&B community. Aretha Franklin and her sister Carolyn were at home in Detroit when the news reached them. Although she was now a Detroit citizen, Aretha had been born in a crowded clapboard house at 406 Lucy Avenue on the Southside of Memphis and remained emotionally attached to her birthplace. She spent the remainder of the day on the phone with Redding’s wife and executives at Stax Records in Memphis, trying to make sense of the patchy information that was leaking out from news services. Soul music had just been denied one of its greatest collaborations. According to Redding’s manager Phil Walden, he had negotiated a deal that would bring Otis and Aretha into the Stax studios to record a series of as yet unidentified duets. Both had recorded the anthemic ‘Respect’, a song likely to have been on the notional roster. Aretha called Atlantic Records in New York, and although Atlantic and Stax, one-time close partners, were now lurching towards a bitter dispute, Franklin sensed that her mentor Jerry Wexler would want to hear the news directly. She couldn’t reach him. Wexler, a boss at Atlantic Records and a long-time distributor of Redding’s hits, had been at a record executives’ convention and was subsequently paged at Kennedy airport when he touched down. Although he had already fallen out with the Stax management, and had no great love of the city of Memphis, he had maintained a good, if proprietorial, relationship with Redding, who he described in his memoirs Rhythm and the Blues as a man with ‘a strong inner life. He was emotionally centered, his manners were impeccable. His humour was sly and roguish.’
Stax singer Eddie Floyd was on tour in Europe and a delayed flight prevented him reaching the funeral service in time. Motown boss Berry Gordy was at the corporation’s Los Angeles offices when he heard, and he promptly called his old friend and label mate Mable John. She was now signed to Stax and living locally, and was closer to the Memphis scene. John had toured extensively with Redding and knew him well, but such was the paucity of hard information she knew only the sketchiest details of the crash. James Brown was on stage in St Louis, Missouri, when the news reached him. Drummer Clyde Stubblefield, then a member of Brown’s Famous Flames, describes the audience falling silent and how the effervescent and usually unflappable James Brown looking genuinely shell-shocked.
Zelma Redding has since admitted that she barely coped with the pain of managing the ‘frightened emotions’ of her three young children. She was advised to delay the funeral arrangements until the family was able to function and to allow Redding’s body to lie in state at the Macon City Auditorium in Georgia. More than 4,500 people snaked through the building to pay their respects to Redding. Many white mourners admitted that they had never heard of him but felt so touched by the way his death had troubled their neighbours or friends that they felt compelled to pay their respects.
The bodies of the Bar-Kays were eventually flown back to Memphis and the body of Otis Redding to home. On Monday, 18 December 1967, Redding was buried at his home in Round Oak, Georgia. Jerry Wexler delivered the eulogy to a congregation of southern soul’s aristocracy. There was a tension in the air. Wexler’s relationship with the mourners from Stax was changing. Having once been a sage from the north and the company’s route to national distribution, he was now less well liked and viewed suspiciously by some. The year 1968 would bring the relationship crashing to an end. The pallbearers were mostly southern-based singers – Joe Tex, Jo Simon, Johnnie Taylor, Arthur Conley and Solomon Burke – and among the ranks of the mourners were James Brown, Rufus Thomas and Aretha Franklin, one of the few to make the journey south from Detroit. The supremely gifted Johnnie Taylor, who in six short months would be Stax’s most successful artist, in part filling the void left by Redding, sang the rousing gospel standard ‘I’ll Be Standing By’ with Booker T. Jones accompanying him on organ.
Two uniformed nurses accompanied Zelma Redding throughout the ceremony, watching out for her wellbeing and prepared to help out if she became overcome with emotion. She came perilously close at times, shouting, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do?’ and hugging her children as if they might be snatched from her, too. Redding’s burial had the heightened atmosphere of a state funeral, but, significantly in a music scene still largely regionalised, Motown’s northern-based superstars stayed away. It was not a snub as such; a North–South divide still shaped the rhythm and blues scene, and the mourners were mostly drawn from Redding’s world – the still segregated country towns of the Deep South. Crowds besieged James Brown, nearly tearing his coat from his back, and singer Joe Tex was forced to seek sanctuary in a nearby parking lot, hidden from the crowd by publicist Lee Ivory. Police with nightsticks were called to restore order, and only when the requiem reached its most solemn moment was there enough calm for Joe Simon to sing the hymn ‘Jesus Keep Me Near The Cross’ and Johnnie Taylor to deliver his version of ‘I’ll Be Standing By’. Both songs were rooted in Redding’s era – rural Christianity ignited by the passions of civil rights. His father, who had always opposed his son’s chosen career, could finally relax in his untimely death; the old songs were sung in the proper way and the sexual temptations of secular soul music were beyond him now.
Jim Stewart spoke fulsomely of Redding’s importance to the recording industry and his adopted city of Memphis, saying in his funeral address, ‘To us Otis exemplified the Memphis Sound, he represented everything the Memphis Sound should be: verve, vitality and excitement.’ But the address tipped into brand posturing as he declared that Redding would always remain on his throne as the King of the Memphis Sound. Stax had simultaneously released statements to the national press and the image of the King of the Memphis Sound recurred throughout. It stopped short of cashing in on death – but only just. Redding’s death had reached out across the nation. Vice President Hubert Humphrey delivered his own personal tribute, thanking Redding for supporting the government’s ghetto outreach projects; his simple and emotionally enduring tribute paraphrased a single prophetic line from Redding’s current single, ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay’: ‘I roamed two thousand miles from Georgia, never to go back home again’. It was an oft repeated line that captured the tragic futility of the plane crash and added a fateful sense of loss to the disintegrating world of sixties soul. ‘Dock Of The Bay’ became the most popular song among Vietnam veterans in the months, years and decades to come, capturing an as yet unspoken realisation of a war already lost.
Myth has it that Redding was laid to rest within hearing distance of the bells of Vineville Baptist Church, where he had sung in the choir. This was a sentimental exaggeration. His church was miles away from the ranch that would carry on his memory. While Redding’s funeral attracted international attention, comment from the White House and fanatical grief among the fans he had charmed in Europe and on American campuses, the funeral of the dead members of the Bar-Kays was a more down-home affair. The families agreed to pool their resources and hire Clayborn Temple A.M.E. Church near Fourth Street and Linden Avenue, an African Episcopal church which across the angry summer of 1968 would become a gathering place for the discriminated and the dispossessed of Memphis. The interior of the church was a breathtaking vision of southern devotion; arched ceilings reached upwards to heaven and stained-glass windows depicting Christ’s Ascension gazed down on the congregation. An old ceremonial pipe organ played sonorously throughout the service, its haunting sounds echoing with tears and cries to the Lord. The Cunningham family occupied an entire pew to the front; ten children, one delivered in almost every year, and almost all of them talented drummers. Dressed elegantly in his funeral suit, Carl’s brother Blair was barely ten years old. He would grow up to become a drummer in the UK with Haircut 100, the Pretenders and Paul McCartney.
Because four young men were being buried at the same service, a cluster of pallbearers had to meet hurriedly in advance. Brothers, school friends and local musicians were coordinated by the funeral directors to carry the coffins into the church, where a congregation of distraught teenagers, familiar gh
etto faces and attentive teachers mingled with the grieving families and the gospel choir. Afterwards, a lengthy cortege of cars drove to New Park Cemetery, due south of Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion. It was there on the quiet hillside that the Bar-Kays, together with valet and school friend Matthew Kelly, were finally laid to rest. Even as the families mourned, Stax swiftly recruited a new generation of Bar-Kays to fulfil outstanding engagements. In the weeks and months to come, a new group emerged featuring saxophonist Harvey Henderson, recruited from teen band the Wildcats, local guitarist Michael Toles, and vocalist Larry Dodson from Memphis harmony group the Temprees. One young hopeful, who in time replaced Carl Cunningham as drummer of the Bar-Kays, was still in high school. Willie Hall was playing midnight sessions with the house band at the Tiki Club near Bellevue Parkway. On the day of the plane crash, Memphis was besieged with a horrendous rain storm, and Hall was bedridden with double pneumonia. He had an omen that he would become the band’s new drummer, and within a few months the surreal daydream came true.
By the time Hall came to the attention of Stax, his predecessor Carl Cunningham had been dead for at least two months. The cardboard boxes that had been delivered to 926 East McLemore had been opened and the remains of his drum kit were transported south to his parents’ home. Don Nix, a saxophonist with the Mar-Keys, remembers the delivery as if it were a dagger to the heart of the Stax community. ‘They were all warped,’ he told Stax historian Robert Gordon. ‘They had been at the bottom of the lake all that time. And everybody just sighed. We were getting over it, and I remember how that made me feel, ’cause everyone was friends – a neighbourhood. It was guys that cared about each other.’
I AM A MAN. Striking sanitation workers walk the gauntlet of military occupation in the weeks after the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker.
Courtesy of Preservation and Special Collections, University of Memphis
ECHOL COLE’S LONG HARD DAY
1 February
Echol Cole worked long hard days. His job was brutal and demeaning, and the cuts and blemishes of hard labour encircled his wrists. The putrid smell of rotting garbage followed him around all day, clinging to his clothes, hanging on his skin, and even coming home with him at the end of the day, where the smell hung heavy in his crowded wooden-frame home in South Memphis. On the first morning of February 1968, Cole had been working since 5 a.m. for the local Department of Public Works, lugging huge garbage cans into the back of an old Weiner Barrel truck. The antisocial hours, the back-breaking physical demands and the most unhygienic working conditions in the city made it a job that was dangerous and poorly paid, and so only ever undertaken by poor black men. In his peerless history of the Memphis sanitation workers, Going Down Jericho Road, historian Michael K. Honey described workers like Echol Cole existing in a life just beyond slavery, ‘in a netherworld between the plantation and the modern economy’.
Irrespective of the weather, which was often humid and unpredictable, the city’s 1,100 sanitation workers collected over 2,000 tons of household garbage daily. They were all male, all black and usually with limited formal education. They worked six days a week, with a miserly fifteen-minute break for a hand-held lunch, which they took either in their truck or huddled by the roadside. They had no access to washing facilities and were forced to take toilet breaks hidden behind cinder walls or crouched behind privet hedges away from householders and passing traffic. Pay rates were controversial – based on the routes they worked, not the hours – as sanitation workers would be expected to clear an area irrespective of how long it took, and with no hope of overtime pay. There was no uniform and no safety suits; workers were expected to supply their own clothing and gloves, and maintain them to a reasonable standard. Back at the depot, there was no place to shower, clean up or change into fresh clothes before returning home. Most of the men lived in low-income housing projects in the city’s Southside and tried to make ends meet with government-sponsored food stamps and small items of value they could scavenge from garbage cans or backyards. The city paid most of its sanitation workers a minimum wage of one dollar and sixty cents per hour, and despite working in a full-time job, over forty per cent were poor enough to draw welfare. It was a miserable existence at the very bottom of the social ladder of Memphis life where fifty-eight per cent of the black population lived in poverty. Coby Smith, a Memphis community organiser, and sometime member of the city’s Black Power group, the Memphis Invaders, described the role of the sanitation worker as ‘a job a white man could not have, it was beneath the level of a white man, it was a social caste, this is a job reserved for blacks, it was not a clean job. They had to wear filthy clothes, they had to work in filth, they had to drag garbage cans, I mean tubs of garbage.’ Taylor Rogers, who worked on the trucks, told a newsreel reporter that ‘those tubs had holes in them, garbage leaking all over ya when you got home in the evening, you had to stop at the door to pull off your shoes, pull off those real dirty clothes because maggots had fallen all on ya’. Such was their lot in life, the sanitation workers had earned the unflattering name ‘walking buzzards’.
Echol Cole’s route snaked eastward out through the suburban homes that fringed the Botanic Gardens, east on Park Avenue, until his truck rumbled to the corner of Verne and Colonial Road, near the end of its daily route. The air was claustrophobic and unforgiving. Humidity seemed to be leaking up from the Mississippi Delta, exaggerating a tense feeling of entrapment, and then the clouds burst. Cole was wearing only a torn sweat-stained shirt when suddenly and spectacularly the heavens opened. He ran to the garbage truck through the fierce thunderstorm to grab his overcoat. As the rain increased in its intensity, the men jostled for shelter. Willie Crain, the driver and chief of the four-man crew, allocated space for the journey back to the municipal garbage dump. Two of the men, Elester Gregory and Eddie Ross Jr, squeezed alongside Crain in the driver’s cab. The two younger members of the crew, Robert Walker (29) and Echol Cole (35), were directed to the rear to find shelter. They had two choices: to hang on to the exterior perches and platforms and find partial shelter as the truck lurched back to base through torrential rains; or climb inside the barrel and wedge themselves between the wall and the machinery that compressed the refuse against the rear of the cab. Cole and Walker opted to stay dry and scrambled aboard the back of the truck.
A white housewife living at 4762 Verne had been sitting at her kitchen table when the storm broke and got up to look out of her window across the cropped lawns and neat hedges that separated her home from the exposed corner. Mrs C. E. Hinson then heard the grinding and screeching of the garbage truck’s hydraulic ram. The rusting and decaying motor had short-circuited and cruelly pulled both men into the barrel. ‘It was horrible,’ she told the Memphis Press-Scimitar newspaper. ‘His body went in first and his legs were hanging out. Suddenly it looked like that big thing just swallowed him whole.’ Then, the man’s legs vanished. Mrs Hinson called for an ambulance but it was already too late. The gruesome job of rescuing the crushed workers from the back of the truck took several agonising hours before they were eventually pronounced dead at John Gaston Hospital.
Death was not the final humiliation. Although the city offered a voluntary, self-financed life insurance policy covering death benefits up to the cost of $2,000, neither of the dead men could afford the payments, and because the city listed them on their employment rotas as ‘unclassified, hourly employees’ they were not covered by compensation. The one month’s salary due to the deceased was a meagre $500, which fell far short of their burial expenses. Neither had personal life insurance. Both left behind wives and children, and Walker’s wife Earline was pregnant when he died.
The deaths deepened resentment among the African-American workforce at the Department of Public Works and provoked a face-off between the workers and the new mayor of Memphis, Henry Loeb, a convinced segregationist, who in successive elections had described court-ordered integration policies as ‘anarchy’. Loeb had taken office just a month ago ‘ov
er the determined opposition of practically the entire black community’, as a local press source claimed, and was proving to be an uncompromising man whose views were stated with such dogmatism that negotiation was impossible. On his appointment, the unbending Loeb returned to a Public Works regime that had been rife in the fifties, using equipment that was decrepit and dangerous, and had a history of causing industrial accidents including deaths.
On the positive side he embarked on an ambitious project to clean the city streets – fixing potholes and exterminating snakes from the drainage system – but those noble aims were achieved on the back of punishing work schedules that discriminated against black workers. They could be sent home in torrential rain and not paid for a full day’s work or struck off the work register if hand, shoulder or arm injuries prevented them working effectively. Loeb’s truculence was to become a weeping sore in the months ahead and his refusal to give ground to workers’ demands made a city-wide strike inevitable. Two days before Cole and Walker were crushed to death, twenty-one members of the sewer and drainage division had been sent home with only two hours of ‘show-up pay’ because of bad weather. In a climate where rain fell frequently, Loeb’s initiatives had taken away black workers’ ability to predict their income. It was dependent on the weather. After years of setbacks and minor defeats, the sanitation workers’ union, Local 1733, of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), began to regroup. From a pitiful base of only forty fully subscribed members from nearly 1,300 sanitation workers, interest in collective action was reignited. One of the barriers to union action was membership; the City of Memphis refused to compromise with AFSCME and collect union dues at source, raising an anxiety that anyone who joined the union would be sacked. Fear of the sack reduced workers to what was called ‘fist collections’, small sums of money surreptitiously exchanged at workplaces, as if they were drug deals. The collector was inevitably a tubby and avuncular public services worker called Thomas Oliver ‘T.O.’ Jones, whose comic-book appearance belied a dogged determination. Jones was from Douglass in North Memphis, a ghetto neighbourhood hemmed in by rail tracks to the north, south and west. Even as a teenager, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the R&B pianist Fats Domino, and his chubby vaudeville appearance meant that he was frequently underestimated by the managers he came up against. Jones was neither a fool nor an easy touch. He went on to become a critical figure in the Memphis of 1968, leading the sanitation workers in what was to become one of the most historic strikes of the civil rights era. In a stand-up row with city officials, Jones used the evangelical language of the local churches, calling the deaths of Cole and Walker ‘a disgrace and a sin’. It proved to be a prophetic statement as a generation of ministers and local preachers rallied behind him and carried their campaign far and wide.
Memphis 68 Page 5