At first in twos and threes, and then in much bigger numbers, the students of Hamilton High moved in the direction of Clayborn Temple, several miles away, to swell an already emotional main march. Police were receiving reports that others schools were joining the march – Manassas to the north, Booker T. Washington to the south, Lester High School from the east, and, inevitably, Carver High, the school that had been most deeply infiltrated by the Memphis Invaders. Young people were arriving in unexpected numbers. The march was supposed to convey a righteous anger but it had already curdled into a furious rage. Branch wrote: ‘Crashes after the bangs signalled instead the unmistakable sound of storefront windows being smashed along Beale and Main. Moans went up that something was wrong. Young marauders ran through over-matched marshals to attack storefronts ahead of the march, Shainberg’s department store, York Arms Company, Perel & Lowenstein – sometimes needing multiple blows to break the heavy plate glass. A helicopter bulletin at 11:24 reported fifteen young people destroying a parked car a few hundred yards to the side and marshals relayed shouted commands to halt the line of the march.’
The march’s chief organiser, the Reverend Jim Lawson, told a newsreel reporter that ‘at the head of us Beale Street was filled to the sidewalks with people, I didn’t quite like that, and we couldn’t correct it and when I got about two blocks up the street on Beale I heard what sounded like windows breaking behind us. The next thing we heard was sirens and police men were coming from every direction with tear gas and they started surging down on the lines. I remember one officer came right up in my face and began to curse, someone near me was trying to tell him that this man was a city council man, a city official, and he said I don’t give a damn who he is I mean get you and yours out of here now or you’re going to get the butt of this gun or a bullet out of it.’ Rioting had taken a ferocious grip. Police moved into the crowds, indiscriminately brandishing nightsticks and firing tear gas. Two hundred and eighty people were arrested and over sixty were injured, mostly black. The ministers who had been at the head of the march, including lifelong advocates of non-violence, the Reverends Lawson and Kyles, retreated to Clayborn Temple, eyes stinging with tear gas. Within a matter of minutes, as the police were still attacking teenagers, the state legislature authorised a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen took to the streets of downtown Memphis. At the height of the fighting a news photographer captured an image of broken windows at the Memphis branch of Sears Roebuck. A group of young teenagers are seen struggling with police outside the store. It was a scene of small-scale criminal damage that was soon to become one of the iconic images of Memphis, 1968. But its full drama was yet to be fully understood. In the foreground a teenager is being restrained; to the right of the photograph, a thin, immaculately dressed young man – Larry Payne – watches as one of his friends is wrestled to the ground. Within a few hours Payne would be dead.
Along the route of the march lay the detritus of a demonstration gone wrong: broken sticks, crushed cans and torn posters. Most common among them were the official strike committee posters bearing the now legendary slogan ‘I AM A MAN’, but among the debris were others: ‘BLACK POWER’, ‘BURN MEMPHIS BURN’, and some less than gracious posters designed by high-school pupils that savaged the city’s unpopular civic leader – ‘MAYOR LOEB EAT SHIT’.
When the riot was at its peak the Reverend Lawson grabbed King and urged him to leave the march, but King protested, concerned that the action would be perceived as his running away. A car was flagged down and the men bundled inside. A police officer on a motorbike escorted the vehicle to an area of the city that was not under siege and negotiated with the management of the Holiday Inn-Rivermont to provide a suite for King and his entourage. The gesture proved to be a double-edged sword. As soon as King checked into the hotel, intelligence officers began to concoct the story that he had fled the violence, ignored the black-owned Lorraine Motel, near Beale Street, and chosen the luxury of a white-owned establishment, occupying the grandest room. Newspapers were briefed and fell into line, accusing King of cowardice.
He woke up the next morning with the reputation of his nonviolent movement in tatters. Rather than hide, King called a press conference and faced down the criticism. He reiterated that his intentions were always to avoid violence and he said that the SCLC would return to the city to lead a non-violent march and kick-start their new initiative, the Poor People’s Campaign. Later in the day, as King licked his wounds, there was an unexpected knock on the door and three members of the Invaders – Charles Cabbage, Izzy Harrington and Calvin Taylor – asked to meet him. It was a short but fruitful meeting. King vaguely knew Cabbage from his close connections to his alma mater Morehouse College and spoke warmly with him. The Invaders denied they had played any role in organising or even inducing the riot and complained that they had been marginalised from the march by local preachers who disliked their attitudes. They specifically blamed King’s friend, the Reverend Jim Lawson, who had purposefully excluded the Invaders from any official role in the strike. As the meeting came to an end, Cabbage made a pitch for financial support from King and the SCLC, and they agreed that for the next march the Invaders would take on marshalling duties and guarantee that teenage demonstrators would be better organised. King was left with one overriding perspective of the Invaders: that they had met him face to face and, unlike many other militant groups he had encountered over the years, they had faced up to their own shortcomings.
* * *
As police gained control of the downtown area, Larry Payne and his friends snaked through side streets, carrying their small profits from looting – some clothes, packs of cigarettes and a camera. Just as they arrived at what they imagined was the safe haven of Fourth and Crump, due south of Booker T. Washington High School and directly opposite Fowler Homes where Payne’s mother lived, a patrol car spotted them. The youths scattered and ran in different directions. According to a fictitious police report, Payne had been seen trying to loot a petrol station on South 3rd Street and supposedly threatened a police officer with a butcher’s knife before escaping from the scene. He was seen again heading home to his mother’s apartment through a maze of low-rise houses and was now being pursued by officers on foot. What happened next was the subject of deep disagreement, and divided the MPD and the residents of Fowler Homes into bitter and opposing camps. The police claimed that Payne and others were carrying a television set looted from the Sears Roebuck at 903 S. Third, and so chased the suspected looters into a basement area. Patrolman L.D. Jones said he and his partner, Charles F. Williams, followed the group of youths and trapped Payne. Police then claimed that the teenager emerged brandishing a knife although none of the residents saw the knife in question. News accounts reported that around 12.50 p.m. on 28 March Payne was ‘repelled by a blast to the stomach from a 12-gauge shotgun, fired in self-defence by an officer of the law’. Community residents told a different story. ‘Larry had his hands up and his back to the door of the storage room. His hands were behind his head when the police shot him,’ said one witness. Another said, ‘The short, fat policeman shot him. It was a muffled sound, like busting a sack. The gun was touching his stomach. The skinny policeman told him, “You didn’t have to shoot him.”’
Payne’s mother was watching the CBS soap opera As the World Turns when a neighbour rushed to her door. ‘That’s my boy,’ I cried. ‘I ran out. I ran to touch him. The police would not let me touch him. He said, “Get back, nigger.” He put the barrel of the gun right into my stomach. I could feel it.’ Lizzie Payne said her last image was of her son lying on his back with both hands outstretched above his head. He didn’t have anything in his hands and there was no knife on the ground, she said. The killing was disputed for years to come, but, despite the differing versions, none of the police officers were ever charged. After pressure from the dead boy’s family, the police finally admitted that there was no extant evidence and the police gun that killed Larry Payne had been thrown into the Mississippi River.
His mother could no longer bear living in Fowler Homes – to pass daily the scene of her son’s death was too overwhelming – and so she moved north to Harlem, telling a news reporter, ‘That has got the best of my life. It’s taken everything out of me.’
Martin Luther King, feeling in some way responsible, and wounded by the violence that had erupted at the march, called Mrs Payne and offered his sincerest regrets. He told her that the next time he was in Memphis he would call to visit the family at Fowler Homes. For reasons now enshrined in history it was a promise he never kept.
‘I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.’
Martin Luther King, 3 April 1968, Mason Temple, Memphis
© Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo
BEN BRANCH’S SOLEMN PROMISE
4 April
Ben Branch was sitting in a chair in a barber’s shop near Firestone Union Hall, North Memphis, unaware that several people, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his own mother, were trying to contact him. He had just left the Union Hall after a public disagreement with the janitors, who had told him that the hall had no licence for live music. Branch suspected that the city authorities were in effect banning his band, Ben Branch & the Downhomers, from playing a concert in support of the striking sanitation workers. The no-licence claim smacked of an instruction from on high and Branch knew it to be false; he was brought up locally and had played the hall on numerous occasions, often signing a licence to guarantee payment in advance. Although Branch was born and raised in Memphis, two years previously he had moved north to Chicago to study a postgraduate degree in music. While there he became the Chicago Director of Martin Luther King’s SCLC and a leading figure in Jesse Jackson’s Illinois-based pressure group Operation Breadbasket, which was committed to improving the economic conditions of African-Americans. The move to Chicago had given Branch the opportunity of a weekly radio show and a musical outlet that he had never fully enjoyed at home in Memphis. Championed by the irrepressible DJ and civil rights siren, E. Rodney Jones, Radio Station WVON – the one-time ‘Voice of the Negro’ – dedicated a weekly hour-long show to Branch and to his Operation Breadbasket Orchestra.
On the night before his arrival back home in Memphis, tenor saxophonist Branch and his band had been travelling by plane to Memphis airport when the city was suddenly struck by an electric storm. This was no ordinary storm. The tornados that had engulfed Memphis, Mississippi and Arkansas had destroyed farms, livestock and outbuildings, killed six people and injured over one hundred. It was a storm that became part of Memphis mythology as news spread within the African-American community of Martin Luther King’s ‘Mountaintop’ speech at the Mason Temple, delivered at the height of the storm’s electric anger.
The writer Hampton Sides described an Old Testament atmosphere as King arrived in the packed hall. The heat was suffocating, and the audience were using their hymn sheets as makeshift fans in a vain attempt to ward off the sticky humidity. Ralph Abernathy introduced him, ‘his words echoing through the vast hall as tornado sirens keened outside’. The Reverend Kyles wrote after the fact: ‘That night rain was pounding on the roof, and the rafters shook with thunder and lightning. I remember: the thunderclaps and the wind set the windows banging. Each time it happened Martin flinched. He was sure someone was lurking and going to shoot him. But when he got to the end of that speech and told us he had looked over and seen the promised land, a great calm came over him. Everyone was transfixed.’
‘I’m delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning,’ King had begun. Then, in a tour de force of public oratory he imagined the worlds he might have been born into, finally returning to the world he would have chosen above all others: the here and now. ‘Something is happening in Memphis,’ he said in his sonorous foreboding tone, ‘something is happening in our world. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.’ Finally he turned to his own predicament. ‘We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.’
As King addressed the strikers and their families, Branch’s flight down from Chicago had been diverted to Jackson, Mississippi, and then, after another aborted landing, touched down in New Orleans. Only when news of the storm subsiding reached New Orleans, did the plane take off again, this time reaching Memphis. Branch had shared many journeys with King. They had grown up in the same segregated post-war South. Branch had taken his saxophone in a battered case to the Montgomery bus boycotts and had been there at the famous Selma–Montgomery marches in 1965, in support of voting rights. By then he had become a close personal friend of the Chicago contingent’s ambitious and self-aware leader Jesse Jackson. It was Jackson who encouraged Branch to leave Memphis, but it was only the promise of a guaranteed postgraduate programme and full-time post with the SCLC that convinced him.
As soon as Branch’s plane brought him back home to Memphis he was greeted by old friends and close family members. The Ben Branch Band and its local rival, the Willie Mitchell Band, led by the legendary trumpeter ‘Papa’ Willie Mitchell, had dominated Memphis nightlife for nearly two decades. Briefly, in the fifties, Branch and Mitchell had both been members of a seminal Memphis band, the Phineas Newborn Sound, the house band at the Plantation Inn, a club across the Mississippi in West Memphis, Arkansas. Apart from their professional success on stage, Branch and Mitchell became mentors to some of soul music’s greatest stars. Branch’s keyboard player was the young and as yet undiscovered Isaac Hayes, and his featured bass guitarist was the teenage Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, who went on to become a member of Booker T. and the M.G.’s and a stalwart of the interracial academy at Stax Records. Dunn had made history as the first white musician to play in one of Memphis’s outstanding black bands, setting the unwritten ground rules of musical integration. Mitchell had been a driving force in the city, too. He was the godfather of Royal Studios and the mastermind of Memphis’s other great record company, Hi Records, which brought Al Green and Ann Peebles to prominence. Stax executive Al Bell Jr claimed that Mitchell was omnipresent in the city and a force for musical innovation: ‘His handprint, thumbprint, footprint, heart print is all over Memphis music,’ he once said.
By the age of forty, Branch had played in every significant venue in Memphis, including the Plantation Inn, Club Handy, the Flamingo and Curry’s Club on Thomas Street, and had spanned the range of black music from spirituals and R&B to jazz. Like many of his generation, notably producer and blood bank clerk Roosevelt Jamison, he had been forced to juggle two careers simultaneously: educator and musician. Branch had been a student at Douglass High School in Mount Olive, North Memphis, where, paradoxically, his school became an unintended victim of the schools bussing policy. Many black teenagers were bussed out of the North Memphis neighbourhood but few corresponding white kids ever signed up to be bussed into Douglass, and so the attendance roll declined and the school was ultimately closed down. Branch was one of Douglass’s star pupils and went on to study at Mississippi State University, returning at the weekends to moonlight at Memphis clubs. His contract – such as it was – required him to play until the last drunken customer had left the building, but then, after a few hours of sleep, he had to rise early to progress his vocation in education. He
was a music supervisor in local schools, setting up the Mississippi State Band Directors’ Association, an organisation that cultivated instrumentation in the city’s black schools. Branch periodically played as a session musician, too; first at Stax, where he was an additional member of the Mar-Keys with Wayne Jackson, Floyd Newman, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper and Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn. He composed and then played on the instrumental double-sider ‘Beach Bash’/‘Bush Bash’, a relentless sax-led dance song that died locally but was a major hit in Europe, especially on the UK’s Mod and northern soul scene. Session work continued when he moved to Chicago, this time with another heritage label, the famous Chess Records, where he shared freelance saxophone duties with Monk Higgins and added beef to songs by vocal harmony groups like the Radiants and the Vontastics. Each Saturday morning, he hosted rehearsals at the University of Chicago’s Theological Seminary Rooms, where in February 1968 he met with Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson. Together they hatched a plan to form the movement’s official orchestra – a supergroup capable of playing spirituals, jazz, R&B and soul, and employing the cream of Branch’s Chicago and Memphis bands as its nucleus. This new band became known as the Operation Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir, a dedicated civil rights band that became, in effect, the musical wing of Dr King’s movement. In 1968 they signed a deal with Chess and settled in Chicago. Branch’s capacity for hard work and his restless entrepreneurial spirit stayed with him throughout his life. While still committed to the civil rights movement, he set up Doctor Branch Products Inc., the nation’s first black-owned soft-drink manufacturing company, and in 1986 the company signed a $355 million agreement with Kemmerer, the makers of 7Up. Branch spent much of his active working life as president of his own drinks company yet still turned up faithfully for rehearsals and for music education classes.
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