Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

  Loeb won the election anyway without the union’s support. Warren and Jones determined they had no recourse except to strike. They thought it best to wait until Loeb completed his first few months in office, his honeymoon period. Perhaps they would strike in the summer of 1968. Then, in the heat of the Memphis sun, piles of fast-rotting and stinking garbage would accumulate all over town. In those circumstances the mayor would feel greater pressure to settle a work stoppage on favorable terms for the union.

  Back-to-back events on two successive days in early 1968 triggered a premature strike. On January 31, twenty-two black sewer and drain workers were sent home when it began to rain. No white employees were sent home. When the rain stopped a couple of hours later, the whites began working. They earned a full day’s pay. The blacks complained, and the city eventually agreed to pay them, but only for two hours.

  On the very next day, a five-man garbage crew was caught in a driving rainstorm. There was room for only three of them in the cab of their Weiner barrel truck. The two junior men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, sought refuge in back. They crawled into the yawning compactor compartment. A freak electrical short apparently caused by an errant shovel hitting loose wires triggered the compactor. Cole and Walker were dragged into its jaws and crushed to death.

  The nightmarish accident buttressed the workers’ long-standing complaint about outdated and derelict equipment. The city had introduced the barrel truck only ten years earlier in grudging compliance with the workers’ demands. A compactor-equipped truck was a modernizing step forward. But the barrel trucks posed new hazards. They were not always well maintained. Union leaders had been pleading with the city to replace them, according to local historian Joan Beifuss.18

  Aggrieved and outraged by two jarring events—the rainy day incident and the horrible deaths of Cole and Walker—Local 1733 voted to strike. The union’s members vowed not to return to work until Loeb granted their demands. For workers who risked their jobs and the livelihoods of their families by striking, it was a great leap. Taylor Rogers, who was supporting a family of eight children, five girls and three boys, remembered the wrenching moment: “I sat down and talked to my family before I went out on strike. They said, ‘look, Daddy, you ain’t doing nothing no way.’. . . And my boy say, ‘Daddy, we’re with you. We’ll go out and work and whatever money we get, we’ll bring in.’” Once the strike was under way, the son, Taylor Jr., shined shoes to help out.19

  The early days of the work stoppage went exceedingly well. By the third day the strike was idling all but four of the city’s 188 garbage trucks. Thirteen hundred employees of the Department of Public Works, all African Americans, were refusing to work. On the fourth day, Joseph Paisley, an AFSCME organizer in Tennessee, crowed to a reporter: “They stood in unison, one thousand plus, they’re not going back.”20

  Mayor Loeb, however, was not about to sit on his hands as garbage stacked up throughout his city. One week into the strike, Loeb began hiring workers to replace the strikers. Fearful of losing their jobs permanently and with rent and car payments coming due, some of the strikers were drifting back to work. By mid-March, a month after the strike began, the Commercial Appeal would report that sixty-seven trucks were back in service.

  Working overtime, escorted by police squad cars, hastily mobilized crews were collecting garbage from most of the city’s businesses and apartment buildings. As though to demonstrate a civic duty to counter the strike, Boy Scouts were pitching in to haul away some of the garbage heaps in residential neighborhoods.

  By April, ninety-five garbage trucks were rumbling through the city’s streets.21 The trucks, crewed mostly by new hires, were steadily clearing mounds of accumulated garbage from alleys, sidewalks, and yards. The number of trucks back in service amounted to only half the pre-strike level. That was enough, though, to relieve the pressure on Mayor Loeb.

  Chapter 4

  Airport Arrival

  The Movement lives or dies in Memphis.

  —MLK, speaking to his staff, Atlanta, March 30, 1968

  A CROWD AT GATE 17 of the Memphis airport was waiting for King’s delayed flight from Atlanta on Wednesday morning, April 3. In the welcoming party of about sixty were African American ministers, civil rights activists, and union leaders. There was a gaggle of news reporters, some shouldering TV cameras. Spilling into the hallway were dozens of curious outbound passengers. They stopped in their tracks to gawk.

  King’s jet arrived at 10:33 a.m., as bursts of sunshine warmed the city. A photo published the next day in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the afternoon daily, shows him and three of his aides on the airport tarmac. Overcoats draped over their arms, the aides hurry along. King seems to be hanging back, peering upward to his left, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. He looks wary, somber. In his white shirt and dark suit, the jacket tidily buttoned, he seems like a man with all under control except for the worry on his face.

  Had his circumstances been different, the weather might have lifted his spirits. He was arriving in early spring. The temperature was in the upper sixties, though rain and a cold front were expected later in the day. Easter was eleven days away.

  The sprawling city then stretched eastward almost to cotton fields. Westward was the downtown bluff near the swirling junction of the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers. Already Memphis was teeming with spring colors. Daffodils were peaking, bright yellow. The azaleas were a blaze of red, white, and purple. In sync with the flowers, ads in the two Memphis dailies were brimming with Easter sales offering pastel dresses and ornate bonnets.

  The rhythm of life seemed utterly normal in other ways. Movie theaters were open for business. Hometown boy Elvis Presley had top billing in Stay Away, Joe, at the State, in which he played an Indian rodeo hand returning to the reservation to “raise the very devil with women,” as one reviewer wrote. In their nonstop Elvis watch, Memphis newspapers were reporting that he was in residence at Graceland with his wife, Priscilla, and their newborn daughter, Lisa Marie.

  The annual Cotton Carnival was on the calendar, the city’s premier high-society event, a five-day extravaganza in late May. Exclusive secret societies were already doing their part by anointing faux-royalty from among the city’s social elite. Indeed, the Nineteenth Century Club and the Petroleum Club were each disclosing their picks for prince and princess. The princesses, all college students or fresh graduates, resplendent in white dresses and bejeweled crowns, would be riding through downtown streets on parade floats later that spring.

  As the garbage workers’ strike entered its fifty-first day, however, no one could say that all was normal in Memphis. In many neighborhoods trash bags littered the sidewalks. Whole blocks of the downtown were in shambles from the riot of March 28. Store windows were shattered. Shelves were bare from looting.

  Only a few of the thirty-eight hundred National Guard troops that patrolled the city after the riot remained on duty. The last of the armored personnel carriers, mounted with .50 caliber machine guns, were rumbling through the streets. Mayor Loeb had just lifted a curfew that had been in effect from 7:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. That order allowed the jazz and blues clubs on Beale Street to reopen. But an eerie, uneasy calm hung over the city.

  Despite the air of foreboding, King was back in the thick of the racial crisis in Memphis. He knew that his plan to stage a peaceful march posed great risks. If the federal court issued an injunction prohibiting him from marching in Memphis, King would face some tough questions. Would he disobey a court order and risk the consequences? Would another march, in defiance of the court, spiral into violence, further damaging his reputation? Would he be risking his life recklessly? He already feared for his personal safety, a fear heightened by the bomb threat to his flight that morning in Atlanta.

  When he emerged into the airport terminal, four policemen in blue uniforms would be waiting for him at Gate 17. It was the detail under the command of Lieutenant Don Smith, with orders to protect King while he was in Memphis. King had not been notified in advance that th
ere would be police security for him. He may have scarcely noted the presence of Smith and the three other officers with him. Police often were on hand to greet King when he was traveling. They were hardly worth a second glance.

  Along with Smith’s contingent, two African American police officers, Detective Edward Redditt and Patrolman Willie Richmond, were at Gate 17. They too were at the airport to watch King but for a different reason. Redditt and Richmond were wearing plain clothes. Their assignment was surveillance, not security. Their orders were to keep King “under continuous surveillance to see with whom he came in contact.”1

  Also in the greeting party for King was the Reverend James Lawson, pastor of the Centenary United Methodist Church in Memphis. Lawson, himself a notable civil rights leader, was hard to miss. He was wearing black horn-rimmed glasses and a white clerical collar under a black pleated shirt. After the garbage workers’ strike began in Memphis, he had been chosen to head a support group known as the Community on the Move for Equality.

  While waiting for King’s plane to arrive, Lieutenant Smith talked to Lawson. Smith informed him that there would be police security for King in Memphis and asked about his schedule for the day. “We have not fully made up our minds,” Lawson replied, according to a police report.2 Smith would say later that he interpreted Lawson’s response as evasive, that Lawson meant to sidestep the question. But Lawson would have another explanation. He would say that he had left the security issue for King to resolve. “That would be the way I would work,” Lawson would say, years later. “I would not have worked independently of King for his security.”3

  Yet another face in the crowd at Gate 17 was Tarlese Matthews. An impassioned strike supporter, she had made a name for herself in local civil rights circles a decade earlier. She had demanded entry to the Memphis Zoo at Overton Park on a day other than Thursday. The zoo was open to blacks only on Thursdays (except when a Thursday coincided with a holiday, when only whites could attend). On non-holiday Thursdays a sign at the gate proclaimed: “NO WHITE PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THE ZOO TODAY.” Stopped from entering one day when the zoo was closed to blacks, Matthews did not merely turn around and go home. She sued. Her lawsuit forced the city to desegregate not just the zoo but also the nearby municipal park and golf course.

  Matthews was at the airport in her gray-and-black Buick Electra to chauffeur King while he was in Memphis. She noted that Lieutenant George Davis, one of the officers in Smith’s detail, was at the gate. She also recognized Detective Redditt nearby.

  Matthews bristled. She knew that undercover police were monitoring the pro-strike meetings. She claimed that the police were intimidating the strikers, violating their rights to free speech and assembly, not enforcing the law impartially. She faulted the police for having employed what she regarded as brutal tactics during two pro-strike marches.

  On February 23 the police had used clubs and the anti-riot agent Mace against the marchers. (How the incident started was a matter of dispute. Did a squad car crowd the marchers and run over a woman’s foot, or did the marchers provoke the police by rocking a squad car?) On March 28, during the march led by King, the police had responded to the rioting by a small number of youths. Officers fired tear gas and once again clubbed many people who were protesting peacefully.

  Matthews stopped Lieutenant Davis. “We have not invited any police,” she said.4

  Then she confronted Detective Redditt. He and Richmond had been working undercover as partners since the strike began. They had the delicate task—“snooping,” the strike’s supporters called it—of tracking pro-strike meetings, rallies, and marches and reporting their observations to the Inspectional Division of the Memphis Police Department.

  Pointing a finger at Redditt, Matthews snapped, according to a police report, “I’m going to get you.” The anger that she directed at Redditt reflected her deep distrust of the Memphis police, even of the African Americans on the force.

  In the hallway beyond Gate 17, King paused before a knot of reporters. He invited questions. In its edition that morning the Commercial Appeal reported that Mayor Loeb probably would seek an injunction from US District Court judge Bailey Brown to bar King from marching in Memphis.

  King was asked if he would obey such an injunction. “I have my legal advisors with me,” he replied, “and conscience also has to be consulted.” If the federal court in Memphis blocked him from leading the march, he said, it would amount to “a basic denial of First Amendment privileges. We stand on the First Amendment.”5

  If King violated a federal injunction, he would be scuttling a core principle of his longtime strategy. He had defied state court injunctions against SCLC demonstrations on the grounds that they were protected under the US Constitution. He had, however, never disobeyed a federal court injunction (although he had come close to doing so in Selma, Alabama). Favorable rulings of the federal judiciary had been a critical bulwark of the movement.

  A reporter asked about the risk that people marching under King’s banner might act violently during the upcoming protest, as they had on March 28. “We have been meeting with them,” King said, interpreting the question to refer to a local Black Power group, the Invaders. “These groups have committed themselves to co-operation with us.”

  Another reporter asked a question that went beyond the immediate crisis in Memphis. He asked if the rioting during the march in Memphis six days earlier had caused King to rethink his plan for the Poor People’s Campaign.

  “Our plan in Washington is going on,” King replied. “Memphis will not in any way curtail or deter it. We must spotlight the plight of the poor nationally.”

  What about NAACP president Roy Wilkins’s comment that the Memphis rioting might be a preview of what lay ahead for the People’s Campaign?

  “He said that before,” King shot back. “That’s not new.”

  At the conclusion of the impromptu press conference King and his entourage of aides hurried down the glass-and-brick concourse toward the terminal exit. The four aides traveling with him were seasoned SCLC staff members. Ralph Abernathy, who was forty-two, was the oldest. The thirty-two-year-old Bernard Lee was the youngest. King himself was thirty-nine.

  Abernathy had been at King’s side, often literally, through the twelve tumultuous years bookended by the crises of Montgomery and Memphis. The two men were close. If anything should happen to King, he wanted Abernathy to assume the leadership of the SCLC.6

  Andrew Young, the organization’s executive vice president, was also close to King but played a different role. Abernathy was King’s folksy sidekick. Young had the composure and polish of a diplomat, which in a sense he was. King would call on him to negotiate with hostile white politicians and businessmen.

  Young and Dorothy Cotton, the SCLC director of education, had trained countless volunteers of all ages in the discipline of nonviolent protest. She was the lone woman in the SCLC’s executive ranks. Bernard Lee, who looked a bit like King and dressed like him, was his frequent traveling companion.

  Close behind them on the way to the airport exit was the four-man security detail under Inspector Smith. The four officers were not obvious choices to guard King. Two of them, Davis and Detective Ronald Howell ordinarily worked in vice and narcotics. The fourth, William Schultz, was on loan from homicide. All were white in a department still rife with racism two decades after the city broke the color barrier in hiring.

  Memphis had no black police officers until 1948, when the first few were invited to join the department. But they did not have the same status as white officers. Blacks did not ride in patrol cars. They patrolled Beale Street and black neighborhoods on foot. They were not to arrest whites even if they witnessed a crime unfolding before their eyes. Years later, when the black officers were permitted to ride in patrol cars, they had to ride separately from whites.

  By 1968, there were 100 blacks on the 850-man force. Even then, though, it was not uncommon for black officers to hear white colleagues say “nigger” on the police radio.7
“Oh, a nigger was killed?” a patrolman’s radio squawked loudly enough for King to hear during the violent outbreak of March 28.8

  The two African American officers on the King watch, Redditt and Richmond, tagged along behind King, keeping a low profile. In 1966 Redditt had worked a security detail during King’s visit to Memphis. He had shadowed King closely. King’s down-to-earth manner had impressed him. “He had this warmth about him all the time,” Redditt would recall years later.9 Sitting with him one day at breakfast, Redditt asked what more it would take to further the civil rights movement. “Keep telling the folks the truth. They’re going to wake up eventually,” he remembered King saying.

  Redditt looked different now. To work undercover during the garbage workers’ strike, he had let his hair grow long in the Afro style, stowed his uniform, and donned khaki pants. In the crowd at the airport King might not have recognized Redditt.

  King likely would have noticed Ernest Withers in the flock of people trailing him. The tall, ruggedly built Withers was a legendary African American photographer. On photo shoots throughout the Mississippi Delta, Withers had recorded images of Southern bigotry in all its naked ugliness. He combed the South for years, snapping photos of key civil rights moments for black-owned publications such as Jet magazine and the Memphis weekly Tri-State Defender. It was his classic shot that caught King on December 21, 1956, sitting at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That triumphant day marked the end of the city’s segregated bus system.

  Now the forty-five-year-old Withers was covering King not entirely on his own account as a freelance photographer much admired in the movement. He was also moonlighting in the role of paid informant for the FBI, as the Commercial Appeal would report four decades later.

  King exited the flat-topped, concrete-and-glass terminal on its upper departure level and climbed into the front passenger seat of Matthews’s Buick. Abernathy, Young, and Lee sat in the backseat.