When I was starting to make all these changes on the force, the white officers were openly defiant. Speaking for myself, I can say that leading an organization that was trying to bring about some change within the police department, I was not met with open arms. There were white officers who refused to ride in a squad car with me. There were black officers who would turn their backs on me, who wouldn’t speak to me because they were afraid I would bring trouble to them. So it was a very, very lonely time for me, personally, in dealing with the situation within the Memphis Police Department. My family suffered as a result of it, and there were just some very unhappy times, very lonely times for me.
And extremely dangerous times. Numerous threats were made on my life, on the lives of my family, but it was almost as if I had taken that step and I couldn’t retreat. There were times when I felt discouraged and wanted to go back. But Father James P. Lyke stood by my side. I have his picture on the bookshelf in my office. He was with me, and there were other white people who worked behind the scenes and were really sympathetic to the cause we were working for, and realized that it was a just cause. They were very helpful.
One time I had to meet with some top police officials. I got a call early one morning at home when I was in bed. It was the director of the police department saying he needed to speak with me. When I got to headquarters—and mind you, I was a patrol officer with five years on the job—I stepped in the room and they had fourteen commanding, high-ranking police officials lined up around a table, and then there was just me.
They said, well, we hear you say there’s trouble in the police department and that there’s discrimination. It was a bit intimidating for me, but I responded by saying, well, yes, sir, there is discrimination within the police department, and it’s obvious when I look at you seated around a table here. I see no one that looks like me. And I said, I look at commanding positions around the police department and there is one black officer. They had him sitting there in a corner, and they looked to him and they said, now you tell them whether you’ve ever seen discrimination in the Memphis Police Department. And the officer, he said, well, no, sir, I haven’t. But I realized that we had a problem; the officer was obviously intimidated by that, and I certainly understood. I could understand his position, but certainly I had to be true to my faith that discrimination did exist and that it had to change within the police department.
The priest, by now Archbishop Lyke, was always there with me. He would sit in a corner of the room while I would conduct an interview. When I would talk with police officials, he would be with me. He would pick me up in the morning, and he would ride with me during my daily chores or duties with the Police Association. We developed a friendship. At first the priest was a spiritual adviser to me, but then as we grew to know each other, he became a personal friend. He was my closest confidant. He never tried to change me. He was a source of strength for me. He gave me a great deal of encouragement. If I needed advice, he would advise me. I felt that having a priest at my side then somehow would make me a better person, because I’m not perfect by any means. I’ve had my transgressions; I’ve made mistakes. But I also feel that deep down inside I’ve always tried to do that which is just and that which is right.
I must have been the only policeman in America who had a priest traveling with him. As ironic as it was, the priest sought me out. I never knew him prior to entering this adviser-friend relationship, and come to find out that this very priest had been close to Dr. King. He had come into my life at that time. The fact that he was a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement only gave me more encouragement that this was somebody I certainly should pay attention to.
The fear that maybe an “accident” might befall me from some of my white colleagues was with me every day. I would go to work and sometimes I couldn’t imagine getting home at night, I was so terrified. I was always aware of what it might mean when the phone rang or what could happen while I was driving down the street. And these fears were not unrealistic. I was working in an environment where I wasn’t held in high esteem not only by the white officers but by black officers. My black officers were afraid to come near me. So I was like a man without a country. I was ostracized. I was told by officers who were around me that simply because of what I represented, I could not be trusted. I was one of the only officers in the city of Memphis who had to ride by himself, because no one would ride with me. Black or white. It was very disheartening. My response was often to be fearful, because who wouldn’t be when you had to face something like that and everyone working around you was wearing guns?
My wife and my children, naturally, were always concerned about my safety. But we’d go about our daily living, and you have to stand up for something. Sometimes you can be so gripped with fear until all the fear is scared out of you. I’ve been that way. I’ve been down that trail, where I have been fearful of things, but I just figure you’ve got to try to do the right thing. You’ve got to try to see that justice prevails, and sometimes that means putting fear behind you. I think that most courageous acts really come about as a result of paralyzing fear.
It was probably the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King that made me decide to fight back and change the system. I always admired Dr. King because he talked about what was just and right, and I felt so strongly about justice. I named my son Justice. Dr. King was always talking about doing the right thing and treating people in the way they should be treated, judging a person not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That really made an impression on me, and I’ve always said that if I ever had an opportunity to make an impact on this earth, then I would want to do something along the lines that Dr. King had done.
I had the distinction of participating in the last march that Dr. King led in Memphis. The city sanitation workers were striking for better working conditions. There were thousands of us marching on March 28, 1968. We were proceeding from the Clayborne Ball Temple to City Hall and had turned right at Main and Beale, where the Orpheum Theater is, when the violence broke out. And I think Dr. King, being an advocate of nonviolence, was disturbed about that.
One of Dr. King’s staff members had tried to discourage him from returning to Memphis to plan another march, but Dr. King was determined. He wanted to have a peaceful march. On April 4, he was in his room at the Lorraine Motel discussing plans for another march with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and then he walked out onto the balcony of the motel.
At that time, I was a salesperson with a supply firm here in the city of Memphis. I left work that afternoon sometime around six o’clock. Dr. King was shot at one minute past six. I recall it was a cloudy day. It seems as though it’s always raining when bad things happen. We got the word that Dr. King had been shot and that they had rushed him to St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Everything just went up in flames throughout the downtown area. Shock gripped the community. Some whites in our community rejoiced over the fact that Dr. King had been assassinated and said that he deserved what happened, simply because he came into the community starting trouble. But the vast majority of the citizens of Memphis were appalled.
Dr. King’s death hurt us and it hurt the nation. It hurt the world to lose someone like Dr. King. When we lost Dr. King, we lost a great leader. Our hearts go out to the King family. But I can surely say that Dr. King’s death brought about many, many positive changes, not only in the city of Memphis but throughout the world. It created a sort of kinship among the people of Memphis that has improved race relations and brought people together. Much of the progress we have today came about as a direct result of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King here in Memphis.
The fact that Dr. King’s life ended here makes Memphis—makes what happened to race relations in Memphis—even more important. I look at how Dr. King lost his life, and I guess it’s only a bit of an irony that he died coming to fight for the rights of a garbageman, a garbage collector. But he did. And I think therein lies the s
ignificance of the struggle for justice and freedom. Certainly Memphians are mindful of that.
Cynics today would say, well, not much has changed in the South; you’ve got a few black people in positions of power, but things aren’t fundamentally different. That is definitely a misconception. Things have changed dramatically in the South. I’ve had the distinction of living through the times when we could not drink at a water fountain, when we could not go to the library on a certain day, when we could not go to a movie, and when we couldn’t eat at a restaurant. So for anyone to say that the South has not changed, then they’re fooling themselves. If you go from Memphis to Birmingham to Montgomery to Atlanta, you see cities where minorities are on the move, where minorities are in leadership positions, and to say that things haven’t changed, certainly you would have to be living with blinders on.
The Memphis police force today is highly diverse. We probably have about fifty-fifty whites and blacks. I’m the chief of police. Two deputy chiefs who work under my command are African American. Precincts throughout the city are equally divided between black and white. When I came on the job, there were no women in police work. Now we have women in leadership positions in the police department. You cannot find an area within the Memphis Police Department where minorities or blacks are not represented.
We’ve come a ways in recent history, because historically in the South, the law was used to enforce discrimination against blacks. The sheriffs and the police were the ones who enforced the Jim Crow laws. These laws were made unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment way back in the 1860s, but they were still being enforced in the South past the middle of the twentieth century. The sheriff or the police could go in and they could arrest, they could take away rights, and it was sanctioned. This is just the way it was. It was the system’s way of oppressing, and that’s the reason why police officers were to be feared. You never knew what would happen if you encountered a police officer at night while you were driving down a lonely road. It always struck fear in you if you were pulled over, simply because the police were the arm of government but you couldn’t trust them. They were the foot soldiers of racism.
I remember very well when we started the Afro-American Police Association in 1973. The first words that came out of the then director’s mouth were that anyone who tries to start any type of association here is liable to be looking for another job. That was intimidation in itself. Everyone who had attempted to form something like an association of black officers prior to that time had always been fired or lost their job some way or other.
Around 1973, we filed an action with the courts concerning discrimination. Around 1978, finally the federal government agreed that there had been discrimination in the Memphis Police Department and a consent decree was entered by the city. It took them five years to admit what I could observe in five seconds. It was very frustrating because we knew that discrimination existed, but still there had to be an acknowledgment from the system saying, yes, this is happening. Once that happened, we felt that we were beginning to turn the corner.
Why we won, or what made us different—what made us succeed when so many others had failed—I would like to think had a lot to do with the ability to stay clean, to stay fair, and the help of prayers, the assistance of the priest. Somebody somewhere had to be watching over me. I know that, because there was no way that I could have done what I did without prayers, without help from something that’s out of this world. Many who had traveled that road before didn’t make it.
But it wasn’t over with the consent decree. The government was watching and saying, you’ve got to do it this way, and still there was resistance. We were fighting. And the fight is not over. It’s not over even now, and not even with me sitting where I am. You can’t say the fight is ever over. But I’ve always felt that justice will prevail, whether I’m here or not. There will be someone else to pick up where we’ve left off and carry on.
Obviously, racism doesn’t exist today in the same way that it did in 1968, but it does persist. If you look at, say, city government, it can take the form of discriminatory awarding of contracts or hiring for services. A lot of times it may be on an individual level, say in pockets within the police department. Certainly if I have an officer out on the streets now who does racist things, who may be guilty of profiling, it doesn’t reflect my philosophy; it doesn’t reflect the philosophy of the Memphis Police Department. We can’t deny that racism exists in some of our members. But I think for the most part they do a pretty good job now of controlling themselves. We have to leave personal biases at home. You can’t bring them to work. We go on record as saying that if we find we have people in our ranks who are abusing people simply because of the color of their skin or their religious beliefs or things like that, then certainly we’re going to do something about it.
When school busing was introduced, the whites began to move out of the city schools and into the suburban areas. But our neighborhoods, for the most part, are integrated, and we have record numbers of whites moving back to the downtown area, which has been revitalized. Whites are beginning to move back to the inner city and downtown in many American urban regions, and Memphis is no different; in fact, downtown Memphis is predominantly white now. Some areas in the city as a whole are predominantly black or predominantly white, but I don’t think you face what you encountered in the 1960s, when you could not move into certain areas regardless of your economic status. Now we have blacks and whites and Hispanics and others living together here.
Back in the 1960s, interracial dating was the last taboo of segregation. But if you come to Memphis now, you’ll see interracial couples, not only dating but married. You’ll see interracial families. An interracial couple walking down the street would not get the stares they would have gotten back in the 1960s. There’s hardly a neighborhood in the city of Memphis right now where you won’t see interracial couples.
I don’t subscribe to the philosophy that the black community was better off when all the black people lived together, with their own doctors and lawyers and maids and janitors. I lived through that era and personally, I don’t like to think there are places in my city or my country where I can’t go simply because of the color of my skin. Thirty years ago, there were places in the city of Memphis where you could not go. Now we’re free to move about. Some of the conditions that exist in the city right now leave a little bit to be desired, simply because there’s a violent element in our society, a lot of blacks killing blacks. We didn’t see as much of that thirty or thirty-five years ago as we see right now. But I certainly wouldn’t want to turn back the hands of the clock and return to the days of Jim Crow.
The response to diversity in the police department has been very good. There was a time when the citizens of Memphis viewed the police as an occupying force. But now we have citizens who actually call in demanding, and I mean literally demanding, that they have police in their communities in the form of what we call our community action centers in the many precincts that are spread throughout the community. We can’t keep up with the demand for police now. That is a big change. When I was growing up, the police were a nightmare. They were the enemy. They were people you were vulnerable around.
I like to say that now, instead of running away from the police, the community runs to them and actually embraces the police. They take ownership. They say, these are our police officers. Hardly a crime occurs in the city of Memphis for which we don’t get a call from a citizen wanting to help out. We have precincts where citizens meet on a regular basis, hold community meetings. They come in and they actually prepare meals for our police officers. So it’s quite different now.
The city of Memphis itself has a population of around 650,000. In the metropolitan area, the population is closer to a million. In the Memphis Police Department, we have about two thousand commissioned police officers who actually carry the badge, and then we have another thousand civilians, for a total force of around three thousand. About half of them are minority p
eople.
We have integrated the police force by neighborhood. We don’t have all black officers in a black neighborhood, for instance. That practice changed some time ago. Police officers now are assigned to neighborhoods regardless of the color or makeup of the neighborhood. So black officers work in predominantly white neighborhoods and vice versa. Color has no effect on the assignment.
We do sensitivity training in the police force, not just for white officers but for all officers, because it’s not just a white problem. There are many officers of color who need sensitivity training to a certain extent. It’s a two-way street. Yes, you are asking whites to understand blacks. But blacks must learn to identify with different cultures within our society and to be sensitive to people who may differ from us as well.
Black officers also need to be sensitive to black people. In the wake of the many changes that have occurred in this city, a black officer may be a little harder on a black person than a white officer might be. So we don’t miss an opportunity to expose all of our officers to sensitivity training.
Our downtown precinct covers the entire downtown entertainment district. It’s really almost like a mini–police department because we’ve got a precinct commander and a number of commanding officers. It’s a fully pledged place. Some of our officers downtown ride horses, some ride motorcycles, some do bike patrol, which lets them interact with the citizens or tourists. So we have a lot of community policing going on. It’s like a community precinct.
Over the next five to ten years, I think, Memphis will become even more of a major player in the world. We’ve seen a proliferation of growth here. Businesses are relocating here; professional sports franchises are moving to town. Memphis is centrally located. This is Middle America. You can get to any point in America very quickly from Memphis and the mid-South area. So I think Memphis is poised for substantial growth. We have a good climate and great restaurants. You’ve got the Isaac Hayes and the B.B. King Blues Club and Rendezvous, Cozy Corner, and all kinds of clubs and restaurants featuring food from all over the world. And we have Beale Street.
America Behind the Color Line Page 22