‘An Unseen Light’
New book chronicles black struggles for freedom and equality in Memphis
“Something is happening in Memphis,” intoned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 3, 1968. “Something is happening in our world.” Outside, the skies filled with ominous rumbles of thunder, crackling lightning and violent sheets of rain. Inside Mason Temple, people were gathered to support the plight of striking sanitation workers. Despite the crises of the present time, King cherished the moment. Throughout the world, people were yearning to be free. “I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding,” he said. “And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.” As we know, King was shot and killed the next day. The assassination rocked the nation and hung like a gloomy cloud over the city. With some justification, that singular tragedy dominates the memory of the black freedom struggle in Memphis. Most history books and popular stories about the civil rights movement in Memphis revolve around April 4, 1968. Fifty years later, the eyes of the world are turning upon Memphis. The anniversary of King’s assassination will bring immense attention to our city. It is an opportunity not only to reflect on the death of a hero of racial justice, but also to look for ways to move forward. What does King’s death mean for us today? We obviously recognize the importance of the upcoming anniversary. But as historians, we hesitate when the past is boiled down to “flashpoints,” moments of crisis, that focus intense energy on a single cause. If we confine ourselves to that specific historical moment, we might bury the complex political, social, and racial dynamics that underlay those crises.
This is why we asked historians of Memphis to contribute to “An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.” Our contributors include the authors of some of the most important studies of the city. They also include up-and-coming scholars – many with ties to Rhodes College, the University of Memphis and LemoyneOwen College – who are shining new light on the city’s past.
“An Unseen Light” will be published in April, just after the MLK50 commemoration. It neither centers around the King assassination nor provides a comprehensive history of the Memphis movement. Instead, its 17 essays include intriguing stories, profiles of compelling people, and portraits of a city that suggest both remarkable progress and unfinished work. They stretch back to the nineteenth century, and they continue beyond 1968.
That approach gives us a distinct perspective on the memory of the city’s most iconic moment in the civil rights struggle. The Sanitation Strike highlighted important themes in Memphis history. It exposed the violent repression that African Americans often endured. It highlighted the expansive and creative ways that black activists fought for justice. It underlined the burdens of a political legacy of paternalism and compromise. And it revealed a vision for economic justice.
These themes are all rooted in the longer history of the black freedom struggle in Memphis.
A history of violence
On Feb. 23, 1968, about 600 sanitation workers started marching down Main Street, leaving City Hall and heading south toward Mason Temple. Their strike had started three weeks earlier, after a hydraulic compactor killed two sanitation workers, a tragic reflection of their second-class status and terrible working conditions.
The City Council had just endorsed Mayor Henry Loeb’s hostile stance toward the strike, and the workers were angry. After a police vehicle rolled over the foot of a black woman named Gladys Carpenter, some marchers rocked a squad car in protest.
The officers donned gas masks and sprayed mace with abandon, leaving its victims with burning red flesh. More police cars rolled up. Some officers removed their badges, and one grabbed a press photographer’s camera. They beat the marchers.
The gross violence transformed the strike. Rather than manage civil rights protests, as the city administration had done earlier in the 1960s, the police bared their prejudice. It inflamed the black community. This was no longer just a labor protest – it was about race. It was about basic black dignity. Soon the famous placards emerged: I AM A MAN.
Black Memphians had long endured racist violence – and mobilized in resistance. After the 1866 Memphis Massacre that killed 46 African Americans, victims courageously testified before federal investigators. After the 1892 lynching of three black owners of the People’s Grocery, journalist Ida B. Wells chronicled the crimes.
In “An Unseen Light,” Darius Young revisits the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons, a black woodcutter unjustly blamed for murdering a young white woman. Young recounts the grotesque nature of the mob violence, which climaxed with a toss of Persons’s severed head onto Beale Street. But he also describes how, in the aftermath of this naked terror, Robert Church Jr. rallied black Memphians and organized an NAACP branch, which had profound ramifications both for Church’s national profile and the city’s freedom struggle.
In her essay, Laurie Green recalls the rape of two young black women by Memphis policemen in 1945. Without a doubt, the incident revealed the racial and sexual abuse of white authorities. Green, however, paints a broader tableau of activism among black women in Memphis during the 1940s, which included agitating for better workplace conditions, appealing to federal authorities, and rallying the black community. Thanks to the efforts of the young women’s mothers, this case led to mass meetings and press coverage, though the policemen were acquitted.
If we connect the 1917 lynching to the 1945 rape case to the 1968 police riot on Main Street, we better understand how violence shaped black history in Memphis.
Black activism
The marches continued. Throughout the strike, protesting sanitation workers gathered in the mornings at Clayborn Temple for the first protest march of the day. They met at a union hall before the afternoon marches. They picketed downtown stores and bore signs such as, “Dignity and Decency for Sanitation Workers.” At night, they buoyed their spirits at mass meetings at churches around Memphis.
The strike wove together strands in the black community. The NAACP leadership, such as Jesse Turner and Maxine Smith, backed the strike. Activist ministers, such as James Lawson and Harold Middlebrook, lent a spirit of militant nonviolence. The black newspapers and black-oriented radio stations painted the strike in different colors than the white-run media. Because the strike was conducted through the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), it fused labor organizing with civil rights. It reached across class lines.
But if the 1968 strike represented a new and dynamic political momentum within Black Memphis, it also built on political traditions. Brian Page’s opening essay in “An Unseen Light” investigates black life and politics in the aftermath of the 1866 Memphis Massacre. New migrants helped rebuild the black community’s strength. Page recounts their interesting alliance with white elites during the 1876 elections – a practical accommodation, for sure, but also a smart wielding of their power bloc.
African Americans continued to find avenues of influence in the 20th century, despite the dominating political machine run by E.H. “Boss” Crump. From different angles, essays by David Welky and Beverly Bond illuminate those contradictions. Welky describes how the government provided relief for both black and white flood refugees in the aftermath of the 1937 Ohio-Mississippi River Flood, yet also rounded up blacks into forced labor. Bond profiles L.O. Taylor, a preacher, writer, photographer, and videographer who avoided challenging the Crump machine, yet delivered sermons and produced art that emphasized black humanity.
In the civil rights era, black Memphians exercised more direct power. In his essay, Steven Knowlton illuminates the fight to desegregate Memphis libraries. It encompassed not only legal challenges, but also direct action protests throughout the city. Although there were no fire hoses or police dogs at Cossitt Library, his essay highlights key themes of the civil rights struggle: a tradition of black activism, various forms of segregationist resistance, an ultimate desegregation, and continued patterns of racial inequality.
For most of the 1960’s, Memphis had a reputation as a relative oasis of peace – neither a crucible of activism such as Nashville and Atlanta, nor a hotbed of violence such as Birmingham and the Mississippi Delta. The city desegregated most public institutions prior to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many whites believed that Memphis had model race relations – at least until 1968. But black Memphians never stopped fighting for a genuine equality, a greater freedom. That struggle had roots in a local tradition of black political action that was both pragmatic and audacious.
Paternalism and power
Racial paternalism – the idea that white folks knew what was best for black people in any and all circumstances – defined city officials’ responses to the strike. While declaring the strike illegal, Mayor Loeb informed the workers that he would be happy to “talk to anyone about legitimate questions at any time.” His conciliatory language barely masked his refusal to negotiate with union officials, or address any of the striking men’s “legitimate” grievances. The City Council, Chamber of Commerce, and both daily newspapers expressed support for Loeb’s hard-line stance.
Striking sanitation workers needed a dogged determination to achieve the recognition of both the union and their very manhood. As the strike gained momentum, a significant contingent of black people and their allies joined the effort. It began to exhibit the political dynamism black folks had cultivated over the years in the face of paternalism. Moral appeals, negotiation, protests, prayer and mass meetings dotted the city as black folks convened once again in the pursuit of greater freedom.
These multifaceted efforts by black activists first took shape in earlier decades of the city’s history. In their battle against segregation – and the paternalism it spawned – black Memphians had always responded with a variety of approaches to both navigate and confront racial inequality. These varied approaches revealed the layered, complex nature of black politics in Memphis. Black activists never simply conceived of political action through the simplistic binary of protest or accommodation.
“An Unseen Light” traces the long legacy of black political life in Memphis as a continuum containing a rich spectrum of ideas and actions. Jason Jordan’s essay tells the story of the 1940 “Reign of Terror,” a three-month police occupation of black neighborhoods. Initially orchestrated by Police Commissioner Joseph Boyle, the terror began as an attempt to curtail the alleged illegal activity of J.B. Martin, a prominent black pharmacist and Republican Party leader. Boyle – with the full endorsement of both E.H. Crump and Mayor Walter Chandler – targeted Martin by harassing and arresting customers at his place of business.
The intimidation spawned a variety of responses. A few black leaders called to end this insurgent political action. Others tried to resolve the conflict by convening an interracial commission to meet with city leaders. Still others brought national attention to Crump’s political repression by cultivating relationships with civil rights organizations, the black press and the federal government. This host of political strategies illustrates the varied nature of protest cultivated by black Memphians throughout the 20th Century.
Economic injustice
Economic injustice lay at the heart of the sanitation strike. Despite being municipal employees, the workers did not earn enough money to raise their families out of poverty. They were paid starvation wages, could be fired on a whim, and represented the nearest thing to an “untouchable” class in the city. City officials had firmly resisted their earlier efforts to form a union. Protest in Memphis,” by James Conway: Robinson: Sonic politics—ideas about race, place, and the ownership of sound—have shaped neighborhood change in Soulsville and the surrounding South Memphis neighborhoods in tandem with local urban policy, particularly since 1980. As the South Memphis neighborhood is redeveloped by and for competing interests, including the tourism industry, nonprofit organizations, community organizations, social preservationists, foundations, and, most importantly, residents, the battle over the right to the soul sound—the neighborhood’s most enduring and profitable commodity—reveals race and class inequities that shaped Soulsville long before Stax. Excerpts from “An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee,” reprinted with permission of The University of Kentucky Press and the authors.
The city’s relationship with the sanitation workers reflected an age-old custom of racial and economic subordination. It had its moorings in slavery, and it shaped the nature of segregation. Economic vulnerability cast a shadow over every facet of life for black people. White people’s ability to dictate the terms of labor and the wages paid (or not paid) for that labor played a key role in how black folks ordered their lives.
No corner of black life lay beyond the shadow of economic inequality. For decades, the music industry in Memphis has been portrayed as a repository of racial parity, where black and white musicians worked together in the spirit of harmony. However, in his essay on Rufus Thomas, Charles Hughes shows us how racial privilege shortchanged black artists. While Thomas achieved success as a singer at Stax Records, he was denied producer credit upon the release of many of his records, despite having worked to produce them. Just as black folks in other areas of Memphis had to navigate race-based economic inequality, black musicians were not exempt from the same challenges, and fought to create more equitable circumstances.
In her essay on South Memphis, Zandria Robinson chronicles the ways that black residents have fought against racist public policy decisions designed to constrain the lives and aspirations of black folks. In an ongoing struggle, black residents of the community – where Stax Records lived, flourished, died and has been reborn – continue to make meaning of the sonic tradition they created, and fight to shape the legacy of their community against a backdrop of gentrification and erasure.
Ultimately, how we remember the past has high stakes. Our history says a lot about our politics, our priorities, our vision for Memphis. If there is one lesson from the 17 essays collected in “An Unseen Light”, that lesson is that African Americans in Memphis have a history of insurgency, rooted in a deep and abiding determination to pursue equality.
This freedom struggle includes marches and protests, but it is much more. It is creating organizations that build political power, it is fostering pride in oneself and the larger community, it is resisting violence and oppression. It is standing up for yourself. It is telling your story.
Dr. Aram Goudsouzian is a history professor at the University of Memphis and author of “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.”
Dr. Charles McKinney is a history professor at Rhodes College and author of “Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina.”
“An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee“, edited by Aram Goudsouzian and Charles McKinney, will be published next month.