Introduction

In a special report issued March 22, 1968, and a supplement dated April 3, the Southern Regional Council described in detail the strike of sanitation workers in Memphis which began February 12. These reports explained that the strike had quickly become a struggle for assertion of manhood and dignity, supported overwhelmingly by the Negro community of Memphis, seeking an end to the paternalistic variety of racism which prevailed in white Memphis.

The first report warned of "tragedy waiting in the wings." Its supplement said that tragedy had come in an outbreak of violence (window breaking and a small amount of looting and arson by Negroes, clubbing and shooting by police) during and after a march led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on March 28. That incident resulted in the death of a sixteen-year-old Negro male by police gunfire and in injuries to sixty people, mostly Negroes. The supplementary report ended with this statement: "It is not the nonviolent movement that is on trial in Memphis, but -- once more -- American democracy. Not the leadership of some Negro ministers is threatened, but the nation itself."

It is a sad duty to offer now, in a different era inexorably begun, a continuation of our report of the confrontation in the microcosm that is Memphis -- and of its appalling denouement.