Other Reaction in Memphis

On Friday morning, the Memphis Commercial Appeal offered a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer or murderers. The Scripps-Howard chain offered another $25,000. On Friday afternoon, the Memphis City Council underwrote another $50,000, the bulk of which, councilmen were told, would be raised by subscription of Memphis businesses.

An anonymous would-be benefactor offered to give the union $25,000 to pay union dues for all of the sanitation workers for six months, so that there could be a cooling-off period. This was rejected with some vehemence by the union, and labor leaders explained that the prospective donor did not understand the situation: what was at issue was not, money but the dignity of collective bargaining by these laboring men.

That person, whoever he was, was not the only one with good intentions who missed a point. The two daily newspapers, whose news and editorial policies were high on the list of grievances of the Negro community, predictably pleaded for calm and reason. But the lead editorial in Friday's Press-Scimitar interlarded some noble expressions with insensitive chauvinism: " . . . Dr. King, evangelist of civil rights, was cut down -- and deplorably in Memphis, one of the cities which has been moving most steadily toward the goals he advocated -- by the force he preached against: the violence of extremism." Again: " . . .his (the assassin's) act was a frightful disservice to the country, and an especially stunning blow to Memphis." And again: "He (the assassin) has stained the nation and our city in the eyes of much of the world . . . . "

Nor could the paper refrain from reiterating, even on that sorrowful day, an opinion well-formed and oft-repeated among white Memphians:

While granting him complete sincerity as to nonviolent purpose, the Press-Scimitar,has felt -- and warned many times -- that his methods tended to produce violence, both sympathetic and antagonistic. This was due to the highly emotional nature of his speeches. The record of his visits to many cities, and at last Memphis, all too starkly bore out this warning.

On Sunday morning, Memphis citizens on their way to church passed police cruisers with four officers in each. The men wore blue riot helmets with heavy plastic visors. On their radios citizens might have heard a recorded message, mindlessly played by a local station, in which Mayor Loeb urged citizens to contribute to the Arts Council Drive, because the arts and culture "are the things that make a city great."

In a fashionable white church, a minister led the congregation in a prayer of confession. It acknowledged their implication in the assassination by their "failure to speak out clearly and quickly." It also acknowledged that "we cannot wash blood from our hands by pouring water over ourselves. "

There were about half-a-dozen Negroes in the congregation at that service. Asked about them, one of the ministers explained ruefully that they were not members or even regular attendants, but had been invited especially on that day by some members who had Negro friends. "You may have noticed," he remarked, "that they were well looked after."

In contrast, the pastor of a Negro church, meanwhile, was telling his congregation that he had received a multitude of reports of abuses of Negroes by police and National Guardsmen, especially the latter.

The minister asked his parishioners to wire the President to request trained army regulars instead of National Guardsmen from rural Tennessee.