Tragedy Waiting in the Wings

In the midst of all the drama in Memphis, the excursions and alarums, one sensed tragedy waiting in the wings.

For one thing, there was a strong undertone of alienation, even among the ministers, whose basic attitude toward the society is positive. "This country has given us a bad check" one of the preachers said. "It bounced. They had the money. They just didn't put it in the bank."

Dr. Jackson, who seems to have become the semi-official money-raiser for the strikers, told the audience one night, "I'm going to New York on Monday to talk to some of these white folks who keep talking about their consciences." He mentioned the National Council of Churches. "I don't guarantee we will get the money. But if we don't, this whole nation is going to know that they've just been lying about their consciences!"

That was not the only hint of deepening disillusionment. Another minister told of receiving a letter from the Memphis Ministerial Alliance asking him to contribute toward a $1,700 ad titled, "An Appeal to Conscience."

"Well, where are they now?" he shouted. "They would do better to give the $1,700 to the strikers' fund, make their appeal to conscience from the pulpits of their own churches, and come to the meeting to show their support."

He was followed by the Reverend John W. Aldridge, the assistant minister of Idlewild Presbyterian Church, who also happens to be chairman of Memphis Presbytery's committee on social concerns. He was the only white preacher present that evening, except the Reverend Malcolm Blackburn, only white minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Aldridge read a resolution of support which had been adopted by the Presbytery's committee.

The Catholic Council on Human Relations, like the Memphis Council on Human Relations, passed a resolution calling upon the mayor to meet all stated demands of the sanitation workers. The Catholic Council on Human Relations is affiliated with the National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice, a voluntary association of laymen and clergymen concerned about intergroup relations.

Otherwise the white churches and churchmen of Memphis were not notably involved. Jerry Wurf made a poignant statement in his talk at one of the church meetings. "I'm a Jewish boy from Brooklyn ", he said. "I've stood in a lot of Protestant pulpits in times of stress and trouble. It just occurs to me that these have always been the pulpits of Negro churches. You have always made me feel welcome and at home."

"The ministers are in this thing until it is proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that our way won't work," said the Reverend Malcolm Blackburn on another occasion. "Then, as one minister said yesterday, we shall just have to go fishing."

Another preacher said that the ministers were committed to nonviolence as a way of life. "But if we ministers, leading the people our way, cannot get results, we have no alternative but to withdraw and The end of his sentence was lost in an approving roar, in the midst of which he turned and pointed into the balcony where three or four young black men, self-proclaimed radicals, stood watching. They broke into broad grins.

Bishop J. 0. Patterson said he believed completely in nonviolence. But he added, "Someone asked me, 'What would you do if somebody was standing on your foot?' I said, 'Well . . . I got to have my foot!"'

The Reverend W. Herbert Brewster preached on Wednesday night. An orator of the old school, he admonished the crowd: "Don't reduce yourself so low that you will hate any man. I feel sorry for any man who is a little man in big times, because a little man in big times is a loser."

When he had finished his sermon, Dr. Jackson came to the pulpit to direct the taking of a collection for the strike fund. "Dr. Brewster better go on back and pray some more," he said, "because he hasn't got me liking Loeb yet . . . ... The crowd loved it.

"When he was up here talking about loving Loeb," he continued, "Bishop Patterson passed me a note that said, 'He didn't get a whiff of that gas, did he?"' The crowd loved that, too.

"You better be careful, Doctor," he concluded. "You might be up here calling for water while the rest of us are calling for fire!"

With that he pulled an object out of his pocket and held it up for the crowd to see. It was a gold-plated cigar lighter.

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The Monday night meeting was drawing to a close. It had been in progress for three hours, which is not unusual for civil rights mass meetings. Before the Reverend Mr. Blackburn pronounced the benediction, he introduced a tall young black man wearing a light, olive-colored jacket with the word "INVADERS" across the back.

"I'm a radical," the young man began. "I'll tell you just like that. I'm a radical . . .

"Before Henry Loeb will listen, the garbage has to be in the street . . . not in your back yard. As long as those trucks are allowed to roll, they can keep it picked up wherever they want it picked up . . .

"Preaching and money raising are fine. Somebody has to do it. But there are some men out there, we've got to do some fighting. Not marching -- fighting!

"And when you talk about fighting a city with as many cops as this city's got, you better have some guns! You're gonna need 'em before it's over!"

When he sat down the minister who had been presiding throughout the evening returned to the pulpit and said he apologized for not recognizing the young radical. It is a free country, he said, and while he did not agree with the brother, he certainly granted him his right to say what he thought. Then he reminded the crowd, "We have chosen our weapons. These are the weapons of nonviolence."

The incident was discussed later by a small group at the front of the church. Someone commented that the sentiments expressed by the young man were a new wrinkle in mass meetings. "Yes," replied Blackburn, "but I felt we had to let it wrinkle to keep it from tearing. We may be in trouble this way, but if we did not recognize this mood as part of the picture, we most certainly would be in trouble."

"Yea," someone else added. "One of the young folks said to me, 'You old folks are barking up the wrong tree. But we'll wait and let you bark a while longer."'

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And so at this writing, with the strike a month old, the tension mounting (in the fourth week, there were incidents of brick throwing by Negroes, of garbage being set afire, of a sit-in at City Council with 121 Negroes arrested and released on their recognizance, of a policeman brandishing an over-sized billy club gleefully and just as gleefully being laughed at scornfully by Negroes), the outcome was highly uncertain in Memphis -- both as to the immediate issues of the strike, the deeper one of dignity, and the awesome one hanging over America in 1968 involving the danger of massive violence and police-state repression.

Out of the impasse, these points, with meaning not merely in Memphis but for all the nation, seemed clear:

1. Spiritual as well as physical needs are imbedded in Negro protest and agitation and, indeed, anger. The demand for dignity as well as better pay was the most profound and moving quality of the Memphis garbage strike. In all of its floundering with the problems of race and poverty, America has seemed unable to grasp that there are hurts in deprivation to the psyche as well as the stomach. Organized labor, in many of its modern manifestations, has seemed to miss this point, also, concerning itself with economic security rather than social needs of people. The excellent performance of labor in Memphis, like the old Operation Dixie, and the current efforts to organize textile plants in the Carolinas and farm workers in Texas, served to point up how rare such attention to the underdog by labor has become.

2. Black power, for all its ambiguity and sometimes irrationality, is a psychological force at work in such a situation as that in Memphis, not by any means all negatively. Indeed, the most positive, constructive meanings of the phrase were implicit in Negroes' demand for dignity. That this demand was made in a context of nonviolence and in the traditional framework of a labor strike should serve to give new insight into the semantics and psychology of black power as an influence on Negro thinking and emotion.

3. The impetus to violence by Negroes is also a factor to be reckoned with in such a situation as that in Memphis. In the simplest terms of human anger, the capacity and ability of Negroes in such a situation to espouse and practice nonviolence was extraordinary. For here as in nearly all other southern locales, there had been the beautiful spirit of the Negro movement of the early 1960's met with hostility and force and arrests when all that had been demanded was the most basic rights of American citizenship. And here as in nearly all other southern locales, eight years after the sit-ins and four years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the demands were the same ones of basic rights -- for an end to discrimination in education, jobs, housing.

Those who have pronounced the civil rights movement dead and buried may want to take a second look at such phenomena as Memphis. "Well, well," said an old man there, shouldering a protest sign and moving out of the church for a demonstration, "marchin' again." The tone and much of the spirit of the old movement was newly alive in Memphis, and its impetus still lives in Negro communities and hearts across the South's cities, towns, and farmlands. One of the very most hopeful things about such new manifestations of the movement as Memphis has been the absence of exploitation from afar for less than local interests of the braveness and beauty and belief of the local people who are the strength of the movement. It was to be hoped that such exploitation would not be attempted in Memphis.

Maintaining nonviolence among masses of untrained and volatile demonstrators was never easy. The implicit threat of the nonviolent leaders in Memphis to "go fishing" and leave things in the hands of "radicals" was a mark of the loss of faith, the frustration and the despair that has come to so many Americans of good will and pragmatic common sense out of the failures on every level of government and through all elements of American society to answer the most elemental needs of race and poverty.

Two Negro women waiting for a bus during one march were asked by an observer if they were supporting the boycott. "We sure are," one of them declared. "I ain't buying nothing!" She glanced at the man's white face, looked down at his notebook, then straight into his eyes. "I don't know who you are," she said firmly, "but we're tired."

4. Failure was on prominent display in Memphis. The city government, the press, the business community, the white church, all the institutions, seemed for the first month simply incapable of coping with what was at once a fairly clear-cut demand, and also a highly dangerous situation. The role of the police in such crises is of particular concern. The danger of Negro violence exploding out of all the failure of the government and society was matched by the danger manifest across the nation of overreaction and repression by police. Instead of agencies for maintaining peace and order, police departments in racial encounters have become themselves direct and dangerous influences toward disorder. In Memphis (and this is not an uncommon situation in the nation), there seemed to be a failure of men on the force to carry out the police commissioner's generally enlightened racial policies and methods aimed at avoiding violence. If the pay of garbage collectors in Memphis was a surface issue, reflective of unmet problems confronting cities the nation over, a less obvious but far more fundamental problem was that of the pay of police- men -- the need that such pay and the standards and qualifications for police service be greatly increased.

But it was a paralysis of the normal function of the city and society to resolve the strike and its issues and its dangerous potential, rather than a will to confront basic problems that characterized the first month of the strike in Memphis. An observer felt that those in positions of power never seemed to grasp the reality of the situation, its danger, or its promise. And this same sort of paralysis seemed to afflict the other agencies of government, state and federal, which might be expected to act toward mediation and reconciliation when a city did not.

Only when the tragedy of violence occurs, the situation seemed to say, could these governments act, and the record has been all too clear that harshness and repression, weaponry and killing, have been most often their answer. Whether in Memphis, Orangeburg, Harlem, or Watts, America needed -- most desperately -- to find out of its great natural and human resources a better answer to the cry of its own people.